Recommendations for learning about the impact and legacy of the Stasi, on contemporary East German culture and psychology in general and privacy.

I've been reading Hannes Heer and Christian Streit's recent book Vernichtung im Osten: Judenmord, Kriegsgefangene und Hungerpolitik (VSA Verlag, 2020). I don't know that there's a ton of new information, but it's an excellent distillation of their work on the Eastern Front, so I'd highly recommend it for the German speakers out there who are interested in that area. Just thought I'd mention it since the subject had come up a couple of times over the last few days.

Can someone recommend me a book (or more than one) on the modern history of the East Africa, in particular the Belgian colonies, the genocide in Burundi in 1972, Idi Amin and wars in Uganda, the Rwandan genocide in 1994 (and everything that led to it) and the Congo wars.

I just finished Meredith's The state of Africa and I really enjoyed the book. What other books would you recommend as a follow-up? I'm particularly interested in Mengitsu's regime in Ethiopia and Siad Barre's in Somalia.

Would really appreciate some suggestions for books on Operation Condor.

I'm on the hunt for books in a few areas at the moment, living the typical scattered life of a dilettante 😅 So any recommendations in any of the below would be much appreciated:

Intellectual antecedents of "Enlightenment thought": Been having a variety of issues with discussions and analyses of the enlightenment lately. Or rather I've been having problems trying to figure how much "influential thinkers" work forwards (i.e. shaping the world views of "powerful" figures of their time) vs backwards (i.e. "powerful" figures of a particular type of present read an unintentionally curated subset of past opinion and select those that best fit their current purposes), and problems of trying to find out how wide a net a given author is casting in their reference to "Enlightenment thinkers" (i.e. who is included/excluded from this group, what is the basis of each, and where was the work done that filtered out the wide array of figures of the era to produce that set that is then selected from, where the chosen become the "Enlightenment" and the excluded become the "Enlightenment" to later authors arguing some prior author has misrepresented the "Enlightenment" by not selecting the thinkers the later author has).

Most of that is stuff I'll have to consider in future (if ever). The least messy next step I've settled on is trying to find work that builds something of a "lineage" of thought from like, the Middle Ages or so, down to Enlightenment times, and does so in as "politically" neutral a way as possible (so work that isn't trying to advance a claim something like "the Enlightenment wasn't as revolutionary as some think"). In short, dispassionate intellectual genealogy written by a thorough technocrat 😋 if anyone knows of anything like that

I've also been reading Yuri Slezkine's The House of Government on/off for the last few months. And I love that damn book. And I'd really like to ask for recommendations for other histories written like it...but it's really hard to explain the "what" that other works should be like. Not because it's esoteric or something you can only really understand experientially by way of conversion and "seeing the light", but because it's hard to explain concisely, and I've no confidence that what I would write would produce the right impression in someone who hasn't read the book. But if by chance someone reads this who has read this book, I'd be super grateful for any recommendations you might have of similar work!

Finally I've been backgrounding a lot of Wodehouse and Saki, and they've gotten me thinking (kinda tangentially -and not as a criticism of their content) about my impression of "peoples of the past". The impression I get of the modern world so to speak is that in situations where there's a lack of real oversight, a general culture of "silence", a decent amount of power and opportunity, you get a lot of stories where the crazy or wild or exciting or surreal thing that happened involved sex, violence, narcotics, etc. This picture, projected "backwards" into the past I can imagine fits rather poorly onto it (and there could be any number of reasons for this), in the context of wars where violence of all kinds is a common indulgence -or at least is painted as one amongst the baser folk- and in the anodyne form of "lord so-and-so had a mistress, mistresses, concubines, a harem etc.".

My default first path of investigation starts me off assuming I've just been stupid or ignorant and missed the rest of the picture in reading too narrowly, so I'm wondering if anyone can point me in the direction of works that either fill in where the actual realities of sex and violence tend to get airbrushed out, or that detail how well-off folk in the past do seem to have just lived the fairly "vanilla" lives of, say, one of the fellows at Wodehouse's Drones Club. Again my preference is for finding something in the dispassionate technocrat vein; I'd be much more interested in a comprehensive survey/summary of people's diaries say than in something arguing that the whitewashing of the past obscures the fact of continuity between 20th century indulgences and those of, say, the 17th century (my concern with the latter case is it seems more likely to involve advancing an argument by way of a handful of outrageous people's history, where my interest is less in whether some people went way out there and more in how common it was -so less "Lord so-and-so had a raunchy sex party with pythons and naked heiresses" and more like, if the reasonably elderly Earl Everyman, out to dinner at the home of Duke Demonstration, happened past an open door revealing the wild sex party of Lord Previous Example, he would likely be shocked at the debauchery and alienness of events he's never seen or heard of before, shocked only at seeing them in the personal home, shocked at the lack of decorum in allowing well-bred people to come across such events "outside their proper place", or entirely unperturbed by this usual Wednesday fare).