10/02/2024
Although secret services are not a modern phenomenon and are sometimes described as "the second oldest industry in the world, the attention and interest of a wider public only increased from the end of the 19th century, reaching a temporary peak during the Cold War. For this There are several reasons for this development: On the one hand, the advancing process of increasing democratization had an impact on the shift in the secret spheres of politics. Secret diplomacy no longer based on individual personal trust, but increasingly professionalized and institutionalized institutions took over confidential correspondence and the collection of information Information and targeted propaganda activities. Since the 18th century, for example, in Austria and France there have been departments such as the "Geheime Diginkanzlei" and the "Cabinet Noir", which dealt with letter espionage on a large scale in an organized manner. Towards the dissolution of the media landscape also changed: newspapers now spread news that had previously been reserved for a small circle; Politics gradually became a public topic.
On the other hand, since the Napoleonic campaigns at the latest, the resource of information (about the enemy, about the terrain, about secret strategies) has been revealed to be indispensable, based on Bonaparte's famous saying: "A spy in the right place replaces 20,000 men at the front." The conflict between Great Britain and Russia over supremacy in Central Asia, which became known from 1835 as "The Great Game"[8], is widely regarded as the first major field of activity of institutionalized espionage, which was also reflected for the first time in literature and thus even more publicly.
With the First World War, the intelligence service experienced a further upswing: in the German Empire, for example, the existing counterintelligence section was upgraded to a department and significantly expanded both in terms of personnel and its competencies - despite the slogan that espionage was dishonorable. Great Britain, Russia and other countries armed themselves similarly in this area. The security policy of all of Europe was no longer based on the agreements of the Congress of Vienna in 1815, but rather on competing and not always stable alliances. These were always risk factors for the other states and, given this threat situation, it was primarily the military that invested in corresponding departments.
At the same time, the fictitious involvement with secret services grew. Already in the run-up to the First World War, Robert Erskine Childers' bestseller "The Riddle of the Sands" (1903) established the genre of the spy novel, which is clearly differentiated from the crime novel in literary terms. Other early works in this new genre include "The Thirty-Nine Steps" (1915) by John Buchan, but also individual stories about the protagonist Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ("His Last Bow", 1917).
