A State of Secrecy: Stasi Informers and the Culture of Surveillance. By Alison Lewis. Lincoln: Potomac, 2021. 342 pages + 6 photographs + 16 images. $60.00 hardcover or eBook.

of the contributors are active journalists and curators, which lends the volume an important public-facing dimension as well. The volume makes a significant intervention in existing scholarship on the visual representation of the Holocaust by moving beyond photography and film through the focus on drawing. As the editors state, “the vast number of drawings by prisoners are overlooked. These drawings bear witness and resist closure in many ways—and provide a singular perspective on the extermination of the Jews” (13). Building on Jörn Wendland’s foundational research in this area (Das Lager von Bild zu Bild. Narrative Bildserien von Häftlingen aus NS-Zwangslagern, 2017), several contributions explore early representations of the Holocaust while also considering the specifics and variations among works that use both text and image (see in particular the contributions by Kathrin Hoffman-Curtius on “post-war graphic cycles” and Emil Gruber who explores “early representations of the Holocaust between caricature and comic book”). From this we see that early illustrations, specifically drawn representations of the Holocaust, need to be considered alongside the documentary films that helped establish what Daniel Magilow and Lisa Silverman have termed “a visual lexicon of Holocaust representation” (Holocaust Representations in History, 2015: 24). Furthermore, the volume provides many examples of how contemporary comics, since Spiegelman’s MAUS, both repeat and reflect upon the images in this lexicon. The integration of illustrations within the articles, as opposed to in an appendix at the end of the book, invites the reader to follow along with the authors’ analyses. However, many of the reproductions are so small that they impede this. Like Mickey in the cover image, one needs to reach for a magnifying glass. Regrettable further are the significant number of typos and linguistic infelicities, which at times hinder comprehension. These reservations aside, the volume deserves to be read widely, and hopefully a future edition will provide an opportunity to address the copyediting issues and consider increasing the size of reproductions.