Underground Revelation: Counter-Publics and Cross-Border Smuggling
In the unofficial or underground literary scenes, literary production and related activities were usually deliberately concealed from the wider public and intended for limited and alternative audiences who were reached through unofficially organised literary salons and unauthorised samizdat “publications.” As we have seen in chapter 3, the editors of the underground journal
Mikado wanted a
different—more open and pluralistic—public sphere.
1Kolbe, Trolle, and Wagner, “Mikado 1–12,” 9. Emphasis in original. Reflecting more recently on the purpose and importance of
Mikado, Bernd Wagner suggested that this was not just about creating a different public, but also the opportunity to establish “eine eigene Gegenöffentlichkeit … eine nicht unbedingt besonders politische, aber völlig authentische, subversive Gegenöffentlichkeit” (our own counter-public … a not necessarily particularly political, but a completely authentic, subversive counter-public).
2Wagner and Blohm, “‘Im Osten war der Teller absolut leergegessen und abgeleckt,’” 59.The editors and authors of samizdat texts worked on the assumption that—despite concealing their activities from a broader public—they would find enough readers (or listeners at literary gatherings) who would understand and appreciate their works, not least on the basis of shared experiences and points of reference. The importance of situated readership is reflected in the West German Mikado collection, in the editors’ assumption:
daß die hier versammelten Texte einem Leser aus der Bundesrepublik weniger sagen als dem, der die Erfahrungen der Schreiber teilt, bleibt doch zu hoffen, selbst der übersättigsten Leserschaft wird nicht verborgen bleiben, daß die Mehrzahl der Texte aus ernster zu nehmenden Gründen geschrieben wurden als, sich eine Spalte im Feuilleton zu ergattern oder aufzuspringen auf das sich lustig drehende Karussell der Stipendienvergabe und Bestenlisten.
[that the texts collected here mean less to a reader from the Federal Republic than to someone who shares the writers’ experiences, though the hope remains that even the most satiated readership won’t be unaware that the majority of these texts were written for more serious reasons than to win a column in the feuilleton or to jump on the carousel of scholarship allocation and bestseller lists].
3Kolbe, Trolle, and Wagner, “Mikado 1–12,” 10.While it may not have been written with the explicit intention of imparting knowledge, whether underground or across borders, the implication here is that literature that circulated in the East German underground but which was also published in West German anthologies would not only reach reading publics of different scales, but also different types of reader who would bring different types of knowledge to those texts—and by extension also acquire different types of knowledge from them.
At the same time, the GDR’s counter-publics were subject to (more or less) intense surveillance by the Stasi and its informants so that the MfS also became part of the audience for these underground performances and publications, as we have seen throughout this book. This was one of the many “known unknowns” surrounding state surveillance which have come up time and again in our research, and which were met with different responses and strategies by those participating in underground activities. Our interviews with Kolbe, Wagner, and others demonstrate their clear awareness, if not outright expectation, that the state, especially the MfS, would show an interest in their underground endeavours, as well as an awareness that the Stasi’s reactions were often deliberately inconsistent. Wagner, for instance, comments: “man [hat] auch schon mit einer Wahrnehmung auch durch die Stasi selber gerechnet … Das Perfide war ja, jedenfalls in meinem Fall so, die ausbleibende Reaktion” (you certainly assumed the Stasi would take notice … The perfidious thing, in my case at least, was the lack of reaction).
4Interview with Bernd Wagner, October 20, 2020. In general, Wagner suggested that the editors received relatively little feedback on
Mikado from readers in East Germany:
Und das war nun keine konzertierte Aktion der Stasi, aber wir haben relativ wenig an Rückmeldungen auf unsere doch paar Jahre dauernde Bemühungen mit dieser Zeitschrift bekommen. Am ehesten noch von anderen Schriftstellern, die uns dann ihre Texte angeboten haben. Also Schreiben ist eben das, was man trotzdem macht. Egal wie, oder ob irgendwelche Leser reagieren.
5Interview with Bernd Wagner, October 20, 2020.[And it wasn’t a concerted action by the Stasi, but we got relatively little response to our efforts with this magazine, which lasted a few years. If anything, it mostly came from other writers who offered us their own texts. Writing is something you do regardless. No matter how, or if, any kind of readers react.]
This apparent lack of feedback raises interesting questions for our study of audience and knowledge. We know that
Mikado did find a limited but significant readership—Kolbe notes in his interview with Windsor that Adolf Endler had given the magazine the accolade “
Sinn und Form des Undergrounds.”
6Interview with Uwe Kolbe, June 1, 2021. But Wagner’s comment suggests that reader responses remained personal and intangible, and we might say that this was even more so the case when that particular type of reading was risky, as it was in the case of such underground literature. Open discussion and knowledge exchange based on this reading either happened in private or not at all.
Not all of the literary texts read or circulated underground were directly concerned with depictions or critiques of the GDR state. However, for those writers who chose to tackle the GDR’s “public secrets” in their texts, unofficial literary production offered considerable scope for openness, or for bolder experimentation with revelation and concealment, both textually and in terms of publication and circulation. Bernd Wagner’s own satirical short story “Wie Tute bis zum HSV durchkam” (How Tute got through to HSV) is one good example of a text that took on the Stasi in the East German literary underground but also found its way—initially via a covert route—to West German audiences. Originally written in 1983, the story was published in
Mikado in 1985 and appeared a year later in a West German anthology entitled
Geh doch rüber! Begegnungen von Menschen aus Ost und West (Why don’t you go over there? Encounters between people from East and West), edited by a West German under the pseudonym Per Ketman (whose real name is Frank Blohm).
7Wagner, “Wie Tute bis zum HSV durchkam.” Further page references are to the 1986 edition and are given in parenthesis in the text. Indeed, the origins of the text and its route to publication in
Mikado and Ketman’s West German anthology are not only closely intertwined but also offer insights into different tactics of revelation and concealment.
In his interview with Windsor, Wagner notes that Blohm had approached him for a text to be included in his anthology on East-West encounters around the same time that he was working on
Mikado with Kolbe and Trolle: “ich kannte keine Tabus mehr … Also ich war auf eine Weise vogelfrei, und das Schlimmste, was mir passieren konnte, war, dass sie mich vorzeitig in den Westen abschieben, ne? (I no longer knew any taboos … In a way I was already an outlaw and the worst that could have happened was that they would shove me off to the West prematurely.)
8Interview with Bernd Wagner, October 20, 2020. In conversation with Blohm in 2019, Wagner commented that the tale was also “prädestiniert” (predestined) for the kind of subversive counter-public he and his co-editors sought out with
Mikado and would certainly not have been accepted for publication with Aufbau, even if he had been preparing a new collection at the time (which he was not).
9Wagner and Blohm, “‘Im Osten war der Teller absolut leergegessen und abgeleckt,’” 59. Blohm’s own introduction to their conversation suggests that Wagner’s experience of state interference even made him resistant to making minor alterations for the West German anthology: “Ich wollte ihn überzeugen, zwei halbe Sätze zu ändern. Als er das sah, empörte er sich: ‘Das ist ja wie hier, Zensur!’ Heute sagt er dazu: ‘Alte Reflexe, wenn jemand etwas aus meinem Text ändern wollte’”
10Wagner and Blohm, “‘Im Osten war der Teller absolut leergegessen und abgeleckt,’” 58. (I wanted to convince him to change two half-sentences. When he saw that, he was outraged: “that’s like here, censorship!” Today he says: “Old reflexes, when someone wants to change anything in my text.”) Blohm’s use of a pseudonym for the original version of
Geh doch rüber! was a tactic of concealment designed to protect the East German contributors (so that their contacts could not be traced back) and to facilitate later revelation through the publication in the West; moreover, the texts that became part of the anthology were smuggled out of the GDR covertly by contacts Blohm had gained through Jürgen Fuchs and Roland Jahn.
11Blohm, “Ein Taschenbuch gefährdet die Staatssicherheit,” 16–17. By the time Ketman/Blohm was barred entry into the GDR in 1985, enough texts had reached him via what he called “die geheimen Transportschienen” (secret transportation tracks).
12Blohm, “Ein Taschenbuch gefährdet die Staatssicherheit,” 21.Written at a time when Wagner had detached himself from the GDR’s official literary scene and evidently felt he and his writing already had one foot in the West, Tute’s story reflects his own disdain for and defiance of state power and is characterised by the kind of resistant humour we have seen in chapter 3 and in both Kunert’s and Krolkiewicz’s writing earlier in this chapter. The story is prefaced with a motto quote from the 25th canto of Dante’s
Inferno—“Es reckte, als er schwieg, der Dieb die Hände mit durchgesteckten Daumen beid empor” (100; His words now reached their end. And then the robber hoisted hands on high—a fig-fuck formed in each.)
13Translation taken from the Penguin Classic translation of The Divine Comedy by Robin Kirkpatrick—here p. 110.—and a note, capitalised and enclosed in parentheses, that the ensuing story had been overheard in the “Grosse Concordia” pub in Weissensee. The main tale is then told by a first-person narrator, Tute, in strong Berlin dialect, about the time he penetrated the Stasi’s security barrier and managed to meet the players from the Hamburger Sportverein football club after they had played a match against BFC Dynamo, the East Berlin team sponsored by the Stasi (and other state institutions). In Wagner’s own words, the story is “eine wunderbare Geschichte, wie … ein schlichter Berliner, Weißenseer, Kneipengänger, Trinker und Fußballfan, die Stasi an der Nase herumführt, indem er es schafft, durch ihren Sicherheitskordon durchzukommen, und ins Hotel zu den HSV-Spielern, und mit denen zu saufen und sich da ein Trikot signieren zu lassen” (wonderful story of how … a humble Berliner, Weißenseer, pub-goer, drinker and football fan fools the Stasi by managing to get through their security cordon and into the hotel to the HSV players, to drink with them and get them to sign a football jersey).
14Interview with Bernd Wagner, October 20, 2020.After three unsuccessful attempts, Tute concocts a plan to force his way past the uniformed “Schutzengel” (guardian angels) wearing “Anzüge grüne Schlipse gelbe Hemden un Parteiabzeichen” (suits green neckties an’ Party badges, 101) and into the hotel lift. Delighted to find the Hamburg players in the bar, Tute proposes a toast to the West German team: “‘Na dann erst ma Prost auf euren Sieg über die Stasis. Ich kann euch garnich sagen wat mir das für eine Genugtuung is’” (well then, cheers to your victory over the Stasis. I can’t tell you what satisfaction that gives me, 102). For Tute, as he tells his listeners in the Weissensee pub, “[s]ie waren die Engel un nicht die grünen Schlipse unten im Foyer” (they [the players] were the angels and not the green ties down in the foyer, 102). Having secured a signed shirt to prove to his friends that the story wasn’t invented—the rest of the text is shot through with references to its unbelievability—Tute recounts how he left the hotel triumphantly with a conspicuous parting shot at the guards in the foyer; the obscene hand gesture directed to God in Dante’s original, now directed at the supposedly omnipotent “yellow shirts” in Tute’s story:
un dann hab ick so gemacht (Es reckte Tute die Hände mit durchgesteckten Daumen beid empor), “so,” hab ick gesacht, “ihr Schweine wat ick will das schaffe ick,” un ick hörte richtich ihre Unterkiefer klappen un raus durch die Hoteltür un rein ins nächste Taxi un ab. (104)
[an’ then I did this (
Tute hoisted hands on high—a fig-fuck formed in each)
15Translation adapted from Kirkpatrick’s translation of The Divine Comedy. “there,” I said, “you swines, I do what I want,” an’ listened as their jaws dropped and left through the hotel door straight into the next taxi.]
With hindsight, Wagner has highlighted his belief that Tute was the kind of person who ultimately contributed to the collapse of the GDR by refusing to comply and by exercising that agency: “Also die Bevölkerung, die nicht mehr mitgemacht hat, die einfache Bevölkerung” (I mean, the population who no longer went along with things, the simple population).
16Interview with Bernd Wagner, October 20, 2020. In her afterword to the 2019 reproduction of
Geh doch rüber!, Annette Simon comments how the protatonist Tute combines “draufgängerische Unverfrorenheit mit Situationskomik und dem Stolz über den Mut eines auf sich gestellten Individuums” (daredevil audacity with situational comedy and pride in the courage of a self-reliant individual), which Simon notes is also a form of “Bewältigung” (mastery or coping).
The Stasi files suggest that, before this story was published in
Mikado, Wagner had read a story entitled “Wie ich zum HSV kam” (How I got to HSV) at a youth club in Leipzig in September 1984 to an audience of thirty people.
17Extract from daily report of BV Leipzig, Abt. XX on Wagner’s reading in Leipzig, dated September 7, 1984. Despite the misunderstanding of the title here, this is clearly the same Tute story and was deemed to contain “negative und verunglimpfende Äußerungen über das MfS” (negative and defamatory utterances about the MfS).
18Extract from daily report of BV Leipzig, dated September 7, 1984. While there is no direct evidence to suggest the informant had assumed the story was autobiographical, Wagner interprets the misheard title as “symptomatisch für die Dummheit der Stasi” (symptomatic of the Stasi’s stupidity), something which the story itself ridicules: “dass ich das nicht sein kann, ein einigermaßen heller Kopf hätte das sofort erkannt” (the fact that it can’t be me, a reasonably bright mind would have recognised that immediately).
19Interview with Bernd Wagner, October 20, 2020. A second Stasi report clearly recognises the distance between the author and narrator-protagonist but nevertheless offers a simplistic interpretation of the text and the knowledge it conveys from the informant’s point of view, which also hints at the kind of “rules of thumb” we saw in chapter 1: “In dieser Erzählung kam es dem Autor nach Meinung des IM offenbar darauf an, zu zeigen, daß es den Mitarbeitern des MfS nicht nur nicht gelang dieses Vordringen zu verhindern, sondern diese auch gut erkennbar waren (Anzugsordnung: grünes Hemd, gelber Binder) bzw. sind” (In the IM’s opinion, the author of this short story apparently wanted to show that the employees of the MfS not only failed to prevent this advance, but that they were, and are, also easily recognisable (dress code: green shirt, yellow tie).
20Summary report on Wagner’s reading in Leipzig by Oberstleutnant Wallner, dated September 11, 1984, 144.In his interview with Windsor, Wagner describes the story as “Rollenprosa” (role prose) based on a story he had overheard in a pub with some added literary “Pfeffer und Salz”
21Interview with Bernd Wagner, October 20, 2020. (pepper and salt), and intimated in his conversation with Blohm that reality is sometimes “verrückter als das, was man sich ausdenken kann”
22Wagner and Blohm, “‘Im Osten war der Teller absolut leergegessen und abgeleckt,’” 58. (crazier than anything you can invent yourself). Given the intricate fictional and narrative devices Wagner employs, the matter of whether Tute’s story is true is both questionable and beside the point when it comes to reading this text as a medium of knowledge. According to the Stasi, Wagner’s reading in Leipzig found little “Anklang” (echo) and the subsequent discussion was “schleppend und ohne operative Relevanz” (sluggish and without operative relevance).
23Summary report on Wagner’s reading in Leipzig, dated September 11, 1984. This lack of open reaction does not necessarily mean that the knowledge contained and conveyed in Wagner’s text went unnoticed by the audience. Through its publication in
Mikado, moreover, with its circulation of 100 copies that were passed around amongst acquaintances, the text would have found an additional limited but not insignificant readership familiar with the images and “standards of representation” it contains and (re-)produces: this is the omnipresence—not to mention perceived absurdity and fallibility—of a state security apparatus purporting to protect GDR citizens from the capitalist West; this is everyday resistance and individual agency.
Through its publication in Blohm/Ketman’s volume, the text also reached a West German audience. According to the original foreword of
Geh doch rüber!, the book was an invitation “die Menschen ‘drüben’ jenseits von Grenzen und ideologischer Voreingenommenheit kennenzulernen” (to get to know the people “over there” beyond borders and ideological prejudice) and described as “der Anfang eines Gesprächs” (the beginning of a conversation).
24Per Ketman, “Vorwort,” 12. Blohm comments that the anthology received “wohlwollende Rezensionen in verschiedenen Printmedien und Radiosendern wie WDR und Deutsche Welle” (favourable reviews in various print media and radio stations like WDR [West German Radio] and Deutsche Welle).
25Blohm, “Ein Taschenbuch gefährdet die Staatssicherheit,” 29. The volume had a print run of 6000 copies, “wovon leider nur wenige in die DDR gelangt sein dürften” (of which sadly very few would have made it into the GDR).
26Blohm, “Ein Taschenbuch gefährdet die Staatssicherheit,” 29. We do know, however, that an exposé of the anthology made its way to the Stasi via IM “Fritz Müller” (Anderson), and that the MfS commissioned two “Experten-IMs” (expert informants) to evaluate the book once it appeared in 1986.
27Blohm, “Ein Taschenbuch gefährdet die Staatssicherheit,” 27. While one offered the assessment that the volume took a dismissive but not hostile position on the GDR,
28Cited in Blohm, “Ein Taschenbuch gefährdet die Staatssicherheit,” 27. the second noted that the GDR came off much worse than the FRG: “[Die DDR] wird als zurückgeblieben, starr und stur beschrieben. Mief, Muff, Enge, Feigheit und Dummheit scheinen überall im Lande zu herrschen … Besonders oft wird die sozialistische Staatsmacht (MfS, Grenzer, ABV) verunglimpft”
29Facsimile reproduced in Blohm, “Ein Taschenbuch gefährdet die Staatssicherheit,” 28. (the GDR is described as backward, rigid, and stubborn. Dreariness, stuffiness, narrow-mindedness, cowardice, and stupidity seem to reign throughout the country … The socialist state power (MfS, border guards, ABV [police]) is vilified with particular frequency.) As we saw in the case of Krolkiewicz, the Stasi’s reception of this book—and Wagner’s story more particularly—was certainly reductive but ultimately, in contrast to Krolkiewicz, rather more tolerant, if not indifferent, than hostile. However, “Tute’s” complex, partially concealed path to publication in both East and West meant that its revelatory potential was realised in constrained but varied underground and cross-border contexts.