Countersurveillance: (Semi-)Open Confrontations to Open Observations
Asserting resistance and agency could also mean flipping the mirror and “looking back” at the Stasi. By watching the Stasi—confronting the secret police with its own means—GDR writers demonstrated that breaking out of the panopticon—or at least reversing panoptic mechanisms—was possible in practice. Foucault provides the theoretical foundations for this reversion:
The Panopticon may even provide an apparatus for supervising its own mechanisms. In this central tower, the director may spy on all the employees that he has under his orders: nurses, doctors, foremen, teachers, warders; he will be able to judge them continuously, alter their behavior, impose upon them the methods he thinks best; and it will even be possible to observe the director himself.
1Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 204.In Foucault’s revision of Bentham’s model, the imbalance of this regime of watching is corrected to a certain extent, as the seer can also be seen. Foucauldian panopticism entails a decentralisation of authority, whereby the inspector is also subject to surveillance, paving the way for what Gilles Deleuze has called “control society” describing the complete decentralisation of surveilling instances in an increasingly technologically controlled world.
2Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 3–7. The move “from the act of directly watching to the probability of being watched”
3Elmer, “Panopticon – Discipline – Control,” 23. in Foucault’s account results in a renegotiation of power. The decentralisation of the act of watching is paired with an internalisation of the gaze, such that those being watched become auto-surveillants. For Foucault, then, the panopticon represents “the diagram of a mechanism of power”
4Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 205. and thus a “laboratory of power.”
5Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 204. Foucault’s framework decentralises power and thereby helps us understand how acts of looking back
could challenge the Stasi’s authority.
As we have seen throughout this book, prominent authors who were critical of the state and party gained knowledge about the secret police through direct confrontation in the contexts of “open” observation and attempted recruitment as informants. They shared that knowledge within their networks as a method of “en/countering surveillance.” “Countersurveillance” is a key term in the interdisciplinary field of surveillance studies and implies anti-surveillance measures aimed at “curbing new forms of surveillance,”
6Lyon, The Electronic Eye, 175. that is, surveillance from below or reversed surveillance.
7See, for example, Mann, “Sousveillance: Inverse Surveillance in Multimedia Imaging.” Gary Marx contends that countersurveillance may also mean a “turning of the tables” where surveillance technologies subvert the would-be controllers and benefit those being controlled.
8Marx, “A Tack in the Shoe,” 384. What all these approaches to defining countersurveillance have in common is that they highlight the neutralisation and resistance of surveillance as the main goals. In the pre-digital society of the GDR, countersurveillance was at work as a method of political resistance. These acts of “countersurveillance” were attempts at self-protection and protest in an effort to sustain a minimum of privacy, freedom, and autonomy.
Countersurveillance occurred in various forms. Individuals who fell under the gaze of the Stasi did not always seek direct confrontation of the kind described in Schlesinger’s case but often employed more subtle strategies of resistance. Creating counter-legends or inventing cover stories were also methods of semi-open confrontations to gain more knowledge about the Stasi. A notable example of this tactic can be found in a report by the IM “David Menzer” (Sascha Anderson), recounting a scenario relating to a Berlin-based punk band with close connections to the Prenzlauer Berg literary scene.
9Report by IM “David Menzer” on the Berlin punk group “Rosa Extra,” dated November 11, 1981. The band name is visible in the document heading but the names of the band members have been redacted throughout the document by the Stasi Records Archive. According to the transcript of “Menzer’s” spoken report, a former member of the band had been summoned to a meeting where she was confronted with two men from the MfS, who tried to convince her to acquire copies of the lyrics sung by the band. Later in the report, he also notes that the Stasi tried to reassure her that they did not expect her to spy on the whole band, but to use her to get close to the lyricist. The existence of this IM report demonstrates that this encounter did not remain concealed from others—that is, the former band member spoke about it with others. Indeed, “Menzer” also relays the chain of contacts through which knowledge of this incident was distributed: after the former band member told her partner (also a member of the band) about her encounter, he then told the lyricist. Through their conversations, the band members recognised the Stasi’s approach as an attempt to test the former band member’s suitability as possible informant.
Most interesting for our present purposes is the group’s own adoption of a kind of “Legende” (legend or cover story) in response. In the story they elaborated—and which Anderson relayed back to his MfS officers—the band members altered the chain of information to claim that the former band member had not told her partner about the Stasi assignment but had instead told the lyricist’s wife, framed as a conversation between women. They also planned for the lyricist’s wife to accompany the former band member to the designated meeting point. Anderson surmises that the group was keen to see “was das für Typen sind, die dort die Texte in Empfang nehmen, mit welcher Konsequenz ist mir nicht klar” (what kind of guys they are who come to collect the texts, with what consequence I’m not sure).
10Report by IM “David Menzer” on the Berlin punk group “Rosa Extra,” dated November 11, 1981, 93. Although the band members’ intentions and the ultimate outcomes remain unclear to us, too, a number of aspects stand out when it comes to thinking about knowledge and confrontations with the Stasi. By developing their own cover story, the group were in some ways imitating and appropriating the Stasi’s own covert methods in order to find out more for themselves. Similarly, although it is not clear how openly she would appear at the meeting, the incorporation of the lyricist’s wife into the planned handover suggests the group’s intention to send a signal back to the Stasi that their contact with the former band member had not remained a secret. As such, they employed different shades and combinations of revelation and concealment as a way of exercising agency. Moreover, their subtle change of narrative was strategically crafted to enable the lyricist’s wife to attend the second meeting, an act of deliberate misinformation and semi-open confrontation that undermined the surveillance effort and disempowered the Stasi in a subtle way. At the end of the report, “David Menzer” comments on a general sense of “Unsicherheit … unter den jungen Berliner Lyrikern der DDR, durch Dinge die im Äußern (sic) wie Bespitzelung aussehen” (uncertainty … amongst the young Berlin poets of the GDR through things that have the outward appearance of spying).
11Report by IM “David Menzer” on the Berlin punk group “Rosa Extra,” dated November 11, 1981, 94. Although the information did make its way back to the MfS via “Menzer,” the band’s actions nonetheless illustrate an attempt to counteract that generalised uncertainty and destabilise the process of intelligence-gathering.
Countersurveillance here is enacted through dialogue in a network, something that we also see in the accounts of other literary intellectuals. In her interview with Windsor, for example, Christa Moog recalls how Stasi collaborators lay in wait for her during the professional training (“Facharbeiterbrief”) that she was required to complete after finishing high school and also later when she was a university student in Halle. She describes how they kept calling her in for questioning (“Vorladungen”) at the university. Feeling increasingly vulnerable and anxious, she gathered her courage and confided in the university chaplain about being followed and harassed by the Stasi:
Ich hab’ ihm das alles erzählt, und ich hab’ ihm auch gesagt, ich kann das nicht mehr aushalten. Und ich hab’ Angst davor, aus’m Haus zu gehen. Und, dass irgendwie—Ich kann irgendwie nicht mehr. Und was kann ich machen? Und dann hat er eine Verbindung aufgenommen irgendwie, und es hörte auf. Es hörte auf mit dieser Beschattung, und dass dann immer jemand—Auch mit diesen Vorladungen. Ja, hörte auf.
12Interview with Christa Moog, August 25, 2021.[I told him all this and I also told him I couldn’t take it anymore. And I’m afraid to leave the house. And that somehow—somehow I can’t take it anymore. And what can I do? And then he somehow made a connection and it stopped. It stopped with the tailing, and that someone was always—Also with the summonses. Yes, it stopped.]
Moog describes a situation where the combination of obvious shadowing and “Vorladungen” (summonings) required a form of semi-open confrontation to open observation. Moog took action in opening up to the chaplain. She assumed the chaplain must have activated contacts to stop the Stasi pursuing her; he must have mobilised his network to curtail this open observation of Moog—at least, for the time being: “Also, der hatte irgendwie doch Kontakte. Es gab sowas, dass Pfarrer doch zu wichtigen Stellen ja, da irgendwie Verbindungen hatten” (well, he did have contacts somehow. There was such a thing that pastors had connections to important places, yes, somehow“).
13Interview with Christa Moog, August 25, 2021. We might note the crucial role that the ability to trust played in Moog’s ability to confront the Stasi in this way: she needed to trust the pastor with the knowledge she had gained through her encounters with the secret police, to trust that he would know what to do and that he would act in her best interests. In this case, her trust was based on a relationship of religious or pastoral care. Moog’s example shows that knowledge of the Stasi, including intuitive knowledge, was not only a tool for deciding whom to trust or mistrust—as we have seen in chapter 2—it could also underpin efforts to counteract the intrusive tactics of the secret police.
Schlesinger and Wegner were also subject to open surveillance. For example, Wegner recalls cars pulling up outside their house and then being followed in a manner that was so obvious they were clearly meant to notice it.
14Interview with Bettina Wegner, August 23, 2021. As we have seen, the couple’s response to their encounters with and knowledge of surveillance was to assert different kinds of agency, from the legal action in response to the house search (described above) to open acknowledgement of the Stasi’s presence at events and performances. In one such case, Wegner recalls having two glasses of sparkling wine sent to the table where the Stasi officers were sitting, metaphorically speaking out loud the public secret that the Stasi were watching and letting them know that she had identified them. The response of the two officers was to leave the venue.
15Interview with Bettina Wegner, August 23, 2021.Ekkehard Maaß recalls similar encounters with the Stasi in the interview with Windsor. He notes that he used to confront Stasi collaborators who were observing the readings in the underground scene of the Prenzlauer Berg:
Und ich stand also immer an der Tür. Und sobald die Lesung begonnen hatte, schlich ich nach draußen … weil dort an dem Küchenfenster immer ein Stasi-Mann stand am Anfang, um zu gucken, was hier los ist. Und den hab’ ich dann immer laut angesprochen, ja, “Guten Abend, zu wem wollen Sie denn?” und dann … war der dann über die Höfe, die waren damals alle offen, nach hinten verschwunden.
16Interview with Ekkehard Maaß, July 30, 2021.[And so I always stood at the door. And as soon as the reading had started, I sneaked outside … because there was always a Stasi man standing at the kitchen window at the beginning to see what was going on. And I always spoke to him loudly, yes, “Good evening, who do you want to see?” and then … he disappeared to the back via the courtyards, which were all open at the time.]
This is a similar tactic to Wegner’s sending of sparkling wine to the Stasi officers at the youth club described above, or Stefan Heym’s sending of coffee to the car of the Stasi officers posted outside his home noted in the Introduction.
17Heym, Nachruf, 806. It is a kind of radical openness, revealing the presence of the Stasi, but also the individual’s knowledge about that presence. We see in the case of both Wegner and Maaß the effectiveness of this approach in diverting the immediate threat: in both cases, the Stasi officers leave the scene of surveillance.
We see in this way how knowledge can empower and enable agency—an agency that might be asserted through actively revealing that knowledge to different audiences. In a report by IM “Hermann Schneider” from August 4, 1977, Wegner’s confrontational behaviour during a party at the US embassy is described as follows:
Auch aus anderen Gesprächen konnte ich entnehmen, daß sich viele der Anwesenden sehr negativ über die DDR bzw. nicht über die DDR als Staat, sondern die DDR im Augenblick gegenüber den Vertretern der amerikanischen Botschaft äußerten … Ich stellte nach kurzer Zeit fest, daß Bettina Wegner ständig Leute, mit denen ich mich unterhielt, von diesen Künstlern, z.B. [redacted] u.ä. beiseite nahm und ihnen etwas anscheinend über mich sagte. Sie tat das recht unvorsichtig, sodaß ich das durch Beobachtungen feststellen konnte. Der Verdacht wurde dann mir gegenüber von der Glick bestätigt, mit der ebenfalls die Wegner gesprochen hatte und die Glick sagte mir, die Wegner hätte gesagt, daß ich ein nicht besonders ehrlicher Mensch sei … sagte sie mir, daß diese hinter meinem Rücken verbreitet, daß man sich bei mir etwas vorsehen müsse.
18Report by IM “Hermann Schneider,” dated August 4, 1977.[I could also gather from other conversations that many of those present were very negative about the GDR, or rather not about the GDR as a state, but about the GDR at the moment, in relation to the representatives of the American embassy … After a short time I realised that Bettina Wegner was constantly taking people I was talking to from these artists, e.g. [redacted] and the like, aside and apparently saying something to them about me. She did this quite carelessly, so that I was able to establish this through observation. The suspicion was then confirmed to me by Glick, with whom Wegner had also spoken, and Glick told me that Wegner had said that I was not a particularly honest person … she told me that she was spreading the word behind my back that people should be a little careful with me.]
What we see here is an interesting complex of looking and looking back and using (intuitive) knowledge to counter surveillance. The IM is observing Wegner and the other artists, drawing them into and recording conversations in which they reveal their critical attitudes towards the GDR. Wegner is in turn observing the IM talking to her colleagues and—using her suspicion (or intuitive knowledge) about the IM—deduces what is behind his actions. She uses those deductions to counter the surveillance by confronting it directly, that is, by revealing to her colleagues what she believes she knows.
Critical writers might also use their experiences with the Stasi to confront surveillance openly in the semi-public and public spheres to which they had access. Bernd Wagner wrote direct complaints or appeals to various authorities after the Stasi had attempted to recruit him and after his trips to West Berlin and abroad were not authorised, demanding meetings with those responsible. In 1983, Wagner wrote to Herman Kant as President of the Writer’s Union. In the letter, he is open about the Stasi’s approach, noting that an employee of the MfS visited him and stated that in order to obtain approval to visit West Berlin, he would need to agree to pass on information about conversations with colleagues and his circle of acquaintances, something he vehemently refused to do: “Mit meinem Schreiben an Sie, das ich als Eingabe zu betrachten bitte, erhoffe ich eine Aufklärung des Falles” (with my letter to you, which I ask you to consider as a formal complaint, I hope that the case will be clarified).
19Letter from Bernd Wagner to Hermann Kant, dated June 17, 1983, 61. In 1985, Wagner even wrote to Erich Mielke, the head of the MfS, to complain that his travel approval had been withdrawn without any clear indication of why. He demands that Mielke explore the reasons behind the decision and to correct it—if that cannot be done, he requests a meeting, “in der über diese und über evt. damit in Zusammenhang stehende Probleme gesprochen werden kann” (in which these and any related problems can be discussed). Interestingly, Wagner states that he is turning to Mielke in the assumption, “dass eine Regelung der mich betreffenden Angelegenheit nur innerhalb des Ministeriums für Staatssicherheit möglich ist” (that the matter concerning me can only be settled within the Ministry of State Security).
20Letter from Bernd Wagner to Erich Mielke, dated January 28, 1985, 159. In this sense, Wagner is directly confronting the organisation responsible for surveillance in the assumption that they are the body that have the power to correct decisions made on the basis of that surveillance (in this case, about permission to travel). At the same time, he is speaking (or rather writing) openly the public secret that writers are subject to surveillance and that the secret police have influence on cultural-political decision-making in the literary sphere.
These open confrontations were attempts to obtain public explanations for rejected visas and draw attention to the complicity of the Writers’ Union with MfS (notably Kant was registered as an informant until 1978). Wagner demanded a written statement from Kant, asking:
ob und wie weit er bereit ist, seine Mitglieder vor derartigen Übergriffen zu schützen, inwieweit er sich die Reisepraxis von dritter Seite bestimmen lassen will; ein Gespräch zwischen mir, einem leitenden Mitarbeiter des SV der DDR sowie einem Verantwortlichen des MfS über das dargelegte Ereignis.”
21Letter from Wagner to Kant, dated June 17, 1983.[whether and to what extent it is prepared to protect its members from such attacks, to what extent it wants to have its travel practices determined by a third party; a conversation between me, a senior member of the SV of the GDR and a responsible person in the MfS about the event described.]
In this way, these letters are also characterised by various shades of knowing and not-knowing—about who in the state apparatus, and beyond, was responsible for these matters—and an effort to bring clarity to (and make public) these opaque systems of control. The uncertainty about who was responsible and how decisions were made revealed in these letters is exemplary for what has been called the “vierte Zensor” (fourth censor).
22Loest, Der vierte Zensor. Coined by the East German writer Erich Loest in his book
Der vierte Zensor (
The Fourth Censor, 1984), the term refers to censorship by publishers, self-censorship, and party censorship as a fourfold censorship complex alongside state-institutionalised censorship. It is a form of unofficial, opaque control influencing cultural policy in untraceable ways.
The audiences for this confrontational knowledge-sharing might be even more public. We have seen examples throughout this book of critical writers sharing their literary representations of the Stasi to different audiences, something that we will explore in more detail below and in chapter 4. However, critical intellectuals also made open statements in the public domain that included reference to the secret police. For example, as we saw in chapter 2, Kolbe gave a speech at the Gethsemanekirche in February 1988, in solidarity with demonstrators who had been arrested at the Liebknecht-Luxemburg demonstration on January 17 that year, a date that has come to symbolise the clash between peaceful civic resistance and authoritarian Stasi control. In his declaration, Kolbe criticised the hypocrisy of the East German regime, which preached tolerance but failed to act on political changes emanating from the Soviet Union:
Wenn nicht jetzt der produktive Konflikt anstelle von Rufmord und Staatssicherheitskampagne tritt, hat diese sozialistische Gesellschaft den Rubikon überschritten. Sie wird ihre behaupteten und ihre vorhandenen Vorteile gegenüber anderen Systemen nicht beweisen oder nutzen können, wenn sie sich in einen Friedhof des selbstständigen Denkens verwandelt.
23Declaration read in the Gethsemane-Kirche Berlin on February 4, 1988, 9.[If productive conflict doesn’t take the place of slander and state security crusades right now, then this socialist society has crossed the Rubicon. It won’t be able to prove or make use of its postulated advantages over other systems if it turns itself into a burial ground of independent thought.]
In his interview with Windsor, Kolbe recalled that his speech led to his only official “Belehrung” (caution) directly at the hands of the Stasi; to that point, all other reprimands and admonitions had come from representatives of other state institutions.
24Interview with Uwe Kolbe, June 1, 2021.Kolbe’s entrusting of the speech typoscript to Professor Werner, the director of the Berlin state library, discussed in chapter 2, was a pre-emptive measure taken to make the declaration and the expected repercussions public, not least through Werner’s known contacts with West German journalists and diplomats. A month later, after he had returned to his temporary domicile in the West, Kolbe himself appeared on the West German television programme “Kennzeichen D.”
25Report on an interview with Uwe Kolbe on “Kennzeichen D” on March 9, 1988, dated March 11, 1988. In that interview, he spoke about the GDR state’s escalation surrounding the events of January 17 and commented that “Fürbittgottesdienste” (intercessory prayer services) were the “einzige Öffentlichkeit” (only public) one could turn to in the East: “Also es wäre für mich in dem Sinne ein Leichtes gewesen, natürlich, in einer hiesigen Zeitung meine Erklärung … abdrucken zu lassen. Aber das war nicht, was ich wollte, und gleichzeitig sah ich die Vorgänge so prinzipiell, daß ich keine Chance hatte, den Mund geschlossen zu halten dabei” (I mean, in that sense it would have of course been easy for me to have the declaration printed in a newspaper here [in the West]. But that wasn’t what I wanted, and at the same time, I had such a fundamental view of the course of events that keeping my mouth shut was not an option).
26Transcript (GDR State Committee for Radio) of ZDF interview with Uwe Kolbe, moderated by Dirk Sager, “Der harte Kurs der SED – DDR-Innenpolitik in der Sackgasse,” dated March 10, 1988, 154.Here we see Kolbe’s awareness of the important difference between confronting the Stasi within and outside the GDR’s borders (earlier in the interview he describes himself as someone with “zwei Beinen in zwei Deutschländern” [two legs in two Germanies]).
27Transcript of ZDF interview with Uwe Kolbe, dated March 10, 1988, 153. At the same time, he takes the opportunity to inform a wider West German audience about the technicalities and aims of the Stasi’s processes:
Ich bin direkt vom Ministerium für Staatssicherheit vorgeladen und belehrt worden über den Paragraphen 220, über den der öffentlichen Herabwürdigung. Und ich hörte, daß ich wie gesagt nicht der einzige war, dem es so erging … Und Zweck? In meinem Falle, kann ich nur unterstellen, geht es einfach darum, wie mir konkret mitgeteilt worden ist … daß es so nicht weitergeht in der DDR, daß man damit einen Paragraphen erfüllt, daß man einfach ein Rechtsbrecher ist, was ja absurd ist. So, und daß man das einfach nicht wiederholt.
28Transcript of ZDF interview with Uwe Kolbe, dated March 10, 1988, 154.[I was summoned directly by the Ministry for State Security and cautioned according to Paragraph 220, the law on public degradation. And I heard that, as I said, I wasn’t the only one who had experienced this … And the purpose? In my case, I can only assume, it’s simply about, as I was specifically told … that things can’t continue like this in the GDR, that doing so would constitute a violation of a law, that one is simply a lawbreaker, which is absurd. So, and that you just don’t do it again.]
According to the MfS, Kolbe’s decision to speak openly in this interview—an additional public confrontation across the inner-German border—was in active contravention of the assurance he had given Klaus Höpcke that he would not engage in future “hostile-negative activities,” which had been a condition of his being allowed to travel back to the Federal Republic.
29Report on an interview with Uwe Kolbe on “Kennzeichen D” on March 9, 1988, 185. As such, it can be seen as a further act of defiance and refusal to acquiesce to the state’s disciplinary and silencing tactics.