Knowledge without Echo: Literature for the Drawer
Our first point of reflection on the relationship between secrecy, knowledge, literature, and its readers is literature written not for publication, but “for the drawer.” Paradoxically, this literature often only comes to be known after the decision to conceal it is revised, that is, when it is published after all. In the case of the GDR, this revelation of hidden literature has most often come after 1989 and therefore in a radically changed political and social context, in which much of what it would have revealed to its readers is already widely known. We might view Was bleibt as exemplary of this practice: one point of contention in the debate that followed its publication was the statement in the text that it had been completed in 1979 and revised for publication in 1990. Wolf’s detractors argued that its publication in 1979 would have been a sensation, revealing the experiences of an author subject to intensive observation and terrorisation by the Stasi; its publication in 1990 stripped it of that revelatory power.
The
Literaturstreit (literature debate) highlights the importance of the political moment in the reception of literary works and the extent to which they will be read as a form of knowledge. The critical response to
Was bleibt was bound up with efforts to discredit all things GDR, including its most famous author; Wolf’s own biography, as one who stayed in the GDR and remained committed to socialism despite her doubts, also irritated several Western critics.
1Anz, Es Geht nicht um Christa Wolf. Günter Kunert’s recent novel
Die zweite Frau met with a quite different response.
2Kunert, Die zweite Frau. Further page references will be given in parenthesis in the text. The text was—Kunert claims—completed in 1974/1975, but remained hidden for 45 years, appearing in 2019 with Wallstein Verlag. The novel is a bitingly satirical depiction of life in the mid-late GDR, including shortages, widespread ennui, paranoia, and the presence of the Stasi. Particularly interesting in our context is the representation of how knowledge was—or rather was not—passed through personal networks.
The protagonist Barthold is searching for an appropriate fortieth birthday present for his wife Margarete Helene. Finding nothing on the shelves, he ends up in an “Intershop” where—in a moment of impatience—he quotes loudly from the French philosopher Montaigne’s Essays. Meanwhile, Margarete Helene is nurturing paranoid fantasies about her husband and a certain “Elfi”; a faded postcard, a bra found in the rubble of a garden shed, and finally a set of bones buried under that rubble are woven into a vision of her husband as murderer of “die zweite Frau” (the second woman/wife). When Stasi officer “Müller” appears at her door, she fears that is why he is there. However, her irritation at her husband’s evasive responses to her own questions about “Elfi” lead her to decide not to tell him about “Müller’s” visit. Barthold is therefore taken completely by surprise when “Müller” reappears. It emerges that the Stasi’s interest is, in fact, in Barthold’s contact with a certain foreigner: a man named “Mohnteine” (i.e., Montaigne). In the middle of the interrogation, the couple’s neighbour, Herr Forster, appears and begins to brag about the Western pornography that he has smuggled across the border, not realising the identity of their visitor. The couple resolve to warn Forster; however, following an alcohol-fuelled (probable) hallucination of Forster and Margarete Helene having sex, Barthold decides not to pass on that knowledge.
The passages in the novel in which the Stasi officer appears produce knowledge about life in a state marked by an (apparently) omnipresent secret police. The form that knowledge takes can be described as everyday—based on generalisations or truisms (including the presumed stupidity of the Stasi, reflecting the use of humour as resistance discussed in chapter 3) and implying the Stasi’s presence as a public secret:
besäße nicht gleich jedermann die Kenntnis, eigentlich mehr als Kenntnis, ein den Nervenbahnen eingeprägter Informationsgehalt etwa, dass gewisse Institutionen außerhalb, eigentlich sogar mehr überhalb von Verordnungen stehen und möglicherweise eigene, natürlich geheime Verordnungen und Gesetze haben. (110)
[didn’t everyone already have the knowledge, actually more than knowledge, information imprinted on the nerve pathways, for example, that certain institutions are outside, actually even above, regulations and possibly have their own, naturally secret, regulations and laws.]
The narrator notes that because the Stasi officer introduces himself as “Müller,” his name is probably “Schmidt” (105); the narrative voice reflects laconically that “es ist immer ein junger Mann, ältere Jahrgänge weisen erstaunlich wenig Affinität zu diesem Berufszweig auf” (it is always a young man, older age groups show surprisingly little affinity to this profession, 107). In this way, Kunert’s novel has the potential to function as a “standard of representation” in Gibson’s terms: this is the impact of a public secret—a half-known unknown—on ordinary individuals who are trying to live their otherwise un-extraordinary lives.
The reception of the text in 2019 confirms this reading of the work as transmitting a form of knowledge about the GDR: Kunert is described as speaking “Klartext” (in plain language),
3Böttiger, “Die Stasi kennt Montaigne nicht.” as offering an antidote to
Ostalgie (nostalgia for the East) through his representation of the oppressive state,
4Greiner, “Wer ist Mohnteine?” and the novel is read as a form of “Selbstverständigung” (exploration of the self),
5Schimmang, “Preis dem Romancier.” as “Flaschenpost” (a letter in a bottle) from the distant past,
6Geißler, “Flaschenpost.” See also Eger, “Der Meister und Margarete.” and the absurd situations of its protagonists as satirical, but “allesamt typisch … für Zeit und Schauplatz” (all typical … for the time and setting).
7Geißler, “Flaschenpost.” Tilman Krause states quite clearly that the novel can provide knowledge about what it was like to live in the GDR—knowledge that is acquired—breathed in—almost effortlessly in the process of reading:
Was in der DDR alles nicht einfach so ging, wie der allgemeine Mangel das Leben beherrschte, wie das Spitzelwesen immer mehr ein Klima der Angst erzeugte, das kann man im Übrigen noch einmal sehr hautnah inhalieren, wenn man jenen Roman liest …
8Krause, “‘Ich bin ein entheimateter Mensch.’”[The things that just didn’t work in the GDR, how life was dominated by general deprivation, how the system of informants created an increasingly intense climate of fear—this can all be inhaled again very closely when you read this novel.]
In his review, Jochen Schimmang points towards the “public secret” of the MfS, noting that it is known that the Stasi was “so gut wie allwissend und doch zugleich stockdoof” (as good omniscient and at the same time as dumb as a post).
9Schimmang, “Preis dem Romancier.” It is unclear if Schimmang considers that to be common knowledge at the time of writing the novel in the mid-1970s or on its publication in 2019—as we have seen, Kunert’s text implies the former.
And yet, can the text play the role of a medium of knowledge if it is confined to a drawer? Does it not require a reader to recognise and appropriate that knowledge? Can a medium of knowledge exist as such if it has no echo? Kunert had previously published the majority of his works in the West German Hanser Verlag.
10For a discussion of Kunert’s publication strategies and encounters with censorship, see Costabile-Heming, “‘Rezensur.’” The (most likely correct) assertion on the dustjacket, repeated throughout the reception of the novel, that it was “in der DDR ‘absolut undruckbar’” (completely unpublishable in the GDR) thus leaves the obvious question: but what about elsewhere? Why did Kunert not offer it to his regular West German publisher?
There is no clear answer to this; however, one suggestion leads us back to the question of the reader. Cornelia Geißler notes that, in contrast to Kunert’s first (and only other) novel,
Die zweite Frau is thematically “eindeutig in der DDR zu Hause” (clearly at home in the GDR).
11Geißler, “Flaschenpost.” Mladen Gladić notes that Kunert himself confirms this view: “Er hätte ihn nicht einfach in einem West-Verlag veröffentlichen können, betont Kunert. Denn dann hätte
Die zweite Frau genau einen Leser gehabt: Erich Mielke” (Kunert emphasises that he could not simply have published it in a Western publishing house. Because then
Die zweite Frau would have had precisely one reader: Erich Mielke).
12Gladić, “Roman Nr. 2.” We might note that this is hyperbole; that texts published in the West frequently found their way back into the GDR and were circulated in secret (such texts therefore occupy another position on the spectrum of revelation and concealment, as will be discussed below). Nonetheless, the implication in Kunert’s statement is that it is a GDR readership that is needed to construct the knowledge archived in this text; and yet, also that it was written with the recognition that it would never reach that audience. In the context of authoritarian censorship, the text that reveals all ends up being that which is concealed most completely. What we do not know is if the text found a GDR readership at all; that is, if it was circulated among Kunert’s family and close acquaintances. The discussion of Stefan Heym below indicates that this was common practice for at least some GDR authors writing texts that they knew could not be published in the state in which they lived. After unification, and its rediscovery and publication in 2019, the novel does find a wider readership, for whom—if the newspaper reviews cited above are any indication—the text appears to confirm already preconceived knowledge about what the GDR was like.