Best Seller: Secret Police Secrets

Thousands of East Germans scrambled to buy a real-life Cold War thriller Friday as the newly published secrets of the disbanded secret police became that nation’s best-selling book.

Hundreds of people stood in line for hours to buy the little yellow volume, eager to know how they had been spied on and lied to in decades of hard-line Communist rule.

The decision to publish was made by the interim government. However, “Orders and Reports of the Ministry of State Security” is not light reading or particularly engaging prose.

The book is an edited selection, in the original police bureaucratic jargon, of the workings, targets and findings of the hated Stasi, or secret police, that imposed Stalinist order in East Germany for 40 years.

The 56 reports in the paperback, which costs about $2, are all labeled Streng Geheim-- Top Secret.

But the main secret they contain is the force’s paranoia and alarm at every suspicion of change in a monolithic state, now in transition to becoming a multi-party democracy.

Every dissident worth his salt can find his or her name in the 250-page book. Western correspondents get a mention, too.

Millions more files are still sealed under police guard at the force’s vast former headquarters in East Berlin.

Co-publisher Stefan Wolle, laughing delightedly at the “crazy” demand for his book, said he had been given carte blanche to go through the files.