Axel Springer Lecture

Markus Wolf: The Years Before

Bedeviled and spurned by some, beloved or admired by others, few personalities in recent German history have evoked such contradictory feelings and public controversy as the GDR’s chief of foreign intelligence, Markus Wolf. In this work-in-progress talk, Christian Ostermann will share some initial findings from a larger scholarly biographical project that uses the life of the former Deputy Minister of State Security as an intimate prism into the history of the twentieth century. The talk will focus on the years before Wolf assumed his role at one of the commanding heights of the Cold War.