3: Looking Back at the Stasi

Sara Jones

Negotiating the “public secret” of the Stasi relied on varied forms of political agency and gave rise to many kinds of political identities. This chapter will examine how critical writers used knowledge about the Stasi to counter the threat that the secret police posed to individuals. We will explore how the psychological impact of knowing one was being watched triggered various actions to resist state power. As we have seen throughout this book, writers and other artists who openly criticised the regime developed a heightened sensitivity to surveillance, which at times resulted in tensions between deliberate action and irrational fear, impairing their ability to resist repressive authorities. “Looking back” at the Stasi—that is, attempting to counteract the East German secret police’s surveillance measures—was not an easy thing to do. Nonetheless, critical intellectuals did develop strategies to respond to surveillance. This ranged from poking fun at the Stasi in humorous representations, to open confrontation, legal intervention, and covert action to protect vulnerable individuals. Following Barth’s premise that knowledge is “what a person employs to interpret and act on the world,”1Barth, “An Anthropology of Knowledge,” 1. the primary focus of this chapter is therefore not on how knowledge was gained but rather on how knowledge was deployed in the service of resistance.

1 Barth, “An Anthropology of Knowledge,” 1. »

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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

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3: Looking Back at the Stasi

Knowledge of the Stasi in the East German Literary Sphere

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