Babett Bauer analyzes the connection between the experience of dictatorship and individual identity creation in the GDR from a double perspective. Interviews with contemporary witnesses are directly related to files of the State Security Service and subjective realities from the "real socialist" everyday life of the dictatorship are traced against the background of state control and repression. In this way, a spectrum of the most varied types of experience and handling of state mechanisms of oppression unfolds, ranging from arrangements to forced adaptation and compromise to collective system opposition and consistent system rejection. On the basis of selected individual cases, the author shows the means and methods with which the State Security Service worked and how this has affected the life stories of those affected to this day.