This project began more than ten years ago, when I received the research accreditation from CNSAS (National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives) in November 2010. I would like to thank Cristina Petrescu for (inadvertently) alerting me to the existence of Herta Müller's secret police file in her contribution to a book Bettina Brandt and I were coediting at that time, Herta Müller: Politics and Aesthetics (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010). I also owe gratitude to Dragoş Petrescu and the CNSAS Board for approving my accreditation application for the research project “Herta Müller and the Securitate.” In the summer of 2011, I was finally able to embark on this journey, as I first laid eyes on Müller's and Richard Wagner's files and began to decipher the documents sewn together and organized within solid grayish covers. I went on to read the files multiple times and to make a myriad of notes on the digitized copies, but it was not until my research leave of 2015–16 that I had the chance to put information from the files, clustered around years and events, on an evidence board to visualize it and see the connections. I would like to thank my university and its presidential committee for selecting my project and deeming it worthy of a one-year sabbatical. At the end of that research leave, I had a better understanding of the files and a rough draft of the story. I would like to thank Brigid Haines, with whom I shared this preliminary text at the time, for her interest and feedback.

My work on secret police files, which expanded to include more and more files pertaining to the German Romanian communities, has brought about my sustained and most fruitful collaboration on file writing and surveillance with my academic soulmates and beloved conference companions, Alison Lewis and Corina L. Petrescu. I will forever value their friendship, generosity, and support. They challenged and inspired me, as I continued to refine my concept of “file stories” in the books and special journal issue we coedited: Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing (Camden House, 2016); Im Visier der Staatssicherheit (special issue of Monatshefte, 2018), which includes my first article that deals with the gaps and contradictions in Müller's file; and Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe (Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2019).