The BND's Eye on East Germany, 1968–1989/90. Intelligence Knowledge and the West German Policy Towards the GDR from Détente to the Fall of the Wall.

• Applicant: Dr. Jens Gieseke
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 525456966

The planned project examines the intelligence on the GDR of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) and its significance for the West German government's policy towards East Germany from 1968 to 1989/90. It is based on the thesis that intelligence on the GDR gained growing importance for West German policy towards the GDR after 1968. It became part of the semi-public field of GDR expertise, to which other actors such as experts in the ministerial bureaucracy and diplomats, academics and pollsters, as well as some journalists contributed. The project inquires into the information resources, the political-ideological foundations and the focal points and narratives of BND reporting. It also examines how the information reached the recipients, to what extent informal networks played a role in "Bonn" and whether the increasingly intense BND public relations activities were able to disseminate assessments of the politics and society of the other German state. The project includes three major topics: First, it will examine how the service's production of knowledge about the GDR developed from 1968 to 1990 in the interplay between changing opportunities of information gathering, patterns of perception and requirements on the part of the federal government. Second, it will be worked out to what extent and in which sense the 1970s and 1980s can be characterized as a period of professionalization, modernization, and scientification of the BND with regard to its knowledge production. Third, the project examines the extent to which the West-German government's GDR-policy provided impulses for intelligence production with regard to the GDR and received its results, used them as arguments or ignored them. The project follows the studies of the Independent Historical Commission for the History of the BND until 1968 (UHK), which primarily placed the history of the BND in the context of the process of enforcing democracy in the early Federal Republic. In contrast, the planned project aims to situate the history of the BND more broadly in the history of political decision-making in the Federal Republic and to contribute to the history of state knowledge production and policy advice in the Bonn Republic. To implement this project, primarily both already declassified and still classified archival records of the BND and the Federal Chancellery will be used. As a cooperation project between the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam and the Intelligence Services Department of the Federal University of Applied Administrative Sciences, new ground will be broken insofar as a substantial amount of documents are to be released by the BND archive for a research project covering the 1970s and 1980s and made accessible for historiography.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Rüdiger Bergien