Secret Dissertations in the German Democratic Republic

摘要

Early in 1995 the editorial boards of C&RL and its German counterpart, Zeitschrift fur Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie (ZfBB), agreed to exchange articles each selecting, translating, and publishing a 1994 article from the other's publication. Thisyear's choice--our first--is a piece that had been published as a follow-up to an article that had appeared In the ZfBB in 1992. C&RL has decided to publish them both.' Partly in order to convey the sense the originals give of research unfolding in a contemporary historical context, we are publishing them in the form in which they originally appeared (minus one table and the footnotes). The results are sketchier and more tentative than is normally the case in C&RL--and in ths ZfBB. But in their very incompleteness they give a sense of a process of discovery and revelation that tells a powerful story. Since the original publication of these articles, the authors have published a book on their research, as well as a bibliography listing the suppressed dissertations." The articles are clearly "different" from the usual C&RL fare, but that's also the point. It is our hope that they will not only provide insight into recent events in Germany, but that they might help stimulate research on the interactions, direct and indirect, open and covert, between political structures and the research enterprise in our own country and elsewhere.