Conclusion
This chapter has demonstrated that trust and knowledge were intimately intertwined in the GDR literary sphere, and both generated and sustained through networks. The importance of trust is underscored by the fact that the Stasi itself sought to perform trust, for example during attempted recruitments or instructing their informants to build friendships, in order to acquire knowledge about its citizens, while also aiming actively to undermine trust through methods of Zersetzung. Nonetheless, the chapter has also demonstrated that writers and citizens were able to exercise and mobilise trust as means of withholding or redirecting knowledge horizontally, rather than passing it vertically to the Stasi. Precisely because it involved a considerable degree of risk, the decision to trust (or not) was a crucial form of agency, informed by intuition and habitual practices, while assumptions about another person’s trustworthiness rested on a combination of interpersonal, experiential, evidential, and reputational knowledge.
Although our authors might have been more aware of the power of distrust in GDR society, our analysis of their interviews, files, and writings illustrate that trust played an integral role in their daily and literary lives and was sometimes discussed and negotiated openly, particularly when it came to navigating state surveillance and repression. The communities of trust (and distrust) that formed in and beyond the literary sphere were also epistemic communities that provided frameworks in which knowledge could be communicated and absorbed. By sharing their stories and by engaging with each other’s knowledge about the Stasi, critical literary figures not only challenged the state’s “regimes of trust and distrust” but also its attempts to maintain a monopoly on knowledge production and circulation.