One of the duties of the "good citizen," as constituted in modem Europe, was to inform the authorities in order to hinder the commission of crimes, track down criminals, or uphold the existing order. The surveillance societies that emerged over the past two centuries can be distinguished from their predecessors in part on the basis of their new formal policing activities, but particularly because of the role envisaged for citizens, whose duty became to watch, listen, and inform the authorities. As this participation became more systematized and became an integral part of routine policing, "panopticism" was establishedthe all-seeing society in which no one ever felt beyond surveillance. The theory of panopticism is identified now with the work of Michel Foucault. In a few oblique but illuminating phrases he directed attention to the development in modern Europe of a "faceless gazeH-that is, a "permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance" that "transformed the whole social body into a field of perception: thousands of eyes posted everywhere, mobile attentions ever on the alert, a long, hierarchized network" that extended into all parts of society.' It is only recently that historians have begun to investigate the importance for modem political systems of denunciations, understood broadly as a variety of popular informing to the police or other authorities. This has been associated in the literature on German history with Hitler's dictatorship and, more recently, with the Communist regime of the German Democratic Republic (GDR).2 If denunciations have occurred in most modem political systems, historians are, nonetheless, concerned about their specificity. In what follows I shall attempt to show-on the basis of a study of their role in the operation of the Gestapo and the Stasi, the two secret police forces in Germany's two dictatorships-that denunciations vary in many important respects such as their fre
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