Introduction
Flipping the Script: Surveillance, Secrecy, and Revelation
This book is about surveillance, secrecy and revelation in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). It is a book about the East German State Security Service, or Ministry for State Security (MfS), popularly known as the Stasi. However, it is also a book about the writers, artists, performers, and publishers in the literary sphere and their efforts to create trust, build networks, and form friendships in a context of pervasive state intrusion. We want to flip the script of existing scholarship. We ask not what the Stasi knew about those involved in literary production in the GDR, but what these groups knew about the Stasi, how they acquired that knowledge, and how it circulated. In the process, we uncover the myriad ways in which those seeking to write, publish, or support critical literary production negotiated, circumvented, and actively confronted the threat posed by surveillance and control.
Our sources include original interviews with individuals who have direct experience of the GDR literary sphere, archival documents, and published and unpublished literary works. The focus is on seven figures who operated in different ways as authors, editors, and organisers of literary subcultures: the poet Uwe Kolbe (b. 1957), the singer-songwriter Ekkehard Maaß (b. 1951), the prose writer Christa Moog (b. 1952), the experimental artist and writer Gabriele Stötzer (b. 1953), the prose writer Bernd Wagner (b. 1948), and the singer-songwriter and poet Bettina Wegner (b. 1947) and her then-husband Klaus Schlesinger (1937–2001). These authors represent different personal and political approaches and different roles within the scene and contributions to it. As we explore the encounters of these individuals with the Stasi, we will meet a range of other critical intellectuals, informants, and Stasi officers who constituted the networks in and through which knowledge about the secret police was shared and circulated. Knowledge of the Stasi thereby makes a significant empirical contribution to our understanding of state intervention in literary production in the GDR.
Through our analysis, we seek to develop a better understanding of the relationship between surveillance, secrecy, and revelation in authoritarian societies more broadly. We engage and bring into dialogue theoretical frameworks drawn from anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and cultural studies to explore that relationship and develop a model that can be applied to other “low trust”
1Hawley, Trust, 18. societies. We show how those engaged in the literary sphere built (unreliable) knowledge about the secret police which permitted the development and maintenance of the relationships of trust that were necessary to foster individual and collective agency. Knowledge and trust in the GDR were intimately connected, fragile, and imperfect—but also essential for the formation of networks and bonded communities. For our case studies this means the networks formed in and between the multiple literary spheres in the GDR; however, as literary authors in
Leseland DDR,
2This was the title of a 2022 exhibition produced by the Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Germany. See: <https://www.bundesstiftung-aufarbeitung.de/de/vermitteln/ausstellungen/leseland-ddr> (accessed May 28, 2025). these authors also connected beyond those networks with different readerships. In the final chapter of this book, we explore literary production itself as a form of knowledge and as a medium that could reveal the secrets of the state.