Conclusion
With the case studies presented in this chapter, we have demonstrated how literary fiction served in different ways and contexts as a “medium of knowledge” about the “public secret” of the Stasi and the strategies employed by GDR writers and citizens to navigate the realities of life in an authoritarian and carefully monitored society. In each of the texts explored, our chosen authors construct a relationship with those extra-textual realities by (re)imagining lived experiences, building on the knowledge acquired personally and through their networks, in acts of “creative imitation,” to return to Felski’s terminology.
1Felski, Uses of Literature, 85. In doing this, they both drew on and expanded a repertoire of the kind of “standards of representation” described by Gibson, which codified shared understandings and symbols, in more or less recognisable patterns and signs, of state surveillance and its repercussions in the literary sphere and everyday life. Many of the texts (and paratexts) explored show the authors’ self-reflexive awareness of the literariness of their writing and their thematisation of the role of revelation and concealment in their construction of knowledge.
Overall, we have given a flavour of the complex interweaving of revelation and concealment, secrecy and knowledge, in literature produced in and about the GDR. We have described this as a spectrum of revelation and concealment with regard to fictionalised representations of the “public secret” of the Stasi and the literary techniques employed, as well as the paths these texts took to publication and reception. However, we might also see it in terms of a see-saw: each act of revelation often brought with it a degree of concealment and one must be weighed in relation to the other. Publication in the West reached a potentially large reading public but resulted in a form of concealment from a readership in the GDR, meaning the knowledge would not be completed by its (primarily) intended audience but instead received in a manner shaped by very different experiences, knowledge structures, and expectations of literary fiction. Bypassing censorship in the GDR through the use of history, myth and allegory, meanwhile, relied on an appropriately sensitised or “adequate” readership that was able to decode that form of concealment to reveal the knowledge within the text. Presenting work at private and semi-public readings, publishing in underground journals or sharing manuscripts hand-to-hand allowed total revelation to small audiences, often in the form of critical satire with thinly (if at all) veiled references to the MfS and other state institutions; in these contexts, authors had to hazard the risk, often knowingly, that reader responses to their work would remain private or that part of their audience would likely be hostile and anxious to prevent a text (or even whole oeuvres) reaching a wider readership. Finally, some works of literary fiction deemed (by their own authors) to be too revelatory were deliberately withheld and the knowledge they contained remained concealed as long as the GDR state existed. After the Wende, hidden and/or suppressed texts begin to emerge and reach the public sphere; however, this is not a public that could even be imagined at the time of writing.