The Disclosures of Respect: The Public Exposure of Stasi Informers after the German Reunification

This dissertation examines the notion of respect for individuals, based on the case of the public exposure of denunciators for the extinct East German Secret Police, or Stasi, during the communist regime. Its goal is to contribute to the theoretical literature on political and moral agency, on the one hand, and on transitional justice, on the other. It is also an exercise in empirically oriented political theory.;The dissertation challenges what one might call the conventional appropriation of respect in transitional justice theories. Transitional justice scholars bring the notion of respect into their analyses in a highly rigid and unimaginative way. For the conventional view, respect is merely the act of expressing recognition that harm was done to victims. From this view, respect revolves solely around victims; it is concerned with the moral and political forms of redress that they are entitled to; and it is, in most cases, implicitly predicated on their passivity.;The dissertation tries to move beyond the conventional framework because it regards it as thematically constraining on a number of fronts. It makes the case for construing a more comprehensive understanding of respect, one that is sensitive to, and informed by, historical and sociological detail. Such broader understanding allows one to think beyond the kind of treatment that victims receive; it brings into focus perpetrators as the subject of inquiry, as well as shifting the attention from notions like repair or redress as cornerstones of respect, to other equally pivotal notions such as agency and responsibility.;As conceptualized in the dissertation, the public exposure of former denunciators for the Stasi is a process that goes beyond the mere fact of disclosing the identity of the individuals involved in denunciation. It encompasses the subsequent moments when the legitimacy of such exposures and the degree of responsibility of informers is debated; when informers are pressured to offer public apologies; and when reconciliation with such repentant citizens is advocated or contested. The chapters of the dissertation are structured around this sequence.