The title of the book, Epistemic Nostalgia: Re-enacting the GDR in Post-socialist Germany, is meant to signal that this book is a contribution to three important debates. First, this is a work on a phenomenon that has so far been neglected in contemporary history: while there is a growing body of literature on the GDR, including the GDR intelligence service and its methods, and also about the dismantling of the GDR system, the discussion about the post-GDR activities of former Stasi officers and other GDR elites has largely been left to journalism. The majority of the German public (as well as the German parliament) have condemned the GDR as a 'state of injustice', which led to the marginalization of the former elites. Accordingly, their post-1989 activities are often seen as potentially dangerous to the democratic order of unified Germany. The field that this book covers is the self-representations of former GDR elites, who in the early 1990s organized in a cluster of associations, the OKV ("East German Union of Associations"). These organisations (which in the early 1990s had a membership of perhaps 20.000) defend the historical image of the GDR as a legitimate attempt at establishing a just society on German soil. My central argument is that the foremost purpose of these associations is to defend the individual life trajectories of their members, and thus to preserve their sense of self-esteem and life purpose. Second, the book is a contribution to the broader debates about historical memory, and more specifically to studies about nostalgia. Nostalgia is mostly defined as a 'longing for the past', or 'a longing for the futures that were still open in the past'. The publications by OKV circles as well as my interviews with 30 OKV members and sympathizers suggest that here we are dealing with a different sort of nostalgia, one that can best be defined as 'epistemic'. This nostalgia is enrooted in the political understandings of the GDR: 'epistemic nostalgics' are longing back for the time in which their way of seeing the world was dominant, and when it was unchallenged by dissidence. This epistemic nostalgia is evident in the autobiographical narratives of the OKV members, which usually describe a trajectory that started with the 'wrong epistemics' of the Nazi era and WWII, continue with successful socialization in the GDR state project, and lead to the acquisition of prestige in higher functions in that state, be it in the Stasi, the GDR border guard, police or army, or in other professions that can be described as 'close to the regime', including in higher education and GDR production and trade. My definition of 'epistemic nostalgia' builds upon the work of sociologist Glaeser, who in his work on GDR army officers analyzed the political convictions that were trained over several decades but then failed to offer a framework for understanding the public protests against the regime in 1989. In a similar way, OKV is caught in a political defiance of the present by concentrating on the past. The third element of the title, 'post-socialist Germany', might appear stunning at first sight; after all, OKV is seen as a particular East German phenomenon, not one that relates to Germany as a whole. Yet I investigate the OKV in a broader German context, for instance by analyzing how former GDR stalwarts quickly adapted to the Bundesrepublik court procedures in order to push their arguments for the abrogation of pension cuts that targeted former Stasi co-workers. This all-German perspective is central in the third part of my book, where I study how OKV associations attempted to influence the radical left party Die Linke, the indirect successor party of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) of the GDR. After 1989, the party - in the past the backbone of the Stasi and the regime - distanced itself from the interests of the former GDR security service officers that once served as the 'shield and sword' of the SED, in order to gain acceptance amo

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