Symposium on Informers Up Close: Journeys – Engaging with Informers Up Close

[Mark A. Drumbl is Class of 1975 Alumni Professor of Law at Washington and Lee University. Barbora Holá is Professor in Empirical Legal Studies of International Criminal Justice at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.]

Even the journey can be the destination…

Mňága a Žďorp, Czech rock band

Writing this book, as we note in its opening pages, lifted us to many places and spaces, physically and intellectually, at times through winding detours or clever shortcuts or trucking along fast highways. We also crisscrossed time –the more or less distant past returned us to a present in which we wondered about the future. All these trips down memory lane – as stored in the thousands of pages of the StB archives or as shared with us personally – hit at close to home. They made us pause; and gaze into a mirror at ourselves and at each other. 

In The Brooklyn Follies – a novel that tracks unspoken love amid voiced dysfunction – author Paul Auster bluntly notes, near the end, that ‘one should never underestimate the power of books’. Book-power certainly is a power to create ideas, a power to shatter shibboleths, and the might to engage. But the power of books also reflects in the powerlessness of authors. A book, after all, is a journey that takes on a life of its own. The push and pull of author and work, and the kinetics as between authors, becomes a force. This especially is the case in a book such as Informers Up Close, in which we ourselves write about stories that others have written about others, deeply personal biopics, such that this book is one with multiple authors, hundreds in fact: all the informers with their words and the many security police with their scripts about informer words, and now our words, added on top and on occasion from below, about all those words. Accordingly, this book is a composite, a pastiche of postcards, a panorama of lives lived, emotions in constant motion, imbued with closenesses and distances. 

These themes: journey, warmth and coldness, sitting right next to and standing very far away, near and apart, togetherness and separateness, infuse this entire project. And now these themes indeed suffuse this symposium in that they resonate through the words of all four commentators

Our book bobs and weaves between academic writing and journalistic exposition. Academic hangovers compel us to define and delimit. Halfway through the project, once the empirical research in the archives was complete, and our file-stories drafted, we hit a point of inflection. Should we just stop there? Should we simply publish the file-stories, with modest historical background to situate the reader in Communist Czechoslovakia, and leave the rest unspoken? Or should we go forward? Should we distil what ‘jumps out at us’ from the files and should we then go even further and posit ‘takeaways’ for law, practice, and research? We ourselves bobbled as the draft toggled between these two worlds. Ultimately, we decided to be more directive, more normative, and to hew to the familiarity of an academic path. Perhaps that is because to us, as academics, this is what we felt was a book, rather than leaving to the readers to become authors, conjurers in their own minds, of the file-stories and why people informed on others and what to do after the fact. 

Mia Swart is absolutely right that we define emotions when, really, any such definition is going to be too much and too little. Nesam McMillan is right that attempts to categorize belie the constant movement among all of the author-actors and within each actor-author. 

But throughout we also sought to preserve all the details and all the granularity, as Nesam welcomes, and we are deeply touched by her invocation of the ethics of our approach, the ethics of letting go, the ethics of respecting the lives of others. If this is one contribution that Informers Up Close could make, namely ensuring dignity through detail, to flourish by not being flat, then we feel this entire project, this adventurous journey – bold, soft, and sassy — could inclusively inspire to make law scholarship not law-less but a bit more law-light, and in this vein bring ‘order’ closer to the ‘soul’. Indeed, this, too – as Nesam remarks – is its own methodology. We are terrifically heartened to read these words from such a distinguished social scientist. 

Relatedly, we also are buoyed by Saira Mohamed’s observations on the merits of granularity. She notes that it is important to see soldiers, informers, and citizens as separate from the state even though it is so easy to lump them monolithically within the state. It is so easy to see them as dehumanized tools. And, indeed, our findings indicate that the relationship of informers was often not with the faceless state per se, but one that faced the handler – the secret police agent — and hence was highly individuated. Some informers dampened their desire to inform once their handlers changed to someone with whom the informers did not vibe. Informing is an intimate relationship; it is social navigation, conversation, expiation, abuse, commiseration, hope, and meanness all at one. We discuss this further in this radio show. Handlers themselves may moreover have had their own complex relationships with ‘the state’, to wit, their bosses and their bosses’ bosses.

Another toggle that was a bit of a boggle for us was whether this should be a book about Communist Czechoslovakia or a book about informers generally. This also stems from the tension between journalism (one place, one time) and academia (something more extrapolatable). Ultimately, and perhaps greedily, we thought Informers Up Close could be a bit of both without being too little or too much. This tension, too, is reflected in the commentaries. Saira, for instance, runs with our findings into new meadows:  membership in voluntary armies (i.e. the US), weaponization of citizens by the state, and abortion policing. 

But this book is also about graspable time and tangible place, a moment, and this is captured so beautifully by Sergey Vasiliev. He is right that the nomenclature, the vernacular, the terminology, the language of the Czechoslovak Communist years resonates with anyone who has come of age, even in childhood, in that then-there; and more so with parents and grandparents who were fully generational behind the Iron Curtain in the Cold War. Assuredly, these experiences are not singular. Repressive tendencies are universal. Fisted authority lurks within putative liberal democracy. Still, our book sits in a locality in time and space. Over and again, and again and over, whenever we presented this book the engagement from Central and East Europeans was by far the most emotional: anger, pity, nostalgia, dismissiveness, adulation, shame, and boredom. And, indeed, as Sergey elegiacally notes, these vocabularies and these emotions flow into contemporary Russia. Continuities arise. Václav Havel remarked wistfully that the Czechoslovak secret police lives on, now, in the files. In technological developments that Havel could not have foreseen in his lifetime, these files now ascend in eternity and overdrive as they increasingly become digitized and, hence, accessible to anyone anywhere without any care – all in the name of transitional justice and transparency. But, really, what happens when it is so easy to know everything about anyone? 

In our own authorial journey we oscillated between proximate distance and distant proximity, bounding between adjectives and nouns, ourselves constantly in movement, pushing and pulling, the individual and the collective. The subject matter was very close to one of us, you can guess which one of us, forming part of silent family histories, an elementary school (the cover image), apartment stairwells, childhood play, and coming of age. For the other of us, the subject matter was distant, a matter of curiosity, infatuation, wanderings, yearning while learning more about the vexation brought by victims who victimize. This book, then, is close to Czechoslovak Communism but is also distant from it. Informing, after all, is everywhere. Informing is so very ordinary and human, as all four of our interlocutors highlight. Ultimately the entangled insider/outside dynamic as between us authors fostered what we feel became a wonderous copper lamp, as we mention in our introduction from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, that sought to illuminate joy amid ruination, agency within rigidity, and passion amid apathy. We search for color within what Mia so aptly describes as greyness: the greyness of responsibility, the greyness of individuality, the greyness of Communist Prague’s buildings and soot-cloaked tramways and city squares. But one person’s greyness is another’s rainbow. Ordinary things can glow, and this glow can grow.

There is more to be said about emotions and agency in times of repression and in moments of ‘justice’. On this note, we have also explored these interactions in the space of resistance. Can informers, who are essentially collaborators, also simultaneously resist? Informers also can serve as a basis to explore other questions that bedevil international law, such as the putative innocence of youth and the differential treatment of children, and we have gone down this path by researching teenage denouncers and informers.  

In the end, we call for a colorful transitional justice that is more humanistic and less planned. For a transitional justice that brings out the best in nearby people and not just the best in mechanical practices.  

Researching and writing Informers Up Close, and now opening our book to others, is an engaging, moving, and intimate journey of intellectual and personal explorations and extrapolations. We hope that pages of our book reflect all this verve and vim, and will inspire others to embark on journeys of their own – in and out of Communist Czechoslovakia, in and out of unnamed places, in and out of established categories, in and out of sundry imaginaries, and perhaps also in and out of comfort zones. We warmly thank Sergey, Saira, Nesam and Mia for their appreciative, encouraging, and thought-provoking words. They mean a lot to us. You are delightful interlocutors.

Photo attribution: “Panorama Mesdag” by Mark A. Drumbl and Barbora Holá