Abstract
With the opening of the secret police archives in many countries in Eastern Europe comes the unique chance to excavate many forgotten spy stories and narrate them for the first time. Spy stories told through the prism of the secret police archives-‘file stories’ (Glajar)-about the top-secret lives of intelligence officers, their agents or informers represent one distinct mode of Cold War spy stories, which is a largely ‘forensic mode’ (Lewis) undergirded by ideological fantasies and paranoid fictions. The files have also led to the rediscovery of curious or enigmatic espionage events, which are being told in interconnected multimodal webs of narration-whether as memoirs of notorious spymasters or as recent fictions and feature films about complex and hitherto unexplained Cold War incidents. Finally, as we will show in our papers, the opening of the Iron Curtain has challenged old Cold War antagonisms such as the friend/foe binary, which is in turn recasting espionage scripts and the very character of the spy and double agent, as can be witnessed in new styles of spy films and television dramas made for a global, post-political audience.
Digital Media
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