4: Literature as Knowledge—Between Revelation and Concealment
As we have seen, writers, as the supposed purveyors of
Ersatzöffentlichkeit (replacement public sphere) in the GDR,
1Herminghouse, “Literature As ‘Ersatzöffentlichkeit’?” were viewed with deep suspicion by the state. Through their mechanisms of control, the Stasi attempted to uncover the “secrets” of the literary intellectuals whom they assumed to be harbouring oppositional intent, and at the same time ensure that these secrets did not enter public knowledge. The tactics—for example, the recruitment of literary IMs and “open” observation—also meant that in their efforts to find out the secrets of their subjects, the Stasi were required to reveal some of their own. We have shown in this book how writers acquired knowledge about the Stasi, how they circulated this knowledge within their networks, how that knowledge underpinned trust and mistrust, and how knowledge could also support agency and “countersurveillance.”
However, the role of writers as the purveyors of Ersatzöffentlichkeit did not (or at least not principally) relate to their interactions with one another; rather, it was the literature itself that was seen as providing a plurality of discourse in an otherwise tightly controlled public sphere. In this chapter, we consider literature—specifically literary fiction—as a means by which authors circulated knowledge, including knowledge about the Stasi. In this way, we argue that literature could (and can) function as a “medium of knowledge”;
2Barth, “An Anthropology of Knowledge,” 3. however, it is a medium that is quite distinct from the embodied and interactional forms studied so far in this book. Literary fiction occupies a particular position in terms of its relationship to the world external to the text and to knowledge of it; yet the writers interviewed for this book repeatedly pointed us towards their literary works as representations of their experiences and as complementary to their first-person accounts. This complex relationship between fiction and the world ‘as it is’ means that literary fiction can itself be understood as part of the “public secret”: an “unstable and uncapturable blending … of concealment and revelation.”
3Taussig, Defacement, 50. In this chapter, we explore this proposition through a series of case studies—including, but going beyond the authors that constitute the focus of this book. Each case study represents a different strategy or approach to concealment and revelation and a different relationship with the intended audience(s). In our analysis we explore the literary texts themselves for what they have to say about the Stasi, knowledge, secrecy and revelation. Where available, we will complement this analysis with readings from unpublished archival material and published reception that indicates if and how the text was read and by whom.