German Writers and the Politics of Culture

Transcription

Dealing with the Stasi
Edited by
Paul Cooke and Andrew Plowman
10.1057/9781403938756preview - German Writers and the Politics of Culture, Paul Cooke and Andrew Plowman
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to npg - PalgraveConnect - 2017-01-15
German Writers and the
Politics of Culture
New Perspectives in German Studies
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 modern 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
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
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.
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German Writers and the
Politics of Culture
Edited by
Dealing \\lith the Stasi
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German writers and the politics of culture: dealing with the Stasi / edited
by Paul Cooke and Andrew Plowman.
p. em. -- (New perspectives in German studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-4039-1326-9
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- III. Series
PT3707.E27 2003
830.9'358--dc21
2003054918
10
12
9
11
876
10 09 08
543
07 06 05
2
04
1
03
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne
*
Editorial matter and selection © Paul Cooke and Andrew Plowman 2003
Chapters 1-14 © Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 2003
Acknowledgements
Notes on the Contributors
List ofAbbreviations
Introduction: Paul Cooke and Andrew Plowman
Part One
1
2
3
4
5
1
The East German Ministry of State Security and
East German Society during the Honecker Era, 1971-1989
Mike Dennis
3
Uwe Johnson's Awkward Legacy:
A Sympathetic Secret Policeman of the pre-Stasi Era
Dennis Tate
25
The Stasi as the Force of Evil: Collin's Faustian
Struggle with the Stasi Boss Urack in Stefan Heym's Collin
Reinhard K. Zachau
41
'Die Tragikomodie Deutschland': Scenes from
No Man's Land in Martin Walser's Dorle und Wolf
Michael Butler
57
Tallhover or The Eternal Spy:
Hans Joachim Schadlich's Stasi-Novel Tallhover
Karl-Heinz Schoeps
71
Part Two
6
vii
ix
xiii
xv
8S
'Ich, Seherin, gehorte zum Palast':
Christa Wolf's Literary Treatment of the Stasi
in the Context of her Poetics of Self-Analysis
Georgina Paul
87
v
Contents
7
8
'K6nnte man sagen, du seist einSpi6nchen?'
Erich Loest's Fallhohe
Stephen J. Evans
107
Telling Tales: Moral Responsibility and the Stasi
in Uwe Saeger's Die Nacht danach und der Morgen
Owen Evans
121
9
The Stasi as Panopticon: Wolfgang Hilbig's »Ich«
Paul Cooke
10
The Stasi, the Confession and Performing Difference:
Brigitte Burmeister's Unter dem Namen Norma
Alison Lewis
11
12
'Bekenntnisse des Stasi-Hochstaplers Klaus Uhltzscht':
Thomas Brussig's Comical and Controversial
HeIden wie wir
Kristie Foell and Jill Twark
The Stasi as Literary Conceit:
Gunter Grass's Ein weites Feld
Julian Preece
13
Jurgen Fuchs: Documenting Life, Death and the Stasi
Carol Anne Costabile-Heming
14
Escaping the Autobiographical Trap?
Monika Maron, the Stasi and Pawels Briefe
Andrew Plowman
Bibliography
Index
139
ISS
173
195
213
227
243
257
Contents
vi
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.
Leeds/Liverpool February 2003
vii
Acknowledgements
This page intentionally left blank
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 (London, 1985, second edition, 1994), and the edited volumes,
Rejection and Emancipation: Writing in German-speaking Switzerland 19451991 (with Malcolm Pender, Oxford 1991), The Narrative Fiction of
Heinrich Boll: Social conscience and literary achievement (Cambridge, 1994),
The Making of Modem 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
l
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 of Gunter 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 of Irmtraud Morgner (Oxford, 1995) and Die Kunst des Verrats:
Der Prenzlauer Berg und die Staatssicherheit (Wurzburg, 2003).
x
xi
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 of Gunter 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.
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).
xii
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.
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.
Die Bundesbeauftragte fur die
Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen
Demokratischen Republik (BStU).
Federal Commissioner for the
files of the State Security Service
of the former German Democratic
Republic.
Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ)
Free German Youth
Hauptabteilung (HA)
Main Department in the MfS
Hauptverwaltung Aufkliirung
Foreign intelligence branch
of the MfS
(HV A)
Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter (1M)
Unofficial Collaborator working
for the MfS
Ministerium fUr Staatssicherheit
(MfS)/(Stasi)
Ministry for State Security
Nationale Volksarmee (NVA)
GDRarmy
Operativer Vorgang (OV)
Integrated surveillence operation
mounted by the MfS
Politische Untergrundaktivitiit
(PUT)
Political underground activity
Politisch-ideologische Diversion
(PID)
Political ideological diversion
Sozialistische Einheitspartei (SED)
Socialist Unity Party
xiii
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
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 democraticallyelected 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 fundamentally 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
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 socialist state and therefore did not feel obliged to conform to its limitations.
As this group began to publish in the 1980s, they were greeted, particularly 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:
xvi
Introduction
xvii
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)
Curiously, although the archives were now open, providing
rich materials for the construction of a far more differentiated 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.?
Introduction
and Jtirgen 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 reflections 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)
xviii
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, postunification, 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
Introduction
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.
xx
Introduction
xxi
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Quoted in Wolfgang Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR.
Erweiterte Neuausgabe (Leipzig: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1996), p. 43.
See Dieter Schlenstedt, quoted in J.H.Reid, Writing without Taboos: The
New East German Literature (New York: Berg, 1990), p. 1.
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 of Poets in the GDR (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1996).
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.
Mary Fulbrook, German National Identity after the Holocaust (Cambridge:
Polity, 1999), p. 225.
Fulbrook, p. 224.
Fulbrook, p. 226.
For further discussion of Christa Wolf and the Literaturstreit see Georgina
Paul's contribution to this volume.
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.
See David.Bathrick, The Powers ofSpeech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR
(Nebraska: University of Nebraska, 1995); Joachim Walther, Sicherungsbereich 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).
Notes
Part One
1
The East German Ministry
of State Security and East
German Society during the
Honecker Era, 1971-1989
The East German Ministry of State Security enjoys a reasonably wellfounded reputation as an omniscient and omnipresent agent of
domination. Not only did its army of officers and agents impose on GDR
society a system of surveillance unprecedented in its comprehensiveness, but its telephone tappers and spies were able to penetrate the
innermost secrets of West Germany's political and social institutions.
One chancellor, Willy Brandt, resigned as a result of the Stasi's
penetration of his office, and another, Helmut Kohl, has suffered severe
damage to his reputation after the discovery of Stasi recordings of
telephone conversations concerning nefarious financial dealings within
the ranks of the CDU. An examination of the files which the MfS kept
on writers, peace activists, environmentalists, athletes, academics,
skinheads and punks, as well as on its own spies, testifies to the
ministry's paranoiac hunt for suspected 'hostile-negative forces' and to
its bureaucratic zeal for the gathering of data. The surviving archival
materials, if arranged end-to-end, would stretch for about 178
kilometres. By the late 1980s, over 91,000 full-time MfS officials and
about 175,000 unofficial collaborators (Inoftizielle Mitarbeiter - IMs), that
is, about one in fifty East German adults, as well as several thousand
West German citizens, were contributing to this mountain of paper.
The sheer scale of MfS operations and the information on even
the smallest details of people's lives, including when individuals under
surveillance turned off the light at night and emptied the rubbish,
persuaded one eminent German historian, Christoph Klessmann, that
George Orwell's dystopia had been realised to a far greater extent in the
GDR than was ever the case in the Third Reich. l It might be possible
to take this apparent omnipresence a stage further to claim, albeit
3
Mike Dennis
Mike Dennis
mistakenly, omnipotence for a Ministry which Habermas has likened
to a giant octopus extending its tentacles into every part of society. 2
The validity of such claims will be examined as part of a general
assessment of the role of the MfS while Erich Honecker was leader of
the SED between 1971 and 1989. Particular attention will be paid to the
ministry's mission and organisation, its multiple functions, the social
profile and value system of the full-time officers, the motivation and
the activities of IMs, the work of Main Department (Hauptabteilung) XX,
and, finally, the disintegration of the MfS in 1989.
The MfS as an Agent of Domination in the Honecker Era
From its founding in 1950, the self-proclaimed mission of the MfS was
to serve as the 'sword and shield' of the SED. In carrying out this
mission, the MfS was involved in various forms of co-operation with
other agents of domination, including the SED apparatus, the Deutsche
Volkspolizei, the Nationale Volksarmee, the Ministerium des Innern, the
Freie Deutsche Jugend and other mass organisations. In fact the MfS
frequently performed acts of repression and conducted surveillance on
behalf of the top party leadership rather than of the party as a corporate
body. Nevertheless, MfS officers were imbued with the notion of service
to the SED, even though the relationship with the party did not always
run smoothly.
The early years of the Ministry were marked by the use of
terroristic methods in restructuring GDR society along Stalinist lines
under the aegis of the SED and, until 1958, under the close supervision
and control of numerous Soviet 'advisers'. The Soviet Union had been
instrumental in the establishment of the secret police and security
structures in the Soviet zone which were the precursors of the MfS. The
radical restructuring of the socio-economic and political system in the
GDR, which helped to trigger the June 1953 uprising and the construction of the Berlin Wall eight years later, left their imprint on the MfS.
The first two Ministers, Wilhelm Zaisser and Ernst Wollweber, were
caught up in the power struggles between Walter Ulbricht and his critics,
and were dismissed. In 1953, the Ministry was temporarily reduced to the
status of a State Secretariat in the Ministry of the Interior, and Wollweber's
successor, Erich Mielke, did not enter the SED Politburo until 1971.
Subsequently, his close working relationship with Honecker enabled him
to ward off what he regarded as undue interference by the SED's Central
Committee Department for Security Issues in the MfS's internal affairs.
4
5
Mielke, an unreconstructed Stalinist, had earned his spurs through
his work as a cadre in the security apparatus of the KPD and the SED.
Under Mielke's auspices the MfS expanded rapidly and was gradually
transformed into a disciplined, bureaucratic and professional body
which, especially after the sealing of the borders in 1961, turned its
attention increasingly towards the protection of the self-styled 'First
Workers' and Peasants' State' on German soil. After the consolidation of
SED rule under the New Economic System from the mid- to late 1960s,
but in particular during the era of detente in the 1970s, the MfS was
deployed as an integral element in what Hubertus Knabe has dubbed
the system of 'silent repression' (lautlose Unterdrilckung). 3 This in turn
was embedded in a broader societal system which has attracted various
labels, such as post-totalitarianism, modern dictatorship, a thoroughly
dominated society and consultative authoritarianism. This form of rule
emerged out of the Stalinist period and, although the methods of
control were less brutal and repressive than in Stalin's Russia, the GDR
of the Honecker years was nevertheless a dictatorship of the party elites
in which coercion and injustice were endemic.
The 'softer' forms of control in the 1970s and 1980s can be
attributed to a series of interrelated factors: the stabilisation of SED rule
since the mid-1960s; the greater sensitivity of the SED leaders to the
population's needs, not least the desire for a higher standard of living; the
counterproductive nature of terroristic methods; the frail legitimacy of
the less prosperous 'other Germany'; the GDR's exposed position on the
border between capitalism and communism; and the country's long and
painful search for external recognition. Although the GDR came out of
the international cold in the first half of the 1970s, it remained a fragile
polity. The Grundlagenvertrag (Basic Treaty) between the FRG and the GDR
in 1972 still denied the GDR recognition as a fully sovereign state and
detente with the West was a mixed blessing. Closer inter-state and
personal contacts raised fears in East Berlin for the stability of the GDR.
Operative Zersetzung (Operational Subversion)
Mielke was a fierce opponent of detente, fearing that it provided the
West German imperialists with an opportunity to liquidate the GDR's
socialist system. The treaties of the early 1970s and the Helsinki Accords
of 1975, especially the guarantees for human rights, not only convinced
him of the need for greater vigilance but also provided him with the
opportunity to expand his security empire. He warned his colleagues
East Germany During the Honecker Era
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German Writers and the Politics of Culture

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