SECRET DISSERTATIONS IN THE GERMAN-DEMOCRATIC-REPUBLIC

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. This year'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.(1 ) Partly in order to convey the sense the originals give of research u nfolding 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 norm ally the case in C&RL-and in the ZfBB. But in their very incompletenes s they give a sense of a process of discovery and revelation that tell s a powerful story. Since the original publication of these articles, the authors have published a book on their research, as well as a bibl iography listing the suppressed dissertations.(2,3) The articles are c learly ''different'' from the usual C&RL fare, but that's also the poi nt. 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 elsewhe re.