Conclusion
In his interview with Windsor, Uwe Kolbe describes the infiltration of the secret police into GDR society, as follows: “Stasi war immer so, mehr sowas im Alltag Anwesendes. Von dem man wusste, dass es da ist, nur dass man es nicht fassen kann” (Stasi was always like that, more like something present in everyday life. You knew it was there, you just couldn’t grasp it).
1Interview with Uwe Kolbe, June 1, 2021. This is a succinct representation of the Stasi as “public secret,” as a “known unknown,” whose presence GDR citizens were well aware of, but which could never be fully grasped. This chapter has set out to explore how critical intellectuals sought to uncover some of those “ungraspable” aspects of the secret police, that is, how they constructed and circulated knowledge about how the Stasi operated.
What we see is a range of intuitive, or heuristic, forms of knowledge—“rules of thumb” that helped these critical intellectuals make quick decisions about whom to trust or how to act in a given moment. Like Gigerenzer’s adaptive heuristics, these rules of thumb were developed in the social environment, often on the basis of personal or familial moments of contact with the Stasi and advice from others with direct experience of the secret police. Throughout the interviews, the artists we spoke to recall moments when knowledge about the Stasi was shared and how that knowledge was used to build strategies to combat the surveillance to which they were subjected, and resist attempts to recruit them as informants.
Unlike Gigerenzer’s adaptive heuristics, these rules of thumb were uncertain, partial, unreliable, and often simply wrong. As we have seen, several of those we spoke to noted that they had wrongly suspected friends and colleagues of working for the Stasi or overestimated the extent to which the scene was infiltrated. In this way, this kind of knowledge contributed to the paranoia and fear that marked the network of which these individuals were a part. However, we also see that this intuitive knowledge was essential for the scene to be able to operate at all. It helped these critical intellectuals gain some sense of certainty in an environment marked by uncertainty, some sense that they could know how the Stasi might respond in given situations, that they could identify Stasi officers even in plain clothing, and—especially—that they could work out who might be working as an informant. As we will explore in chapters 2 and 3, this partial knowledge was crucial for the creation of trust in a society marked by distrust, and to permit critical agency despite panoptic surveillance.