“…there are indications within these films and their presentations of the Stasi’s actors, victims and collaborators that show significant shifts in historical memory.”

A single honors course on authoritarian regimes sparked a big question for Hank Herzfeld: how do societies remember crises, and how does that memory shape what comes next?

In the course, Herzfeld — a history and political science major, Rhodes Scholarship Finalist and Bodenhamer Fellow — was introduced to the Ministry for State Security, known colloquially as the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police force that operated from 1950 to 1990. He was struck by how little he had heard of the Stasi despite its vast power, deep infiltration of everyday life and relatively recent disbandment just 35 years ago.

In the fall of his junior year, Herzfeld traveled to Berlin on a study abroad trip, funded by his Bodenhamer Fellowship, where he began conducting research on the Stasi. He was especially interested in how the group is remembered within German society, particularly after the reunification after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

During his trip, Hank reached out to Laurence Hare, associate professor of history, executive director of Undergraduate Excellence and Global Engagement, who researches modern Germany and found Herzfeld’s interest in historical memory intriguing.

“As he learned, answering the questions he was asking first demands an understanding of how memory cultures form, Germany is a great place to ask those kinds of questions,” said Hare.

During his time abroad, Herzfeld toured Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, the primary Stasi prison where individuals suspected of attempting to escape East Germany or opposing the government were held. Featured in several television series and films, the prison is also a member of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience organization.

There, Herzfeld discovered that throughout the Cold War, the Stasi maintained files on approximately one-third of all East German citizens, many of which were stored in the prison itself. Even so, he was surprised by how difficult it is to piece together the Stasi’s history, due in part to the gradual and chaotic progression leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

“When the Berlin Wall was torn down, protesters did not immediately enter the prison,” Herzfeld said. “This gave Stasi personnel plenty of time to destroy files that documented the work and history of the place.”

Now that Herzfeld had a clear topic, he needed to narrow the scope of his research. One challenge was the sheer breadth of ways to study the Stasi’s impact in Germany. With numerous forms of media available, he chose to focus on film for a couple of key reasons.

“German film is famous for being openly available post-reunification,” Herzfeld explained. “And almost all of the films produced by the German state-owned film company are housed in one place, at University of Massachusetts in Amherst.”

The years following Germany’s reunification were financially challenging, and in an effort to reduce costs, the government liquidated many of its assets, including state-owned film properties. Several private film and media companies eventually acquired these materials, and they were later transferred to the University of Massachusetts to facilitate academic research, Herzfeld shared.

Hare provided some of his own research to help Herzfeld establish a solid foundation of the topic, and from there, Herzfeld refined his focus.

He examined how the films in both Eastern and reunified Germany shaped public perception of the Stasi. His research delved into the shifting views of the victims, collaborators and commanders over time with a particular interest in understanding how Germany is grappling with its complex history of state-sanctioned crimes.

Herzfeld organized his research findings into three main categories: what actually happened, how archival sources portrayed these events, and — based on these portrayals — how the public came to understand what happened.

“Assigning a determinative historical memory using only film is impossible, a challenge that is worsened in the German Democratic Republic (DDR) where creative freedom on certain topics like the Stasi was stifled,” Herzfeld writes in his thesis. “However, there are indications within these films and their presentations of the Stasi’s actors, victims and collaborators that show significant shifts in historical memory.”

Herzfeld found that early films under DDR leader Erich Honecker’s 1970s media policies portrayed the Stasi as protectors against Western threats, but by the 1980s, there were fewer such depictions even as the Stasi’s domestic presence intensified. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, initial portrayals took a comedic tone that softened the Stasi’s image, but by the 2000s, films offered darker, more humanized portrayals that explored the complexities of individual agency within a repressive system. As German cinema reckoned with the DDR’s legacy, it shifted from emphasizing external threats to confronting internal betrayals, victimhood and the moral ambiguity of collaboration and resistance, culminating in works like Netflix’s Kleo, which fully humanize Stasi agents while casting a critical eye on Western institutions as well.

Herzfeld hopes that his thesis and the research behind it will contribute to ongoing efforts to better understand Germany’s path forward. One way that could be achieved is by promoting further research into newer films and television programs, which could provide fresh perspectives on how Germany continues to confront its past.

“There is newer media that hasn’t been analyzed,” Herzfeld said. “Some of the films and media I used in my thesis have already been used as sources for others doing this work, but there is new media, like the film Goodbye, Lenin and television show Kleo, that could add to the subject.”

Herzfeld interprets the more recent films as portraying stories of people living through a difficult time, but without focusing on what made the time difficult.

“They are coming-of-age stories that validate people’s lived experiences,” Herzfeld said. “They show that, despite the hardships and political climate, individuals were still growing up and facing the same kinds of issues and personal challenges that people around the world experience.”

That same interest in how people navigate complex systems — and how their experiences are remembered — will inform Herzfeld’s next steps. He plans to build his legal career in his home state of Arkansas and will attend the William H. Bowen School of Law in Little Rock this fall, where his brother currently studies and his father teaches as an adjunct professor.

“The smaller class sizes in Honors College courses and the opportunity to read and discuss the coursework and write about it in long form has already been valuable to me,” Herzfeld said. “I’m sure it  will continue to be an asset as I advance my education.”