This research project, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and conducted in cooperation with the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF), examines how the West German Federal Intelligence Service (BND)) observed and analysed the German Democratic Republic between 1968 and 1990.
Our first related publication appeared as the edited volume Der BND nach Gehlen (2025), which explores the post-Gehlen transformation of the BND, DDR-related espionage, personnel structures, and intelligence knowledge production.
This cooperative project with the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Research and the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute examines, using the German case, the hierarchies and new digital walls that have emerged in increasingly digitalized societies since the 1970s.