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Who’s afraid of Markus Wolf? When the East German spymaster died in 2006, few outside Germany remembered him except as the putative original for John le Carré’s fictional Soviet villain Karla. Yet as last year’s Oscar-winning movie The Lives of Others showed, the organization for which Wolf worked was no ordinary intelligence agency. By the time it was wound up after German reunification in 1990, the Ministry for State Security, popularly known as the “Stasi,” employed a staff of some 80,000. In a small country of 17 million, its presence was ubiquitous. Even today, eighteen years later, the Stasi still casts a long shadow over those who lived under its scrutiny for two generations in the now-defunct entity known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

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