Biermann’s behalf resulted, prompting heated discussions within the
MfS.
His close surveillance continued undiminished during his resi-
dency in the FRG. Among the many informers engaged by the MfS
to monitor his professional, financial, and personal situation was his
manager, Diether Dehm, and Dehm’s companion, Christa Desoi.
Their mission was also to render him impotent as a political and
artistic figure, but it met with only limited success. Following the
fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Biermann inspected his own massive
security file, which comprised 69 volumes and involved the work of
197 MfS officials and 213 informers. Another controversy erupted
in October 1991, when, upon receiving the Georg Büchner literary
prize, he bluntly denounced the avant-garde poet Alexander Ander-
son as a Stasi spy. See also OPERATIVER VORGANG.BIRTHLER, MARIANNE (1948– ). The second head of the Bundes-
beauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der
ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (BStU; Federal
Commissioner for the Files of the State Security Service of the For-
mer German Democratic Republic), Marianne Birthler was born in
Berlin on 22 January 1948, the daughter of a working-class family.
Prior to the 1989 revolution, she worked in the Export Ministry of
the German Democratic Republic before resigning and starting a new
career as a youth leader and civil rights advocate. After reunification,
she served in the Bundestag and then in the provincial Brandenburg
government as education minister.
In September 2000, upon the expiration of the term of Joachim
Gauck, Birthler was selected by a large majority in the Bundestag
to head the BStU, where she inherited a brewing dispute over the
Stasi transcripts of the intercepted telephone conversations of former
Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Kohl demanded that the agency withhold
any material pending his private review, but Birthler maintained that
the law contained no provision for such personal exceptions. After
the Federal Administrative Court ruled in July 2001 that “persons of
contemporary history” such as Kohl be protected, Birthler temporar-
ily closed the BStU website along with all exhibitions and informa-
tion centers, and nearly all applications for historical research were
denied. In June 2004, the Federal Administrative Court reached a
BIRTHLER, MARIANNE • 39