Computerization and Knowledge Production in East and West German Security Authorities, 1960-1990

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Rüdiger Bergien
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2017 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 397084663

Neither the impacts of computerization on state institutions nor state knowledge production have gathered much attention in contemporary history research about the FRG and the GDR. The planned project analyzes the interconnections between computerization and knowledge production on the part of West- and East-German police and intelligence authorities between the early 1960s and the late 1980s. Therefore, it studies the East German Ministry for State Security and three West German national authorities, the Federal Criminal Police Office, the Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution and the Federal Intelligence Service, all of which introduced computer use relatively early and extensively. The project sets three focuses: First, it analyses the relationship between computerization and organizational change, which is seen to become manifest in the authorities' organizational structures, employee profiles, and channels of communication. Second, it studies the change of power structures within the authorities and of their surveillance capacity within their particular societal framework. Third, it investigates the transformations of the security authorities' production and circulation of knowledge. This last perspective put emphasis on the effects of the new storage and transportation technologies on the gathered information's contents and format. In addition, it addresses the question to what extent the new information and communication technologies increased horizontal information transfer or fostered the build up of new knowledge hierarchies. The requested project examines the interrelation of computerization and knowledge production therefore in comparative manner, in view of security authorities situated in a state socialist and a western liberal society respectively. Thereby, it shall become visible to what extent the particular political system had influence on electronic data processing's development and its manner of use in the security sector, or, conversely, to what extent computerization led to similar solutions in different political systems. Beyond that, the project focuses on knowledge transfer. The requested project's work program builds on earlier work of the applicant about the GDR-State Security's and the Federal Criminal Police Office's computerization. The requested project goes further first, by including archival records of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Federal Intelligence Service. Second, it aims to embed the security authorities' computerization within an interpretative framework built on the history of knowledge, to link it to more far-reaching questions about state knowledge's changes within the "digital modernity". The first working' period focuses on the analysis of archival records that only recently have become accessible. The second working period focuses on the writing of a 350-page monograph to be completed within the 24 months.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants