Overview of this Book

The “rules of thumb” and experiential knowledge discussed in chapter 1 were used to make decisions about who to trust and what knowledge could be entrusted to others. Building on this, chapter 2 demonstrates that trust played essential role in the construction of knowledge on many levels in the literary sphere, illustrating that the interplay between trust and distrust was complex and often symbiotic. This chapter draws on work from the history, sociology, and philosophy of trust to explore how “regimes of trust and distrust” were met with “communities of trust and distrust,”2Tikhomirov, “The Grammar of Trust and Distrust,” 319–22. within and through which knowledge was generated and circulated. While the Stasi notoriously sought to sow seeds of distrust in literary (and other) networks with methods of Zersetzung, the urge to gain knowledge about GDR citizens as a mechanism of control and power depended, perhaps paradoxically, on the performance and mobilisation of trust both between the officers and (potential) informants and between informants and targets. Conversely, the chapter demonstrates that, precisely because of the risks entailed, our writers’ decisions to trust or distrust others enabled them to acquire, share and/or strate­g­ically withhold knowledge in different situations and thus became a means of navigating uncertainty and exercising agency which challenged the regime’s attempt to monopolise knowledge and trust. The chapter explores how trustworthiness was cultivated and (mis-)deciphered on the basis of emotions and (unstable forms of) evidence and examines the role of (semi-)professional networks and reputation in establishing and expanding relationships of trust. The often fragile bonds of trust on which these various relationships rested were crucial for the sharing of knowledge which, in turn, informed strategies of resistance.

Chapter 3 turns to those strategies that were developed and employed by our chosen writers and their acquaintances to deal with the state surveil­lance they were subjected to. We draw on theories of surveillance and countersurveillance to illustrate how literary intellectuals were able to exercise political agency and “look back” at the Stasi, building on the different kinds of intuitive, experiential, and second-hand know­ledge discussed in chapter 1 and the communities of trust explored in chapter 2. Chapter 3 shows that while living in the “panopticon” of the MfS and enduring their methods of “Zersetzung” certainly engendered paranoia, anxiety, and mistrust, these were not only mechanisms of control but also galvanised those being observed to push back against the state’s disciplinary power in both subtle and confrontational ways. Throughout the chapter, we explore numerous examples of (semi-)open confrontation to open observation—including the development of counter-legends, the mobilisation of prominent contacts, legal measures, protest letters, and public declarations—as well as covert actions in the underground scene that sought to avoid and subvert the Stasi’s gaze. The chapter also illustrates how humour was used as a means of sharing knowledge and undermining the Stasi’s authority and how writing was employed as a strategy of resistance, including the circulation of personal testimony, which revealed aspects of the repressive state apparatus otherwise concealed from public knowledge and counteracted the epistemic injustice imposed on those who experienced that repression first-hand.

The final chapter turns to the specific role played by literary fiction as a “medium of knowledge.”3Barth, “An Anthropology of Knowledge,” 3. While works of fiction do not make a claim to extra-textual referentiality, we argue that they draw on and add to a repertoire of shared “standards of representation,”4Gibson, Fiction and the Weave of Life, 70–73. thereby performing “acts of creative imitation”5Felski, Uses of Literature, 85. and using a complex interweaving of revelation and concealment, which must be interpreted by what we term (more or less) adeq­uate readers. The chapter is structured around five themes and case studies of writing, which employ diverse literary genres and techniques to deal with the “public secret” of the Stasi, and which took different paths to publication. We situate these along a spectrum of total concealment to total revelation and illustrate how these positions shaped the extent and kinds of knowledge transported through these literary works. The chapter begins with an explor­ation of literature written “for the drawer,” taking Günter Kunert’s novel Die Zweite Frau (The Second Woman) as its key example, before moving to a discussion of satirical writing by an almost entirely unknown writer, Ralf-Günter Krolkiewicz, whose works only reached very limited audiences before they were seized by the Stasi. The chapter also examines critical fiction that circulated amongst underground counter-publics and was smuggled across the border between East and West Germany, focusing on Bernd Wagner’s literary prose, and demonstrates how the use of history and myth in Christa Wolf’s Kassandra enabled a form of revelation within the const­raints of the East German publishing landscape. In a final step, we consider the somewhat paradoxical position of Stefan Heym’s novel Collin which was highly revel­atory in its depiction of GDR state surveillance but could only directly reach audiences in the West.