Writing as Resistance

Similarly, in her interview with Windsor, Christa Moog recounts readings and concerts in the cultural underground scenes of Magdeburg where punk gigs took place in churches. Moog was in awe of the punk bands’ “mutige Texte … Macht kaputt was euch kaputt macht“ (courageous texts … break what breaks you): “Und dann liefen die alle mit solchen nach oben gestylten bunten Haaren und schwarzen Klamotten und Ringen überall in den Ohren und Nasen und es war so ’ne Szenerie wo man dachte, ‘Mann, die lassen sich jetzt auch hier nichts mehr sagen’” (and then they were all walking around with their colourful styled-up hair and black clothes and rings all over their ears and noses and it was a scene where you thought, “Man, they’re not going to let anyone say anything to them here either”).3Interview with Christa Moog, August 25, 2021. She notes that she was certain that these meetings would be infiltrated by the Stasi (though this knowledge appears to have been intuitive in Gigerenzer’s sense): “Also, dieses Punktreffen und Dichtertreffen, das war sicher absolut durchsetzt von der Stasi. Da hatten die sicher ’ne richtige Delegation abgesandt, nich’ nur ein oder zwei, die da berichtet haben und alles aufgenommen haben und so” (so, this punk and poets’ meeting, that was certainly totally infiltrated by the Stasi. They must have sent a real delegation, not just one or two, who reported there and recorded everything and so on).4Interview with Christa Moog, August 25, 2021. The fact that those attending knew that there were informants in the audience makes these meetings an example of open confrontation—a confrontation that was underpinned by the lyrics of some of the songs, as Moog recalls: “Zurückschlagen, sich wehren, sich nich’ unterdrücken, sich nich’ Angst machen lassen, auch so, in die Offensive gehen, und, sich was trauen, und die können uns nicht unterkriegen, oder sowas” (fight back, defend yourselves, don’t suppress yourselves, don’t let them scare you, go on the offensive, and dare to do something, and they can’t get us down, or something like that).5Interview with Christa Moog, August 25, 2021. But it was the collective nature of the meeting, the coming together of people around a common sense of defiance that allowed Moog to feel less afraid and a stronger sense of security:

Nonetheless, resistance was not always collective. Individual texts could also form a kind of “looking back.” In chapter 4, we will explore in more detail how different writers represented the Stasi in literary form along a spectrum of concealment and revelation. Here we will look at a particular kind of writing as resistance: life writing or testimony. There is an extensive body of work on testimony—understood as an account of personal experience produced by an individual with that lived experience—performed through different cultural media.8For an overview see Jones and Woods, Palgrave Handbook of Testimony and Culture. Sara Jones and Roger Woods note that testimony—in whatever form—is always produced in a contested context, in which the experiences of the testifier are either unknown or not believed.9Jones and Woods, “Introduction.” As Günter Thomas puts it, the “witness enters into a hotly contested and unstable reality” (italics in original). Thomas, “Witness as a Cultural Form of Communication,” 93. As Jones puts it elsewhere, the “witness gives an account of something he or she has directly experienced for the benefit of an audience that has not.”10Jones, “Testimony through Culture,” 260. Testimony then is about passing on knowledge as a form of resistance against ignorance or forgetting of suffering—suffering that one has undergone oneself and suffering experienced by others like you. The concept of testimonio, emerging in the Latin American context and described most prominently by John Beverley, emphasises the political potential of personal accounts. Beverley defines testimonio as having the function of communicating “repression, poverty, subalternity, imprisonment, struggle for survival,” as representative of the experiences of a social class or group.11Beverley, Testimonio, 32.

Testimony is thus about the communication of knowledge in a context in which the testifier has reason to fear they will not be believed. Indeed, the epistemic value of testimony is widely disputed. In analytic philosophy, as we have seen in chapter 2, testimony is seen as knowledge at “second hand,” its reliability dependent on the trust and authority placed in the testifier and the reasonableness of that trust.12See, for example, Scholz, “Das Zeugnis anderer,” 34–35; Krämer and Weigel, “Introduction,” xv; McMyler, Testimony, Trust, and Authority; Lackey and Sosa, The Epistemology of Testimony. However, when it comes to testimony to traumatic experience, different considerations apply in what Sibylle Schmidt describes as the ethical-political approach.13Schmidt, “Wissensquelle oder ethisch-politische Figur?,” 47. Here, the accounts of those who have suffered violence come to acquire “existential or embodied truth”; that is, the knowledge seen to be contained in the testimony is linked inextricably to the body of the witness and its co-presence with that suffering.14Krämer and Weigel, “Introduction,” xii. Italics in original. Nonetheless, as Jones shows, embodied truth is only recognised if the witness is considered to have the necessary authority and respect to speak about this topic: perpetrators have also been physically present at moments of extreme suffering and, yet, we are generally reluctant to trust their testimonies, subjecting their accounts to greater scrutiny than that provided by victims.15See Jones, “Testimony through Culture,” and Schmidt, “Perpetrators’ Knowledge.” Moreover, it is not only perpetrators who find themselves not believed; women and other marginalised groups also struggle to find an “adequate witness” in Gilmore’s terms, who will hear, read, and trust their accounts on their own terms.16Gilmore, Tainted Witness, 4; Michael, “Gendered Testimonies.” Women who have been incarcerated are likely to experience a double marginalisation.17Colvin, “Dancing through the Next Minefield,” 590.

As we saw in chapter 1, Stötzer wrote an account of her imprisonment as a way of passing on knowledge to others, especially her friends. The account in question was entitled “Dabei sein und nicht Schweigen” (Being Present and Not Silent), a 30-page, typewritten account based on her experiences—and the experiences of others—in Stasi remand prison and in the women’s prison facility in Hoheneck. “Dabei sein” is one of Stötzer’s earliest written pieces, produced between 1978 and 1979.18Horakova, “Learning from the Underground,” 138. According to Anna Horakova, the “text is an exercise in objectivity”—at least, it is stylised as such—“and an attempt to convey a sphere that the majority of East Germans did not experience.”19Horakova, “Learning from the Underground,” 139. Although this was not printed in an underground periodical, copies of it circulated independently.20Extract from a report by IMB “David Menzer” undated; interview with Gabriele Stötzer, June 14, 2021. In this sense, Stötzer’s text meets Jones’s definition of testimony as an account of a lived experience by an individual who was present at an event for the benefit of others who were not. It is mostly written with an external focalisation, recounting the experiences of nameless actors, employing a third-person heterodiegetic narrator, and making extensive use of the passive voice and impersonal pronoun “man.” These features mean it lends itself to being read as the account of a group of sufferers, rather than that of a single individual, and as a form of resistance through revelation.

Questions of secrecy, knowledge, and societal (dis)trust are deeply embedded in Stötzer’s text. This is seen in the title, which underscores the directness of knowledge acquired by being “dabei” (there at the time) as well as an imperative to speak out. It is also addressed in the opening of the text, which is framed in terms of self- and socially imposed silence, secrecy, and taboo: “Es ist eigenartig, daß den Gefangenen in der DDR bei Entlassung aus der Haft … nicht ans Herz gelegt wird, von ihren Erlebnissen hinter den Gefängnismauern keinem etwas zu erzählen” (it is strange that prisoners in the GDR are not advised not to tell anyone about their experiences behind prison walls when they are released from prison).21Stötzer, “Dabei sein und nicht Schweigen,” 1. Such a demand was not necessary, Stötzer continues, because most former inmates wanted to suppress and found it difficult to articulate their experiences and, most importantly, because:

The former prisoners thus suffer epistemic injustice,23Fricker, Epistemic Injustice. as they are not granted the possibility of sharing their experiences and an adequate witness to receive them, all whilst the Stasi has extensively documented every detail of their lives through its own hostile perspective. Horakova suggests that the opening of Stötzer’s text “sets out to counter two oppressive forces that have compounded the secrecy surrounding the GDR’s penitentiaries,” that is, “the complacency of the public” and the “censorship.”24Horakova, “Learning from the Underground,” 138. “Disregarding both mechanisms,” Horakova continues, “Stötzer’s text testifies to the dehumanizing conditions of imprisonment.”25Horakova, “Learning from the Underground,” 138. By writing and sharing this text, Stötzer not only reveals aspects of her experiences but also emphasises the need for “öffentliche[s] diskutieren und anzwei­feln” (public discussion and questioning) about the mechanisms of state security and justice that were mostly conducted “hinter verschlossenen Türen” (behind closed doors):

“Dabei sein und nicht Schweigen”—sometimes referred to in the files as her “Haftbericht” or “Knastbericht” (prison report)—is written as a detailed, dense report covering diverse aspects of the physical, material and psychological conditions in the prison. According to Horakova, the text is “[r]eplete with facts,” and Stötzer’s personal experiences are “buttresse[d] … with reports, statistics and official documents.”29Horakova, “Learning from the Underground,” 139. These narrative and stylistic features—along with the external focalisation, passive voice, and impersonal pronouns—are part of the text’s revelation and concealment: the deeply personal experience of imprisonment is extrapolated to an abstract, documentary level, concealing individual identities, including the author’s. At the same time, the text’s documentary character implies that its revelation is full and authoritative and therefore should be believed, that is, function as a medium of knowledge. This type of revelatory document stands in contrast to other written forms mentioned within it: Stötzer characterises the relationship between the accused and the interrogator, for example, as “eine fast kreative Gemeinschaft” (an almost creative community) as they struggle over the formulation of sentences in the interrogation records.30Stötzer, “Dabei sein und nicht Schweigen,” 5. This hints at the “fictions” ­contained within the Stasi files themselves and Stötzer’s (or the unnamed “accused’s”) own agency in attempting, under extremely challenging conditions, to shape the record that the Stasi holds on her:

Copies of “Dabei sein” made it into the Stasi files via “David Menzer” (Anderson), whose reports also reflect on the nature and purpose of the text. According to “David Menzer,” Stötzer claimed that she wrote the report for herself as a kind of “Gedächtnisprotokoll” (memory protocol) but also gave it to other people “um mit ihnen ins Gespräch zu kommen und sie mit Dingen bekannt zu machen, die sie nicht kennen”35Information from “David Menzer” about a report by Gabriele Kachold, “dabeisein und nicht schweigen,” in OV Toxin, dated April 14, 1981. (to get into dialogue with them and introduce them to things they don’t know)—emphasising further that Stötzer saw this text as a medium of knowledge. Indeed, “David Menzer” characterised the work as an “extra emotionslosen Informations- und Verhaltensbericht … zur Verbreitung und zur Bekanntmachung mit dem Knast” (extra unemotional information and behaviour report … for dissemination and to make known the prison)36Extract from a report by IMB “David Menzer” undated. and later suggested that it was the beginning of Stötzer’s ambition to turn her direct experiences into “dokumentartige Literatur” (documentary-like literature).37Report by IMB “David Menzer” about the “Galerie im Flur,” Erfurt, dated May 6, 1981, 157. According to “David Menzer,” several copies of the text existed and it was read by “sehr viele Erfurter und Berliner” (many people from Erfurt and Berlin) and had also been passed on to Christa Wolf.38Report by IMB “David Menzer” about the “Galerie im Flur,” dated May 6, 1981, 158; information from “David Menzer” about a report by Gabriele Kachold, “dabeisein und nicht schweigen,” 106.

In Stötzer’s recollection, Anderson’s reception of the text was steeped in misogyny and part of his wider attempt to isolate and discredit her as a producer of knowledge whose testimony might be reasonably believed. In the interview with Windsor, Stötzer notes that lots of people thought she was “psychopathisch” (psychopathic), something she appears to attribute to Anderson’s efforts to undermine her. She recalls reading “bei Sascha” (in Sascha’s work)—presumably in the Stasi files—his response to her reading from the “Knastsache” (prison thing) in the underground scene: “‘Die ist ja total verrückt.’ Ja? Und: ‘Die hat sowieso schon lesb-, die ist sowieso lesbisch oder hat sowieso … ist bisexuell.’ Oder: ‘Ist Psychopath’” (“She’s totally crazy.” Yes? And: “She’s a lesb- anyway, she’s a lesbian anyway or … is bisexual anyway.” Or: “Is a psychopath”).39Interview with Gabriele Stötzer, June 14, 2021. We might note the presentation of women’s accounts as “irrational,” is a long-standing method of discrediting them as witnesses to their own experience.40Gilmore, Tainted Witness, 16.

In a letter to Joachim Walther in 2002, Stötzer claimed: “Zu meinem dokumentarischen Knasttext sagte [Christa Wolf], ich solle es nicht weiterreichen, es würde mich gefährden” ([Christa Wolf] told me not to pass on my documentary prison text, that it would endanger me).41Letter from Gabriele Stötzer to Joachim Walther, January 9, 2002. Stötzer reiterated this in her interview with Windsor, noting that Wolf advised her “tu die ins Schubfach und zeig die niemandem” (put it in the drawer and show it to no-one).42Interview with Gabriele Stötzer, June 14, 2021. See also Horakova, “Learning from the Underground,” 136. Wolf herself recalls this incident in her autobiographical text Ein Tag im Jahr (2003), noting that she spoke to a friend about “[das] Mädchen … das wegen einer Unterschrift gegen die Biermann-Ausbürgerung auf Hoheneck eingesperrt war” (the girl … who was imprisoned in Hoheneck because of a signature against the Biermann expulsion).43Wolf, Ein Tag im Jahr, 244. We get a sense of Wolf’s guilt as she describes her decision to maintain contact with the “girl”: “An ihr wischen sie sich die Füße ab, während ich schreibe, verlegt werde, auf einem Empfang herumstehe” (they wipe their feet on her while I’m writing, being published, standing around at a reception).44Wolf, Ein Tag im Jahr, 246. Wolf’s strong advice to Stötzer not to attempt to publish the text does not mean that the younger author did not communicate knowledge about imprisonment to the older one; in fact, it is clear from Wolf’s account that she was deeply affected by Stötzer’s text, but wanted to protect the author from the potential repercussions of disseminating that knowledge more widely.

Wolf’s fictionalisation of this encounter in Was Bleibt (1990) is further testament to the impact that Stötzer had on her, as she appears in Wolf’s novella as the “Girl” who shows the older narrator-protagonist her manuscript.45Horakova, “Learning from the Underground,” 132. Horakova argues that “Wolf’s substantial engagement with Stötzer and her prison writings in Was Bleibt must not be overlooked. The established author’s strategy of placing the younger writer and her manuscript intertextually in Was Bleibt counteracts her marginalisation not only before, but also after 1989.”46Horakova, “Learning from the Underground,” 138. Whereas the narrator-protagonist “struggles to divulge the implications her surveillance has for her socialist ideals … the Girl emerges as someone who cannot be held back from acting.”47Horakova, “Learning from the Underground,” 140–41. Not only does the Girl “disregard[] the protagonist’s recommendation not to publish her manuscript” but her prison writing gives the narrator-protagonist a glimpse of “a coveted, new language that would help overcome the paralysis imposed by the conflict she experiences between the Stasi surveillance and her self-censorship.”48Horakova, “Learning from the Underground,” 141. Horakova draws here on Samson, “Die ‘neue Sprache’ bei Christa Wolf.” The protagonist even “positions her own inadequate critique of the Girl’s text after she skims through its first few pages”49Horakova, “Learning from the Underground,” 142. when she notes, “Es war mir nicht gegeben, einen guten Text für schlecht zu erklären oder die Autorin eines guten Textes nicht zu ermutigen. Ich sagte, was sie da geschrieben habe, sei gut. Es stimme. Jeder Satz sei wahr. Sie solle es niemandem zeigen. Diese paar Seiten könnten sie wieder ins Gefängnis bringen” (It wasn’t for me to call a good text bad or not to encourage the author of a good text. I said that what she had written was good. It was no lie. Every sentence rang true. She shouldn’t show it to anybody. These few pages could land her in prison again.)50Wolf, Was Bleibt, 76, cited in Horakova, “Learning from the Underground,” 142. Translation by Schwarzbauer and Takvorian. In Horakova’s reading, the “linguistic renewal” needed in the East German literary sphere is “textually indexed as already having taken place in the writing of authors such as Stötzer” and others of the “fourth generation” who “possess a more effective language for critiquing socialism and are not afraid to use it, as Wolf admits.”51Horakova, “Learning from the Underground,” 143. Although Horakova suggests that Wolf had indeed gained knowledge from Stötzer’s writings and “carv[ed] out space in her own writing for Stötzer’s marginalized voice,” the fact remains that Was Bleibt was not published and read for over a decade after Stötzer had sought out Wolf’s support, meaning that her acknowledgement and endorsement of Stötzer’s authority as a witness and a writer remained concealed.52Horakova, “Learning from the Underground,” 138. Horakova notes that although Wolf provided Stötzer with material support, “this generosity did not always entail backing the young author and her oeuvre” (Horakova, “Learning from the Underground,” 137), something Stötzer also emphasised in her interview with Windsor. Interview with Gabriele Stötzer, June 14, 2021. Wolf might in this sense be understood as a semi-adequate witness to Stötzer’s testimony.