Symposium on Informers Up Close: Out of the Grey – The Limitations of Transitional Justice

[Dr. Mia Swart is Visiting Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand Law School]

Informers Up Close focuses almost exclusively on informers in the context of Communist Czechoslovakia. Drumbl and Holá state explicitly that, but for a sideways glance here and there, the book is not comparative in nature. It zooms in on individuals that informed to the secret police or StB (Státní bezpečnost) in Czechoslovakia. This strict geographical and temporal focus is useful since it allows the readers to truly immerse themselves into that specific time and place. It also prevents the generalisation and coarse reductiveness often associated with transitional justice. Much of the oversimplification in transitional justice stems from a tendency to over-compare. Perhaps one can argue that the particular pathologies attaching to Czechoslovakia during the period under scrutiny belong to that time and place, which means that we need to move away from a theoretical model that strains to find commonalities in the unfree societies that transitional justice focuses on, to wit, societies transitional justice seeks to ‘liberate’, democratise and transform.  

The authors essentially resist conceptualising StB informers as tragic victims. Throughout the book, they insist on ‘granularity’ – delving into the fine particularities of each individual informer’s specific situation, motivations, peculiarities and fate. 

In engaging with greyness, the book shows the banality, conformity and grimness of everyday life in communist Czechoslovakia. But it also contrasts the dark hand of the state and the darkness of persecution and practices such as interrogation with some of the joys of social and family life in this period. The authors even depict architectural greyness, including illustrations of buildings associated with communist-style political violence – structures that are nothing, if not intimidatingly grey. Never before have I seen an academic book engaging with greyness so vividly. 

Embracing greyness extends to the authors’ scepticism toward transitional justice. Early on in the book, the authors reveal one of their core concerns with regard to transitional justice – the lack of the emotional quotient (EQ):

…transitional justice would do well to recognize the full panoply of diverse emotional motivations of informers and their handlers in all of their hues. Such recognition would augment the emotional quotient (EQ, so to speak) of transitional justice interventions.

A point the authors make up front is that the topic of informers, as well as the closely related topic of lustration of informers, has received scant attention in transitional justice literature thus far. In a field as saturated and possibly overpopulated as transitional justice, this gap is interesting in itself. It seems that transitional justice scholarship has generally opted for simpler topics and has not been particularly adept at exploring grey areas which defy the ‘tool-kit’ approach to transitional justice or the clear oppositional nature of transitional justice – good versus bad; perpetrator versus victim.

Fundamentally, the book is interested in why people spoke to the StB. The authors consider this question more important than the veracity of the information obtained by informers. This means that the authors take a psychological dive into the informers’ motives. This book seeks to identify the emotions that drive and animate behaviour; specifically in the context of informing and interacting with the secret police. 

Throughout the book, the authors remain fascinated with the scapegoating of informers. ‘The informer was largely constructed as a distrustful threat to society, as loyal to a failed and ugly ideology, as a menace to the new enlightened order, and scorn-fully dumped—“we are not like them”—from the remainder of society’ (p. 102). But the authors ultimately say, ‘We conclude that totalizing informers as ideological and condemning them as inimical to the new regime departs from what our research actually suggests drove informers to engage with the StB’ (p. 102). If Drumbl’s book on child soldiers aimed ‘to approach child soldiers with a more nuanced and less judgmental mind’, this book takes a similar approach to the topic of informers. Just as Drumbl aimed ‘for social repair within afflicted communities’ in the former book, this publication woven with Holá’s archival dive aims for much the same.

In an attempt to get as close as possible to individual informers, Chapter 4 contains distillations of four informer files and forms the heart of the book.  Six informers were chosen – Věra, Vašek, Lily, Goldfus, Volný, and Soukup. The StB records of these informers were translated and recounted in great detail. According to the authors, ‘[e]ach file-story showcases a cocktail of (e)motions that pulled informers towards and pushed informers away from the StB and vivifies how these sentiments morphed over time’ (at p. 230).

Whereas one would expect that the authors might only summarise the lives of the informers and provide mere outlines of their lives, the authors go far beyond this. They describe informers’ lives in near-excruciating detail.  The material makes for interesting reading – at times surprising and amusing, other times fascinating and occasionally tedious and downright boring. But herein lies the magic of the book. Since these files have been opened to the public, anyone over the age of 18 has the opportunity to access them. The experience of reading Chapter 4 mirrors the experience of a reader who has requested access to such files. This experience is often awkward, uncomfortable and downright voyeuristic.

The authors engage closely with the role of emotions. Although the authors acknowledge that emotions ‘represent something beyond themselves’, they do not make enough of the un-definability of emotion and all that flows from that un-definability. Ironically, in attempting to over-define emotions, the authors somehow miss the essential fact that emotion defies definition. Their focus on emotion is however powerful in the sections where they analyse the motives of individual informers one reads about in chapter 4. The authors zoom into four emotions that motivate informers: fear, resentment, desire, and allegiance.

Informers Up Close stands out as the most interesting book to have appeared in the broad field of transitional justice in many years. It is interesting not only for its novelty and ambition, but also for introducing and opening up entirely new fields of study. Many of the sub-topics, including the impact of emotion, lustration and architectural transitional justice, warrant separate research projects and publications. Innovatively, the book is accompanied by an educational website that can aid and facilitate teaching on the topic. 

How does and should the law deal with informers and those they inform upon and to? In the case of informers, possibly more than any other category of agents or players in the grand and perhaps overly popular and populated theatre of transitional justice, it is clear that the line between informer and informed upon – ‘us’ and ‘them’ – is terrifyingly thin. In this space, especially, virtue signalling only shows up those who do the signalling. This is not only evidenced by the fact that many informers themselves were informed upon, but also by the fact that the behaviour of informers are common to that of opportunistic or scared people everywhere. Václav Havel expressed the pervasiveness of guilt and the futility of assigning guilt in this context when he wrote the following: 

We are all in this together— those who directly, to a greater or lesser degree, created this regime, those who accepted it in silence, and also all of us who subconsciously became accustomed to it.

p. 21

Regarding the pervasiveness of informing, the question shifts to: can the law deal with it, or do informers, particularly under communist rule, present too hard a case? And what does all of this mean in a post-pandemic surveillance society? The lives of informers are simultaneously the lives of others, lives we struggle to identify with, but also lives that are every bit as prosaic and banal as the lives of the rest of us. Granted, informers seemed particularly prone to behaviour that would classify them as societal ‘misfits’, but what we read in the files is also terrifyingly familiar, thereby prompting one to think, ‘there but for the grace…’.