Methodology

To this end, our interviews began with broad questions that enabled the participants to narrate their experiences in the GDR literary sphere, in general, and their encounters with the MfS, in particular. These general questions were followed by more specific questions tailored to the particular interviewee, framed in the light of readings of their literary texts and related archival materials, and building on aspects arising from their responses to earlier questions during the conversation. As the historian Penny Summerfield has ­written, “[o]ral history is dialogic”:

The schedule of questions underpinning our interviews revolved around the following: having been asked to reflect on what it was like to be a writer or artist in the GDR, interviewees were invited to recall what it was possible to know about the Stasi within the literary sphere, how that knowledge was acquired, and whether and how that knowledge was passed on. This entailed exploring the kinds of formal or informal literary networks they were part of, including (where relevant) the role their contacts in the West may have played in their acquisition and transmission of knowledge about the MfS. In doing this, our interviewees were encouraged to think and speak about the strategies they developed—whether individually or collectively—for dealing with the Stasi, as well as the kinds of rumours and gossip they heard and passed on about the Stasi and suspected informants, when, and in what contexts. Interviewees were also asked about their recollections of particular moments of contact with Stasi representatives or with colleagues and acquaintances who were suspected of collaborating with the Stasi and how those moments transformed their knowledge. In this context, questions about the circumstances or characteristics that aroused suspicion or what made certain people seem more or less trustworthy were addressed. Interestingly, the interviewees often found it easier to explain what made someone seem suspicious (whether that suspicion turned out to be justified or not) than to specify why they trusted some people over others.

Our reading of the interviews proceeds with an awareness of the vagaries of memory and retrospective accounts. Much work has been conducted and published on the ways in which individual mem­ories are shaped by wider social, cultural, and political frameworks. As Summerfield writes, “[s]cholars argue that memory interacts with subsequent experience, and with ideological and cultural representations of both the present and past, so that accounts of the past are never pure recall of life as it was.”5Summerfield, “Oral History as an Autobiographical Practice,” 5. Building on the work of historians Graham Dawson, Alistair Thompson, and others, Summerfield refers to the mediated character of personal recollections as the “cultural circuit.” According to this, “individual life stories are picked up, developed and portrayed in a generalised form in public media constitutive of popular culture, such as films, television, fiction, and newspaper articles” so that the “meaning of experiences of, for example, the Second World War [the focus of Summerfield’s own research] becomes crystallised in popular and general accounts … Individuals narrating their own accounts subsequently use elements of this generalised form in recalling their personal part in that war, and indeed find it difficult to speak outside it.”6Summerfield, “Oral History as an Autobiographical Practice,” 6. On the “cultural circuit,” see also Abrams, Oral History Theory, 59, 68–70; Saupe and Roche, “Testimonies in Historiography and Oral History,” 76. In her work on the media, testimony, and memories of the Stasi, Jones shows that scholars working from “diverse disciplinary and/or theoretical perspectives … agree that social conventions structure how (and indeed what) individuals remember and that a significant aspect of these conventions is the medium in which personal memories are presented. Moreover, the form that memory takes is influenced by previous mediations and, in particular, their narrative structures, which, in turn, draw from culturally accepted patterns of remembrance.”7Jones, The Media of Testimony, 33. See also Wesser, “Das Erinnern an die Staatssicherheit.”

Previous writings and interventions by the very figures we focus on in this book have contributed—undoubtedly quite consciously and deliberately—to the public framing of the GDR. But the influence of cultural and medial circuits also applies to our interviewees’ own narration of their memories of life in the GDR literary sphere, and more specifically their recollections of what it was possible to know about the Stasi, during our conversations. They are both producers and recipients of cultural narratives of the past (and present). In some cases, they made direct reference to works published by their colleagues before and after the end of the GDR. Kolbe, for example, referred to Gabriele Stötzer’s Die brö­cklende Festung (The Crumbling Fortress) and more generally to writings by Wolfgang Hilbig, as well as documentary publications such as Erich Loest’s Der Vierte Zensor (The Fourth Censor) and Reiner Kunze’s Deckname “Lyrik” (Codename “Poetry”). Perhaps most tellingly, Kolbe mentioned explicitly that he had been rereading Jürgen Fuchs’s novel Magdalena, which was published in 1998 and combines narrative fiction with documentary evidence from the Stasi files.8On Magdalena as “hybrid” genre, see Lewis, “Reading and Writing the Stasi File,” 383. See also Costabile-Heming, “Jürgen Fuchs.” Kolbe was clear that he considers this to be “ein sehr aufklärerisches Buch” (a very enlightening book), yet he also reflected openly on its emotional impact and how this, in turn, left its mark on his contributions to our interview (especially on comments he made about the Stasi’s treatment of prisoners and the ubiquity and insidiousness of the regime’s bureaucratic language): “Da kommt auch eine Menge Zorn heraus, und überträgt sich” (a whole lot of anger seeps out of it, and gets transferred).9Interview with Uwe Kolbe, June 1, 2021. Even where this kind of reflexiveness is not explicit in the interviews, our critical analysis of the transcripts takes into account the creation of these narratives as part of what Lynn Abrams terms a “three-way dialogue: the respondent with him or herself, between the interviewer and the respondent and the cultural discourses of the present and the past.”10Abrams, Oral History Theory, 59. At the same time, we acknowledge the interviewees’ own agency and potential for “critical subjectivity,” which is never “wholly constrained by dominant discourses.”11Abrams, Oral History Theory, 70.

Crucial in this respect is also their own consultation of files from the Stasi Records Archive. Like cultural depictions, the files themselves—as well as public discussions about them—present certain kinds of narrative structure, which influence how individuals make sense of their own past.12See Wesser, “Das Erinnern an die Staatssicherheit.” As Barbara Miller suggests, “individuals may begin to re-remember the past on the basis of the information which has been recorded in the files. This is not only the case for the area of interpersonal personal relationships but also for past behaviour.”13Miller, “Wiederaneignung der eigenen Biographie,” 372. In the context of our study, knowledge acquired in the process of reading their own files inevitably colours their recollections of what our interviewees knew before. Indeed, the interviewees often raised the topic of viewing their files or referred to things that they had read in them throughout our conversations without direct prompting. Bernd Wagner spoke openly, for example, of being summoned to speak with the head of the Aufbau publishing house after he (Wagner) had signed a protest letter against Biermann’s expatriation, but noted that his own memories of the encounter were vague: “ich ­selber habe kaum Erinnerungen an das Gespräch, ich kann mich auch fast nur auf die Akten da beziehen, ne?” (I myself can scarcely remember the conversation, I am almost completely reliant on the files for that, right?).14Interview with Bernd Wagner, October 20, 2020. In this particular case, Wagner was baffled to discover the publisher—Fritz-Georg Voigt, alias “IM Kant” whom he did not name explicitly in the interview—had informed the MfS that Wagner had been blackmailed into signing the protest, something which Wagner rejects as “völlig aberwitzig” (completely absurd).15Interview with Bernd Wagner, October 20, 2020. In his recent book of reflective notes, Wagner also suggests that reading the files led him to momentarily question his own recollections of this episode: “Ich versuchte mich vergeb­lich, an den Wortlaut unseres Gesprächs zu erinnern. War ich tatsächlich ein solcher Opportunist gewesen, dass ich mich als vom [Jurek] Becker erpresst dargestellt hatte? Das ergab doch überhaupt keinen Sinn … Von alledem findet nichts in meinen Notizen einen Niederschlag” (I tried in vain to recall the exact words of our conversation. Had I really been such an opportunist that I had portrayed myself as being blackmailed by [Jurek] Becker? That made no sense at all … There’s nothing about any of this in my notes): Wagner, Verlassene Werke, 44. To open further reflection on the impact of the files, a final point on our interview schedule was to invite interviewees to discuss their experiences and reactions having consulted their own files in the Stasi archive, how this affected their understandings of the Stasi and transformed the knowledge they possessed before, and how their ability to articulate what they know or knew about the Stasi may have changed over time, especially since the end of the GDR. We reflect on this further in the Conclusion.

According to Lewis, the Stasi files are: “especially good at capturing the surface minutiae of everyday life, often in excruciating, hyperrealistic detail. Reading the files, however, we soon discover that in this context, no amount of detail is redundant or superfluous, since any snippet of information can reveal itself later to be an important piece of intelligence.”19Lewis, “The Secret Lives and Files of Stasi Collaborators,” 28. Paying close attention to this fine-grained detail is an important facet of our approach to reading the files to understand not how “snippets of information” were used as incriminating intelligence, but to explore patterns of revelation, secrecy, and knowledge transmission about the Stasi itself within the literary scene. Of course, there is always the possibility that documents from the files—especially IM reports—contain “errors of detail,” but there is little evidence of entirely fictional reports;20Jones, Complicity, Censorship and Criticism, 25 (note 91). there can be little doubt that the meetings from which they emerge or the occurrences that they refer to did in fact take place, even if accounts and interpretations of those moments differ. Moreover, discrepancies between accounts contained in the Stasi files and written or oral accounts from our writers and/or their acquaintances are, in fact, pro­ductive for our analysis of the kinds of unstable knowledge that circulated in the literary sphere, as demonstrated in our discussion of Stasi reports on short stories by Christa Moog and Bernd Wagner in chapters 2 and 4.

Our research in the Stasi archive focused primarily on the observation reports contained in the extensive IM files of the notorious poet and informant Sascha Anderson, and on the Operative Personenkontrollen (OPK, operative personal surveillance) and Operative Vorgänge (OV, operative procedures) that were opened to monitor oppositional writers such as Uwe Kolbe (OV “Poet”), Ekkehard Maaß (OV “Keller”), Christa Moog (OV “Dichter”), Gabriele Kachold-Stötzer (OV “Kapitän” and OV “Toxin”), and Bettina Wegner and Klaus Schlesinger (OV “Schreiberling”). In the case of Bernd Wagner, the only one of our interviewees who was not the focus of an OPK or OV, we were given access to another category of personal file—an Allgemeine Personenablage (general personal dossier).21On the various categories of MfS files, see Walther, Sicherungsbereich Literatur. We also consulted files that contain documents relating to these writers and their literary works, including underground publications such as Mikado and, for wider context, (partial) files on Franz Fühmann, Stefan Heym, and Christa Wolf.

Although we draw on both “perpetrator” (or “collaborator”) and “victim” files from the Stasi Records Archive, our interest lies not so much in exploring such dichotomies of collaboration and persecution but in different types of knowledge transmission across and within these cate­gories. Through close, detailed readings of these various files, we seek evidence and accounts relating to different types or moments of contact with the MfS that came about in the process of recruitment and activity as informants; through attempted, but unsuccessful, recruitment as informants; in the course of the Stasi’s observation, whether open or covert, of writers deemed oppositional; and in cases when writers were arrested and/or brought in for pre-emptive questioning and interrogation (Zuführung). For each of these overlapping categories or perspectives, we are interested in what was revealed or concealed to the writers in question about the MfS (and how) and what tactics those writers developed for dealing with the knowledge they acquired about the Stasi and related institutions in such instances. We also read the files for indications of interactions and discussions amongst writers and their circles of friends and acquaintances when knowledge about the MfS or the topic of “state security” more broadly was exchanged and passed on. In doing this, we look not only for dramatic moments of revelation, Dekonspiration (public outing or exposure of informants, often voluntary), and confrontational accusations, but also read the files “against the grain”22Lewis, “Reading and Writing the Stasi File,” 394. for more subtle patterns of behaviour, traces of suspicion, and the circulation of rumours. Through these readings, we aimed to reconstruct communities and practices of knowledge transmission and, where possible, consider developments in knowledge over time.

In the preface to his collection of essays, History and Criticism, Dominick LaCapra argues that “all forms of historiography might benefit from modes of critical reading premised on the conviction that documents are texts that supplement or rework “reality” and not mere sources that divulge facts about ‘reality.’”23LaCapra, History and Criticism, 11. Our emphasis. Drawing on this in her discussion of reading the Stasi files, Lewis suggests that “all historical documents—even police reports—ought to be read not simply as sources for facts, but as texts that “supplement or rework ‘reality.’” As such police reports “can benefit, like literature, from ‘modes of critical reading.’”24Lewis, “Reading and Writing the Stasi File,” 383. Our emphasis. Lewis, Jones, and other scholars such as Annie Ring have developed approaches to reading the Stasi files as a “genre” of life story, which has often been incorporated into—and can be productively read in conjunction with—other (hybrid) forms of life writing about the GDR, especially literary biography and autobiography.25Lewis, “Reading and Writing the Stasi File”; Jones, “Conflicting Evidence”; Jones, “‘Ein reines Phantasieprodukt’”; Jones, “Wie man ‘das Gruseln’ lernt”; Ring, “Collaboration as Collapse”; Ring, After the Stasi. Such approaches often take their cue from writers’ own responses to reading their files: Schlesinger, for example, compared the experience to reading a novel, in which he was the main protagonist. Specifically, for Schlesinger, the file read like a work of European modernism, “in which the characters emerge without subjective consciousness … and the protagonists are constructed entirely by factors and persons external to themselves.”26Lewis, “Reading and Writing the Stasi File,” 385; Ring, After the Stasi, 141. Schlesinger, “Macht, Literatur, Sicherheit,” 30.

In the case of the Stasi’s victims, Lewis suggests that “the files can be read as a form of hostile, unauthorised biography” written by Stasi officers and/or informants about “dissident subjects and real or imagined enemies of the state.”27Lewis, “Reading and Writing the Stasi File,” 383. In its original context, the Stasi’s documentation of its surveillance in these files functioned as a written “technology of power” (in a Foucauldian sense) and, according to Lewis, “is witness to the state’s desire for total control as well as a participant in its means of achieving this.”28Lewis, “Reading and Writing the Stasi File,” 388. Ring, meanwhile, suggests that the Stasi’s “increasingly detailed archive … [was] akin in scale and ambition to the ‘totalizing assemblage’ that in Derrida’s description is put together in order to achieve complete knowledge of the objects in the archive” and notes that “[t]he Stasi files did not only hold a thorough record of existing behaviours; they also had a role in authoring the lives contained within them, and thus producing what Foucault termed a ‘reality equivalent to fiction.’”29Ring, After the Stasi, 141. According to Ring, “[the Stasi’s notorious Zersetzungsmaßnahmen”—which she translates in this context specifically as “measures for breaking down the subject”—“were crucial to this authoring project.”30Ring, After the Stasi, 141. Removed from the context in which they were originally written, however, these files can be reread not as they were “intended to be read”31Lewis, “Reading and Writing the Stasi File,” 394. but in ways which interrogate and potentially challenge the “authorial quality of the Stasi’s procedures.”32Ring, After the Stasi, 131. By flipping the script in our own study—by reading the files, in conjunction with other sources, for traces of (intuitive) knowledge, trust, and resistance—our approach illustrates that these hostile, unautho­rised biographies can ultimately be seen to afford the protagonists of these (hi)stories agency in a manner that was never intended by the authors of the files (without trivialising the impact of those hostile attempts at total control and complete knowledge on individuals’ lives).

In the first three chapters, we draw on essays and autobiographical accounts, applying the same critical awareness of context, perspective, and narrative technique discussed thus far in relation to the interviews and arch­ival documents. Our analysis of these writings asks similar questions about authors’ recollections of knowledge acquired and circulated following different moments of contact with the Stasi and interactions with colleagues, friends, and family, mindful of their entanglement in the “cultural circuit” of memories of the GDR, as well as the fact that such autobiographical texts are “present­ation[s] of the self that the creator imagines him or herself to be or would like to be perc­eived as being, or indeed both.”35Jones, Complicity, Censorship and Criticism, 28. In doing this, we also take into account the often hybrid nature of autobiographical writings, including their intertextual relationship with other forms of life-writing and ego-documents, as well as the direct or indirect integration of materials from the Stasi files themselves. The transformative experience of consulting their own files and the resulting tensions between archived documentation and personal memories (consolidated in written form) offer fruitful points of analysis when it comes to understanding different types of knowledge about the Stasi and changes in that knowledge over time.36See, for example, Jones, “Wie man ‘das Gruseln’ lernt” on Stefan Heym’s pre- and post-Wende accounts. Our approach demonstrates, moreover, that “[t]he narration of personal experience and the selection this involves promise to be particularly useful” not only in the “study of ambiguity and ambivalence in this experience,”37Jones, Complicity, Censorship and Criticism, 28. but also in the study of perceived and real agency when it came to these authors’ navig­ation of the “public secret” of the Stasi. As Ring points out with particular reference to the writer Wolfgang Hilbig, “it is in his most autobiographical works, works that deal with some of the worst aspects of Stasi victimization, that the flaws of the Stasi’s project begin to emerge.”38Ring, After the Stasi, 131.

While our focus in chapters 1 to 3 is primarily on non-fiction writings, we also refer, where relevant, to works of fiction with strong autobiographical traits. Our purpose here is not to read such works positivistically, but rather—building on uses of literature in the historiography of everyday life—to consider them to be “an expression of the author’s relationship to society, and a source that offers promise of ambiguity and multiplicity of meanings,” which can contribute further insights into the complexity of interactions with and knowledge relating to the Stasi.39Jones, Complicity, Censorship and Criticism, 29–30. In this sense, we also build on Lewis’s suggestion (which draws, in turn, on Felski) that both the files and much literature “present a type of ‘social phenomenology’ of life under communism.”40Lewis, “The Secret Lives and Files of Stasi Collaborators,” 30. In chapter 4, we turn specifically to literary fiction as a “medium of knowledge”41Barth, “An Anthropology of Knowledge,” 3. based on “standards of representation”42Gibson, Fiction and the Weave of Life, 70–73. in a range of literary depictions that can be placed at different points on a spectrum of revelation and concealment, both in terms of the literary techniques and devices they employ and the context of their publication and/or circulation. In doing this, we consider various paths that such texts took to reach different audiences, including canonical works and those written for the drawer, as well as underground or samizdat periodicals and others that were entirely suppressed and remain relatively unknown, some of which are now deposited in the Archiv unterdrückter Literatur in der DDR.43On the Archiv unterdrückter Literatur in der DDR see Buchholz, “The Archive of Oppressed Literature”; Geipel and Walther, Gesperrte Ablage.