Copyright

Sara Jones

Some Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

First published 2026

by Camden House

Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc.

and of Boydell & Brewer Limited

www.boydellandbrewer.com

ISBN-13: 978-1-64014-193-3 (hardback)

ISBN-13: 978-1-64014-195-7 (paperback)

ISBN-13: 978-1-80543-995-0 (ePUB)

This title is available under the Open Access license CC BY-NC-ND due to funding by the Arts and Humanities Research Council/UKRI.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

CIP data is available from the Library of Congress.

The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate

Full credit details are provided in the captions to the images in the text. The authors and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and individuals for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

Cover image: © Bernd Hiepe. Gabriele Stötzer during her performance “U-Haft” (1990).

Cross references refer to page numbers in the print edition

Details

Knowledge of the Stasi in the East German Literary Sphere

Stable URL:https://openaccess.boydellandbrewercms.com/?id=-318348

Open Access license

The first book to investigate what writers, publishers, and editors knew about the Stasi and how, rethinking the relationship between knowledge, secrecy, intuition, trust, and agency under an authoritarian regime.

While much scholarship has explored what the East German Ministry for State Security - the Stasi - knew about writers, publishers, editors, and others involved in the GDR's literary sphere, none has asked what these groups knew about the Stasi, how they acquired that knowledge, and how it circulated. The present book flips the approach of existing scholarship to ask those questions, thus offering an innovative approach to studying the production and circulation of literature in East Germany. It uncovers the myriad ways in which those who wrote, published, or supported literary production that was critical of the state negotiated, circumvented, and actively confronted the threat posed by surveillance and control. The study draws on original interviews, Stasi files, and writings by Uwe Kolbe, Ekkehard Maaß, Christa Moog, Gabriele Stötzer, Bernd Wagner, and Bettina Wegner, as well as works by Stefan Heym, Ralf-Günter Krolkiewicz, Günter Kunert, and Christa Wolf. The book shows that the Stasi was a kind of "public secret"-a known unknown that was positioned between revelation and concealment. It engages with theoretical frameworks drawn from anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, surveillance studies and cultural studies to reconceptualize the relationship between knowledge, secrecy, intuition, trust, and agency in an authoritarian context.

This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

SARA JONES is Professor of Languages, Cultures, and Societies at the University of Birmingham, UK.
TARA TALWAR WINDSOR is Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Leeds, UK.
BETIEL WASIHUN is Lecturer in Cultural and Literary Theory at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany.

Author

Sara Jones

PublisherCamden House

Print publication date May, 2026

Print ISBN 9781640141933

EISBN 9781805439950

Base text size -

Copyright

Knowledge of the Stasi in the East German Literary Sphere

Chapter illustrations ()