Republic (GDR), Alexander (Sascha) Anderson was born in Weimar
on 24 August 1953 and adopted by a couple in Dresden with profes-
sional ties to the cultural establishment. Anderson was trained as a
typesetter and later studied filmmaking for three years. He allegedly
served a jail sentence for forging checks, although his name is miss-
ing from official records. Beginning in 1975, and working under the
code names David Menzer, Fritz Müller, and Peters, he came
to be classified by the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS) in
the top category of Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (unofficial collaborators),
prized especially for his extensive and factually detailed reports.
Following his move from Dresden to East Berlin, Anderson
emerged as a dominant figure in the alternative cultural scene in the
Prenzlauer Berg district, known as much for his entrepreneurial en-
ergy and connections as for his poetic and musical output. In 1986, he
relocated to West Berlin, where his focus became the city’s emigrant
community of former East German writers and dissidents. For the
MfS, Anderson represented a new type of agent whose main purpose
was to subvert potential dissident groups from within, promoting, in
this case, a wholly aesthetic and apolitical artistic credo. In fall 1991,
Wolf Biermann, the popular satirist and songwriter who had been
expelled from the GDR in 1976, publicly accused him of having
informed on writers and artists throughout the 1980s. Despite An-
derson’s initial denials, the amount of corroborating evidence—more
than 1,000 pages—proved overwhelming, especially when portions
of these reports were published. The revelation of other leading
GDR writers with prior Stasi connections—Rainer Schedlinski,
Heiner Müller, Christa Wolf, and Monika Maron—soon followed,
and a major political and literary controversy ensued. In his stylized
autobiography Sascha Anderson (2002), he fully acknowledged his
15-year role as a Stasi spy but left his personal motives generally
unclarified.ANDREAS. See BERNHARD.
ANMELDUNG. The systematic screening by the Bundesamt für Ver-
fassungsschutz (BfV) to identify East German Illegaler (covert op-
eratives) in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Operation An-
meldung (Registration) was conceived by Heinz Marx and based on
12 • ANDREAS