There is a great deal of extremely good socio-cultural research on communist East Germany, covering topics as varied as lifestyles, food culture, shopping, living culture, gender relations, television, popular culture, etiquette, advice literature, nudism, and sex education. In many of these studies, the dictatorial aspects of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) recede into the background. There is an awareness of the mass rapes, the Soviet special camps, the harsh suppression of the June 1953 uprising, the shootings at the Berlin Wall, the political trials and the machinations of the Stasi—but these are not taken to be defining events. Instead, these studies perceive East Germany as (just) another society, with its own peculiar strictures and foibles. In spite of its many failings, it was a bold social experiment that dared to try to create an alternative form of modernity.

Naturally, this preoccupation with the more esoteric and ephemeral aspects of the GDR might seem superficial and callous to someone who suffered under the extremes of dictatorial misrule. For someone who saw close friends murdered by the regime, the trendy preoccupation with the “cozy corners” (Kuschelecke) (156) of GDR history is a slap in the face. That is why studies like Iris Bork-Goldfield's are a useful reminder that a much darker, more serious, and dangerous history lurks beneath the bright and gay surface appearance.

This book is about the resistance activities of the author's father, Werner Bork, and his friends in Werder an der Havel, a small town located not far from Potsdam. Because of his outspokenness in secondary school, Bork was blocked from taking the Abitur (the exam necessary to go on to university). Turning his back on the GDR, though not cutting off all contacts, he went to live and study in West Berlin. He went from distributing his own leaflets criticizing Walter Ulbricht's regime (in emulation of the White Rose student resistance movement under the Nazis), to firing propaganda rockets on behalf of the West-Berlin-based Fighting Group against Inhumanity (Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit, or KgU). He ultimately ended up collecting scraps of information about the Soviets for the West German Gehlen espionage organization and the Americans. The process of shifting from pure resistance—spreading self-produced leaflets—to carrying out espionage for a foreign power was a gradual one. It was only later that Bork and his friends, motivated by their hatred of undemocratic SED rule, reflected on the trajectory and radical change in their methods.

Along the way, there were many scrapes and escapades, fuelled largely by youthful idealism and a burning sense of injustice. Bork and his friends saw the Soviet Occupation Zone (Sowjetische Besatzungszone, or SBZ) and the GDR as little better than the Third Reich. As democrats, they were determined to resist the arbitrary encroachments of dictatorship. Bork later admitted, with hindsight, to a certain amount of recklessness. Operating loosely, with enthusiastic networking rather than according to strict conspiratorial rules, the group did not remain undetected by the Stasi for long. East German intelligence quickly rounded up more marginal members and subjected them to interrogation. In a remarkable turn of events, the group's leaders in West Berlin were nevertheless able to negotiate the release of their friends and family members back in the GDR by committing themselves to cooperating with the Stasi. When the leaders of the Bork group in West Berlin reneged on this promise, the Stasi retaliated by rounding up as many remaining group members in the East as they could find: seven were found guilty of espionage by a special Soviet Military Tribunal, sent to Moscow, and executed. Overall, in the period from 1950 to 1955, about a thousand other Germans met a similar fate.

The book reconstructs the different elements of the story using a mixture of Stasi files and oral interviews. Bork-Goldfield is determined not just to recount what happened, but also to commemorate those who suffered because of it. Her father and his surviving friends made numerous efforts to have a proper monument erected in memory of the victims in Werder. They even went to Moscow to collect soil from the mass grave where the victims’ ashes were buried. The town council of Werder, however, demonstrated an unusual degree of ineptitude in commemorating its one-time citizens: the plaque at the Oberschule contained mistakes, and a book commissioned from a young researcher, employed directly after her Abitur, also contained errors and omissions.

Looking back, Bork was more aware of the risks he and the others had taken as young people. Nevertheless, while critical, for example, of the erratic firing mechanism on the propaganda rockets (which made capture more likely), he did not categorically denounce the actions of the KgU. In many other instances in the early 1950s, the KgU sent eager and foolhardy young people into the GDR to carry out propaganda and resistance actions. If caught, they risked long prison sentences or even execution. Bork condemns the degree to which the KgU was infiltrated by Stasi spies, but was much more critical of American intelligence. He speculated that the reason why their American handlers gave young people such shoddy fake identity documents was that they were using them as bait. The world of espionage in Cold War Berlin remains murky, but Western agencies do seem to have regarded the surfeit of refugees as a good source of cheap and eager undercover agents. Often their handlers treated these amateur operatives as if they were expendable; they were ruthlessly exploited and then abandoned. For example, the Americans gave Bork a pistol to defend himself against Stasi kidnapping attempts—there was at least one—but refused to confirm the source of the weapon when he was brought to court in West Berlin on the charge of illegally possessing a firearm.

This book is a fitting recognition of the resistance group's activities and remembrance of the victims. Moreover, it is not a one-dimensional, black-and-white account. Iris Bork-Goldfield seeks to present her protagonists as fully-rounded human beings, many of whom met through amateur dramatics. On trips to West Berlin, they listened to jazz and embraced the cultural life on offer. Whatever hopes or aspirations they might have had, they were cut down by a brutal and senseless manifestation of Cold War power politics.