New Perspectives in German Studies

General Editors: Professor Michael Butler, Head of the Department of German Studies, University of Birmingham and Professor William Paterson, Director of the Institute of German Studies, University of Birmingham Over the last twenty years the concept of German studies has undergone major transformation. The traditional mixture of language and literary studies, related very closely to the discipline as practised in German universities, has expanded to embrace history, politics, economics and cultural studies. The conventional boundaries between all these disciplines have become increasingly blurred, a process which has been accelerated markedly since German unification in 1989/90. New Perspectives in German Studies, developed in conjunction with the Institute for German Studies at the University of Birmingham, has been designed to respond precisely to this trend of the interdisciplinary approach to the study of German and to cater for the growing interest in Germany in the context of European integration. The books in this series will focus on the mod­ ern period, from 1750 to the present day. Titles include: Michael Butler and Robert Evans (editors) THE CHALLENGE OF GERMAN CULTURE Essays Presented to Wilfried van der Will Michael Butler, Malcolm Pender and joy Charnley (editors) THE MAKING OF MODERN SWITZERLAND 1848-1998 Paul Cooke and Andrew Plowman (editors) GERMAN WRITERS AND THE POLITICS OF CULTURE Dealing with the Stasi

Wolf-Dieter Eberwein and Karl Kaiser (editors) GERMANY'S NEW FOREIGN POLICY Decision-Making in an Interdependent World Jonathan Grix THE ROLE OF THE MASSES IN THE COLLAPSE OF THE GDR Margarete Kohlenbach WALTER BENJAMIN Self-Reference and Religiosity Henning Tewes GERMANY, CIVILIAN POWER AND THE NEW EUROPE Enlarging Nato and the European Union Maiken Umbach GERMAN FEDERALISM Past, Present, Future New Perspectives in German Studies Series Standing Order ISBN 0-333-92430-4 hardcover Series Standing Order ISBN 0-333-92434-7 paperback (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England German Writers and the Politics of Culture Dealing \\lith the Stasi

Edited by

Paul Cooke and Andrew Plowman Editorial matter and selection © Paul Cooke and Andrew Plowman 2003 Chapters 1-14 © Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 2003 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover I st edition 2003 978-1-4039-1326-5 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted * save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-51181-5 ISBN 978-1-4039-3875-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781403938756

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data German writers and the politics of culture : dealing with the Stasi I edited by Paul Cooke and Andrew Plowman. p. em.-- (New perspectives in German studies) Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. German literature--Political aspects--Germany (East) 2. Germany (East). Ministerium fer Staatssicherheit. 3. German literature--Germany (East)--History and criticism. I. Cooke, Paul, 1969- II. Plowman, Andrew, 1966- Ill. Series PT3707.E27 2003 830.9'358--dc21 2003054918

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 Contents

Acknowledgements vii Notes on the Contributors ix List ofAbbreviations xiii Introduction: Paul Cooke and Andrew Plowman xv

Part One 1

1 The East German Ministry of State Security and East German Society during the Honecker Era, 1971-1989 3 Mike Dennis

2 Uwe Johnson's Awkward Legacy: A Sympathetic Secret Policeman of the pre-Stasi Era 25 Dennis Tate

3 The Stasi as the Force of Evil: Collin's Faustian Struggle with the Stasi Boss Urack in Stefan Heym's Collin 41 Reinhard K. Zachau

4 'Die Tragikomodie Deutschland': Scenes from No Man's Land in Martin Walser's Dorle und Wolf 57 Michael Butler

5 Tallhover or The Eternal Spy: Hans Joachim Schadlich's Stasi-Novel Tallhover 71 Karl-Heinz Schoeps

Part Two 8S

6 'Ich, Seherin, gehorte zum Palast': Christa Wolf's Literary Treatment of the Stasi in the Context of her Poetics of Self-Analysis 87 Georgina Paul

v vi Contents

7 'K6nnte man sagen, du seist einSpi6nchen?' Erich Loest's Fallhohe 107 Stephen J. Evans

8 Telling Tales: Moral Responsibility and the Stasi in Uwe Saeger's Die Nacht danach und der Morgen 121 Owen Evans

9 The Stasi as Panopticon: Wolfgang Hilbig's »Ich« 139 Paul Cooke

10 The Stasi, the Confession and Performing Difference: Brigitte Burmeister's Unter dem Namen Norma ISS Alison Lewis

11 'Bekenntnisse des Stasi-Hochstaplers Klaus Uhltzscht': Thomas Brussig's Comical and Controversial HeIden wie wir 173 Kristie Foell and Jill Twark

12 The Stasi as Literary Conceit: Gunter Grass's Ein weites Feld 195 Julian Preece

13 Jurgen Fuchs: Documenting Life, Death and the Stasi 213 Carol Anne Costabile-Heming

14 Escaping the Autobiographical Trap? Monika Maron, the Stasi and Pawels Briefe 227 Andrew Plowman

Bibliography 243 Index 257 Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank the following people, first of all Professor Michael Butler from the University of Birmingham, who carefully read the whole manuscript and whose advice and experience has been invaluable throughout this project. Thanks are due to Jonathan Grix at the Institute for German Studies, Kristine Thelen and Professor Peter J. Kitson, and also to the German Department at the University of Liverpool for helping to fund a one-day colloquium in 2001 where many of the contributors met to discuss their chapters. We would like to thank Dr Wini Davies from the University of Wales Aberystwyth, as well as Professor Frank Finlay and the German Department, Professor Rachel Killick and the School of Modern Languages at the University of Leeds and Professor Dorothy Severin and the School of Modern Languages at the University of Liverpool for providing the necessary funding to see the project through to completion. Our appreciation also goes to Sarah Church at Echelon for her expertise in producing the finished copy and finally to Beverley Tarquini at Palgrave Macmillan for all her support.

Paul Cooke and Andrew Plowman Leeds/Liverpool February 2003

vii This page intentionally left blank Notes on the Contributors

Michael Butler is Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Birmingham. His publications include The Novels of Max Frisch (London, 1975), The Plays of Max Frisch (London, 1985), Frisch: 'Andorra l (London, 1985, second edition, 1994), and the edited volumes, Rejection and Emancipation: Writing in German-speaking Switzerland 1945­ 1991 (with Malcolm Pender, Oxford 1991), The Narrative Fiction of Heinrich Boll: Social conscience and literary achievement (Cambridge, 1994), The Making ofModem Switzerland, 1848-1998 (with Malcolm Pender and Joy Charnley, London, 2000), and The Challenge ofGerman Culture: Essays presented to Wilfried van der Will (with Robert Evans, London, 2000). He has written numerous articles on modern German literature, from the eighteenth century to the present day. He is General Editor (with William Paterson) of the series, 'New Perspectives in German Studies'.

Paul Cooke is a Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Speaking the Taboo: a study of the work of Wolfgang Hilbig (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA, 2000) and The Pocket Essential to German Expressionist Film (London, 2002). He has co-edited, with Jonathan Grix, East Germany: Continuity and Change (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA, 2000) and East German distinctiveness in a unified Germany (Birmingham, 2002). He has published on German literature, film, politics and cultural studies.

Carol Anne Costabile-Heming is Associate Professor of German and University Fellow in Research at Southwest Missouri State University. She is the author of Intertextual Exile: Volker Braun IS Dramatic Re-Vision of GDR Society (Hildesheim, 1997) and the co-editor, with Rachel J. Halverson and Kristie A. Foell of Textual Responses to German Unification: Processing Historical and Social Change in Literature and Film (Berlin, 2001) and Berlin: The Symphony Continues: Orchestrating Architectural, Social, and Artistic Change in Germany's New Capital (Berlin, 2003). She has published essays on F.C. Delius, Peter Schneider, Gunter Kunert, Jurgen Fuchs, Ingeborg Bachmann and Christa Wolf. Currently, she is preparing a book that examines the various censoring mechanisms in the GDR.

ix x Notes on the Contributors

Mike Dennis is Professor of Modern German History at the University of Wolverhampton. He is the author of German Democratic Republic: politics, economics and society (London, 1988), Social and economic modernization in eastern Germany from Honecker to Kohl (London, 1993), The rise and fall of the German Democratic Republic, 1945-1990 (Harlow, 2000), and The Stasi: Myth and Reality (Harlow, 2003). He is currently working on the former contract workers from Vietnam and Mozambique who were resident in the GDR and also on minorities in the GDR.

Owen Evans is a Lecturer in German at the University of Wales Bangor. He is the author of Ein Training im Ich-Sagen: Personal Authenticity in the Prose Work ofGunter de Bruyn (Bern, 1996) and has published on GDR literature, film studies, autobiographical writing and new German fiction. He is co-founder of the European Cinema Research Forum.

Stephen Evans is completing a PhD on Erich Loest at the University of Wales Swansea. Formally a Lektor at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, he is currently a member of the English Department at the Chemnitz University of Technology.

Kristie Foell is Associate Professor of German at Bowling Green State University (Ohio), where she also directs the International Studies Program. She has held Fulbright scholarships in Berlin and Vienna and has published widely on 20th-century authors from Elias Canetti to Stefan Heym.

Alison Lewis lectures in German language, literature and cultural studies in the Department of German and Swedish Studies in the School of Languages at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on East German women's writing (Irmtraud Morgner, Christa Wolf, Monika Maron), German unification and intellectual debates, gender in Heinrich von Kleist, postwar East and West German literature, Wende literature, the Prenzlauer Berg and the Stasi. She is the author of Subverting Patriarchy: Fantasy and Feminism in the Works ofIrmtraud Morgner (Oxford, 1995) and Die Kunst des Verrats: Der Prenzlauer Berg und die Staatssicherheit (Wurzburg, 2003). Notes on the Contributors xi

Georgina Paul is a Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Warwick. She has published on a range of aspects of contemporary German literature, including articles on Christa Wolf and on gender issues. She is co-editor (with Helmut Schmitz) of Entgegenkommen: Dialogues with Barbara Koehler (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA, 2000).

Andrew Plowman teaches German language, literature and film studies in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of The Radical Subject: Social Change and the Self in Recent German Autobiography (Bern, 1998), and of essays on autobiographical writing and on contemporary German literature.

Julian Preece has ghosted the memoir of a former NKVD agent and informer (Nine Lives: Ethnic Conflict in the Polish-Ukrainian Borderlands by Waldemar Lotnik, London, 1999) and is the author of The Life and Work ofGunter Grass: Literature, History, Politics (Basingstoke, 2001). He teaches German and Comparative Literature at the University of Kent.

Karl-Heinz Schoeps, Professor Emeritus of German, taught for thirty years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. His publications include books and articles on Bertolt Brecht, East and West German literature and the literature of the Third Reich. His latest book Literatur im Dritten Reich (1933-1945) (Berlin, 2000), will appear in 2003 in English translation with Camden House/Boydell & Brewer.

Dennis Tate is Professor of German Studies and Head of the Department of European Studies and Modern Languages at the University of Bath. He has published widely on GDR literature and on cultural developments in Germany since unification. His main publications include: The East German Novel (Bath, 1984), Geist und Macht: Writers and the State in the GDR (joint ed., Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA, 1991), Franz Fuhmann: Innovation and Authenticity (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA, 1995), Gunter de Bruyn in Perspective (ed., Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA, 1999), Heiner Muller: Probleme und Perspektiven (joint ed., Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA, 2000). He is currently working on a monograph on autobiographical writing by Eastern German authors before and after unification. xii Notes on the Contributors

Jill Twark is Assistant Professor of German at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. She has written several articles on humour and satire in post-unification Eastern German literature and cabaret. Her interests include post-1945 and GDR literature and culture.

Reinhard K. Zachau is Professor of German at the University of the South (Sewanee) and wrote the first monograph on Stefan Heym (Munich, 1982). He has published several books on modern German literature, including volumes on Boll, Fallada, and Koeppen. List of Abbreviations

Die Bundesbeauftragte fur die Federal Commissioner for the Unterlagen des Staatssicherheits­ files of the State Security Service dienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen of the former German Democratic Demokratischen Republik (BStU). Republic.

Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ) Free German Youth

Hauptabteilung (HA) Main Department in the MfS

Hauptverwaltung Aufkliirung Foreign intelligence branch (HV A) of the MfS

Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter (1M) Unofficial Collaborator working for the MfS

Ministerium fUr Staatssicherheit Ministry for State Security (MfS)/(Stasi)

Nationale Volksarmee (NVA) GDRarmy

Operativer Vorgang (OV) Integrated surveillence operation mounted by the MfS

Politische Untergrundaktivitiit Political underground activity (PUT)

Politisch-ideologische Diversion Political ideological diversion (PID)

Sozialistische Einheitspartei (SED) Socialist Unity Party

xiii This page intentionally left blank Introduction

Paul Cooke and Andrew Plowman

It is a curious twist of history that, in a time when many former citizens of the German Democratic Republic are lamenting what they see as their marginalisation within unified Germany and the erasure of their past from the historical record, the hated Ministerium fUr Staatssicherheit (the Stasi or secret police), an institution the majority were glad to see the back of, should be one of the few East German organisations to continue to have an influence over present-day affairs. Throughout the 1990s the German press was regularly full of the scandals that came to light as the miles of Stasi files accumulated in the forty years of its existence were gradually worked through by archivists. These scandals were mainly concerned with the 'outing' of a range of prominent East German figures as Stasi collaborators, from Lothar de Maiziere, the first democratically­ elected premier of the GDR, to Manfred Stolpe, the former Minister President of Brandenburg. More recently, however, the influence of the Stasi has also been felt on the political life of the former West Germany, when surveillance tapes made by the MfS were used to show that the former Chancellor Helmut Kohl had received illegal funds for his party. And it is not only the political sphere that has been fundamen­ tally rocked by Stasi scandals. One of the most controversial areas of influence was that of culture, and in particular the organisation's position within the literary scene. That the Stasi should have been so interested in the activities of writers in the East is understandable given the special status of the arts within the Eastern Bloc. From the early days of the GDR, writers were seen as a crucial weapon in the state's propaganda arsenal. They were to be, as Stalin put it, the 'Ingenieur[e] der menschlichen Seele', who would help to educate the masses in the ways of socialism. 1 State-endorsed writers were given special privileges, such as generous financial support and the opportunity of Western travel. However, over time relations between some of the GDR's most important writers and the ruling elite became strained. Rather than simply toeing the party line, writers such as Christa Wolf and Heiner Muller saw it as their duty to provide a forum for public debate. Never losing faith in the ideals of

xv xvi Introduction socialism, such writers believed that it was their responsibility to try to reform the GDR in order to turn it into a truly democratic socialist state, and due to the quality of their work they gained huge international recognition.2 In the 1970s and 1980s, a new group of writers began to emerge, the most famous of which centred around the working-class Prenzlauer Berg area of East Berlin. Poets such as Uwe Kolbe, Jan Faktor, Sascha Anderson and Rainer Schedlinski began to organise an underground literary scene which criticised the GDR state far more radically than Christa Wolf's generation had done. Unlike these older writers who had experienced the fascism of the Third Reich and had embraced socialism as their salvation from barbarity, this new generation, the so-called 'Hineingeborenen',3 never made the conscious decision to build a social­ ist state and therefore did not feel obliged to conform to its limitations. As this group began to publish in the 1980s, they were greeted, particu­ larly in the West, as representing new hope for the GDR. They were seen as producing a truly autonomous, democratic form of culture that offered a radical challenge to the draconian cultural politics of the ruling elite of the SED. However, with the collapse of the GDR and the opening of the Stasi files a startling new picture of the relationship between these writers and the state emerged. MfS documents revealed that the State Security Service had substantial files on the majority of GDR writers, both on those who worked within official State structures and on those who wrote and published within the underground literary scene. More shocking, though, was the fact that certain key critical authors had actively co-operated with the Stasi as Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (1M). Figures such as Muller and Wolf, but - worst of all - Sascha Anderson and Rainer Schedlinski, the dominant personalities of the Prenzlauer Berg Scene, had actually all worked as IMs for the MfS. 4 More alarming still was how this new-found information was being used. As the historian Mary Fulbrook notes: 'In the immediate aftermath of the end of the GDR, a very black and white picture of the GDR rapidly replaced the more nuanced views which had been Widely prevalent in the previous two decades.'s She suggests that in the East 'there was the very understandable sense of emotional outrage felt by victims of former communist regimes, who wanted to express their anger through the use of an analytic concept emphasising oppression and injustice'.6 However, she goes on to· note that the use made of the Stasi files was ultimately reductive: Introduction xvii

Curiously, although the archives were now open, providing rich materials for the construction of a far more differen­ tiated picture than was previously available, they were at first rapidly plundered simply in order to pad out and prop up preconceived views based essentially in a desire to effect a political and moral demolition job.?

The mere hint of collusion with the organisation, such as finding one's name in a Stasi file without any further material evidence of what one had done (as in the case of Lothar de Maiziere) was enough to exclude one from public life. The influence of the Stasi on cultural life in the East was taken as confirmation of the view held by a growing number of critics in the West, first expounded in the Literaturstreit of 1990/1991, that writers such as Wolf had had their day, that the work of GDR artists only ever had any value as political documents.8 In a post-Cold War climate, art could now withdraw from the political sphere and so such writing was no longer required. The Stasi scandals of the 1990s seemed to be the final nail in the coffin for these writers, since even the quasi political function of GDR literature was undermined by the fact of Stasi involvement.9 In the years since the collapse of the GDR much energy has been devoted to exploring the historical relationship of the Stasi to the writers in the East. Commentators such as David Bathrick, Joachim Walther, Mike Dennis and Hubertus Knabe have charted in great detail the inhuman methods, the so-called 'ZersetzungsmaBnahmen' (methods of psychological and/or social subversion of an individual or group) used by the organisation to terrorise its victims. 10 They have also looked at the motivation behind those who collaborated as IMs, from those who were forced to comply through blackmail to those who worked with the Stasi out of ideological conviction. The detailed exploration by these commentators of the machinations of the Stasi, now possible due to the opening of the MfS archives, is crucial if we are to come to a true understanding of the nature of life in the GDR. This present volume opens with an overview by Dennis, based on detailed archival work, of the organisation and its methods. However, in the rest of the volume we turn to a curiously neglected area of study, namely that of how writers themselves have reacted to the problem of the Stasi in their own fictional texts. In the course of this study of texts ranging from Uwe Johnson's Mutmassungen tiber Jakob (1959) to Monika Maron's Pawels Briefe (1999) xviii Introduction andJtirgen Fuchs's Magdalena (1999), we examine literary representations of the MfS from both the East and the West, and from both before and after the caesura of 1989/90, known in German as the Wende, in order to refute the claim that such writing no longer has any literary or political value. What links all these works is an urge to explore the position of the MfS in GDR society and its legacy for post-unification Germany. Part One deals principally with pre-Wende representations of the MfS. In Chapter Two, Dennis Tate focuses on the figure of the secret policeman Rohlfs in a reading of Johnson's Mutmassungen tiber Jakob which sets the novel against Margarethe von Trotta's Jahrestage film of 2000, a project that reworked material from Johnson's earlier novel. Here Tate contrasts Johnson's exploration of the role of the MfS in the GDR of the 1950s and the black-and-white Stasi debates of the present. Reinhard K. Zachau's discussion of Stefan Heym's Collin (1979) in Chapter Three examines how this novel uses the conflict between the writer Collin and the Stasi boss Urack to explore the destructive forces and the potential for change within socialism, considering whether Heym's conclusions are cast in a new light following the Wende. In a treatment of Martin Walser's novella Dorle und Wolf (1987) Michael Butler shows in Chapter Four how this West German writer uses the figure of the Stasi operative Wolf Zieger as the focus for a series of reflec­ tions on the problem of the division of Germany after 1945. Then in Chapter Five Karl-Heinz Schoeps examines Hans Joachim Schadlich's Tallhover (1986), looking at the way the Stasi may be understood as part of a wider - and reactionary - tradition of German (secret-) police enforcement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Part Two, our attention turns to post-Wende representations of the MfS. Key themes which run through these essays are, on the one hand, the question of historical Aufarbeitung and, on the other, the crisis of representation many writers have faced since the opening of the Stasi files. No examination of the Stasi in literature can be complete without a discussion of Christa Wolf, and in Chapter Six Georgina Paul analyses how the critical reaction to Wolf's account of being under surveillance in Was bleibt (1990) marks, in contrast to the reception of her earlier treatments of the MfS, the collapse of the GDR's literary system and of the public, identificatory role of the writer within it. The following two chapters turn to the more explicitly aesthetic issues of narrative and representation. In Chapter Seven, Stephen J. Evans shows how Erich Loest's presentation of the Stasi in a series of documentary and fictional texts - including Fallhohe (1989) and Die Stasi war mein Eckermann (1991) Introduction xix

- changed following the Wende and the opening of the Stasi files. The problem of narration, memory, invention and the written presentation of historical truth forms the basis of Owen Evans's discussion in Chapter Eight of the protagonist's encounter with the Stasi agent Mike Glockengiesser in Uwe Saeger's Die Nacht danach und der Morgen (1991). Chapters Nine and Ten deal with the relationship between the Stasi and the assertion of a new or continuing sense of 'East German-ness' since the Wende. In Chapter Nine, Paul Cooke argues that in »Ich« (1993) Wolfgang Hilbig's preoccupation with the Stasi represents both a response to East German attempts to ignore awkward questions about their history and to West German views that the experience of Easterners has no place in the unified Federal Republic. The way that narratives about the Stasi - and in particular those of complicity - function, post­ unification, as markers of an East German identity and of national difference in the face of Western images of the East is explored by Alison Lewis's reading of Brigitte Burmeister's Unter dem Namen Norma (1994) in Chapter Ten. In Chapters Eleven and Twelve the focus is on texts which attempt to explain and demystify the MfS and its methods. In Chapter Eleven, Kristie Foell and Jill Twark look at how Thomas Brussig uses the comic mode of satire in his hugely popular HeIden wie wir (1995) to shed light on those caught up in the MfS, whether as victims or perpetrators. Julian Preece examines Gunter Grass's presentation of the relationship between Fonty and the Stasi operative Hoftaller in Ein weites Feld (1995), and in so doing he also shows how Grass seems to humanise the organisation. Finally, in Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen the volume turns to the question of autobiography. The use of Stasi files, which are themselves a textual construction of the reality of the GDR, and their implications for the act of self-presentation is the theme of Carol Anne Costabile-Heming's analysis of Jurgen Fuchs's Magdalena (1999) in Chapter Thirteen. Then, in Chapter Fourteen Andrew Plowman analyses Monika Maron's Pawels Briere (1999), exploring the fraught nature of the turn to the modes of biography, autobiography and confession in order to deal with the surfacing of uncomfortable Stasi files from the past. In the course of the volume the Stasi emerges as a powerful trope which writers have used to address historical and political issues surrounding German division, unity and identity. The essays collected here explore the different ways in which writers have dealt with the internal tensions within the German nation both before and after unification. But the Stasi is also the point of departure for an examination of more overtly literary issues such as the nature of narrative itself and xx Introduction the act of representation. A striking feature of many - if not all - of the essays is that they shed light on how the Stasi has been used by authors to reflect upon· their own position as writers. The MfS method of 'Zersetzung' may be read as a metaphor for the way that, as Georgina Paul's discussion of Wolf's Was bleibt shows, the Stasi marks a fissure in the individual writer's relation to the state and the realm of politics, between the public and private worlds, and the beginning of a process of fragmentation and disintegration through which the role and identity of the writer is called into question and the armoury of rhetorical devices at his/her disposal challenged. The process of 'Zersetzung' also aptly describes the pertinent image of a fragmented self in works exploring the role of the 1M and the spy, which become, in the texts by Hilbig and Walser for instance, a metaphor for the activities of the writer who voyeuristically observes society in order to find material for fictional reports but who is at the same time forced to work in a liminal 'no man's land', living partly in society and partly in a world of fiction. Further, 'Zersetzung' illuminates the way in which the Stasi can be used to destabilise the act of narration itself. Such destabilisation occurs, for example, in Saeger's Die Nacht danach und der Morgen and in the autobiographical texts by Fuchs and Maron, in which it throws into relief the problematic nature of the act of self-presentation. Finally, on a broader, historical level, .the concept of 'Zersetzung' also offers a striking metaphor for the divided German nation, particularly in the work of Western writers such as Walser and Grass. Throughout this volume, we see, then, that although the MfS has been defunct as an organisation for over a decade, paradoxically it remains a force not to be underestimated in the history, politics and culture of unified Germany. The Stasi scandals that have shaken public life continue to rumble on, even if not always with the same force as they once did. In the sphere of literary culture meanwhile, the Stasi and its socio-political ramifications continue to provide writers with a rich field to explore. Introduction xxi

Notes

1 Quoted in Wolfgang Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR. Erweiterte Neuausgabe (Leipzig: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1996), p. 43. 2 See Dieter Schlenstedt, quoted in J.H.Reid, Writing without Taboos: The New East German Literature (New York: Berg, 1990), p. 1. 3 This term comes from a poem by Uwe Kolbe, in which he reflects on the experience of those whose entire formative years were spent under socialism. See Uwe Kolbe, 'Hineingeboren', in Hineingeboren. Gedichte 1975-1979 (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1982), p. 46. For further discussion of this group of artists see Karin Leeder, Breaking Boundaries: A New Generation ofPoets in the GDR (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 4 For a fuller account of the influence of the Stasi within the literary scene in the East see Mike Dennis's chapter in this volume. 5 Mary Fulbrook, German National Identity after the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), p. 225. 6 Fulbrook, p. 224. 7 Fulbrook, p. 226. 8 For further discussion of Christa Wolf and the Literaturstreit see Georgina Paul's contribution to this volume. 9 Nor, one should note, did prominent writers of the West escape censure in the wake of the Literaturstreit and the Stasi scandals. Famously, Gunter Grass, the chief exponent of an ideal of literary engagement in the public sphere, found himself the object of savage criticism when he published his post-unification novel Ein weites Feld (1995). For further discussion see Julian Preece's contribution to this volume. 10 See David.Bathrick, The Powers ofSpeech: The Politics ofCulture in the GDR (Nebraska: University of Nebraska, 1995); Joachim Walther, Sicherungs­ bereich Literatur. Schriftsteller und Staatssicherheit in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (Berlin: Ch. Links, 1996); Hubertus Knabe, Die unterwanderte Republik. Stasi im Westen (Berlin: PropyHien-Verlag, 1999).