Alison Lewis

Reading and Writing the Stasi File: on the Uses and Abuses of The File as (auto)biography

The opening of the Stasi files in 1992, made possible by the Stasi Documents Legislation, was an important symbolic act of reconciliation between victims and perpetrators. For victims, reading their file provided a means of re-appropriating stolen aspects of their lives and rewriting their life histories. This article argues that the Stasi file itself can be viewed as a form of hostile biography, authored by an oppressive state apparatus, that constituted in GDR times an all-powerful written ‘technology of power’. The analogy of secret police files to literary genres enables us to pose a number of questions about the current uses to which the files are being put by victims and perpetrators. Are victims and perpetrators making similar use of their Stasi file in the writing of their autobiographies? What happens when the secret police file is removed from its original bureaucratic context and ‘regime of truth’ and starts to circulate as literary artefact in new contexts, for instance, as part of victims’ and perpetrators’ autobiographies? How is the value of the Stasi file now being judged? Is the file being used principally in the services of truth and reconciliation, as originally intended in the legislation, or does it now circulate in ‘regimes of value’ that place a higher premium on accounts of perpetrators, as can be witnessed in the publication of the fictitious ‘autobiography’ of the notorious secret police informer, Sascha Anderson?

“Are the Towers Still Standing?” September 11 and the Resurrection of the Literary Intellectual

Four weeks after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel ran a feature that was designed to coincide with the opening of the annual Frankfurt Book Fair. Titled “Literature: Early Tremors of Fear,” the article opens with the question that was on every literary editor’s lips in the wake of the terrorist attacks: what immediate impact will the acts of terrorism on the United States have on German publishing? The editors of Der Spiegel settled on a face-saving solution to the problem they faced of running with the scheduled promotional piece on new releases in the book industry in a dramatically changed international climate. In acknowledgment of the gravity of the situation, the editors decided to interweave publicity for the season’s new books with spontaneous outbursts from fiction writers in response to the catastrophe. What is especially interesting about the article is the justification given for the relevance of literature post–September 11. The magazine makes a forceful case for the continued relevance of works of fiction in an appeal to the role of the writer as interpreter of history and world events. As the magazine argues: “Writers are always seismoscopes of ‘Zeitgeist’, observers of intellectual tremors, chroniclers of historical ground shifts, some of them—such as Franz Kafka and George Orwell—have the gift of prophesy.”1

Subverting patriarchy : feminism and fantasy in the works of Irmtraud Morgner

Feminism and fantasy lessons in socialist patriarchy the quest for female emancipation science, history and legends gender and genre - models of female development female sexuality and technological control the witch, the mother and Pandora the quest for peace female subjectivity the quest for a feminist aesthetic.

Das Paradox der freien Partnerwahl in der Liebe: Zum Aufstieg und Fall einer sozialistischen Liebessemantik in Christa Wolfs Der geteilte Himmel und Volker Brauns Unvollendete Geschichte

Kaum ein anderes Thema wurde in der Literatur der ehemaligen DDR so oft behandelt und in deren Rezeption so wenig beachtet wie die Liebe. Ehen, Liebesaffaren und Ehebruchsdramen sind zwar der narrative Stoff, aus dem sozialistische Erzahlungen und eine spezifisch sozialistische Nationalliteratur geschmiedet wurden, aber als Topos in der Rede um die Literatur fuhrte die Liebe eher ein Schattendasein. Dennoch kommt kaum eine Erzahlung der funfziger und sechziger Jahre ohne das Handlungsgerust einer Liebesbeziehung aus. Von den Produktionsromanen der Aufbauphase uber den Ankunftsroman bis hin zur feministischen Literatur von Christa Wolf und Irmtraud Morgner der siebziger und achtziger Jahre werden die Liebe und das Liebesleiden in der Literatur der DDR stets thematisiert, sei es als Passagenritus sozialistischer Jugendlicher, Eifersuchtsgeschichte in einer Dreieckskonstellation oder als Ausdruck einer spezifisch weiblichen Utopie. Obwohl die Liebe eine weitgehend vernachlassigte Komponente der sozialistischen Literatur blieb, wies sie eine unverkennbare Semantik auf, die ihre eigenen Paradoxien und auch ihre eigene Evolution hatte. Wie diese Liebessemantik codiert war, ware der Gegenstand einer umfangreicheren Studie als dieser. Hier soll stattdessen der Versuch unternommen werden, anhand von zwei Schlusselromanen der sechziger und siebziger Jahre, Christa Wolfs vielleicht bekanntestem Werk Der geteilte Himmel aus dem Jahre 1963 und Volker Brauns 1977 veroffentlichtem Roman Unvollendete Geschichte, zwei Wasserscheiden der Evolution einer sozialistischen Liebeskonzeption nachzuzeichnen, die man als den Aufstieg und Fall einer Semantik bezeichnen konnte.

The Stasi, the Confession and Performing Difference: Brigitte Burmeister’s Unter dem Namen Norma

According to Michel Foucault, the confession is one of the West’s ‘most highly valued techniques for producing truth’.1 At the end of the nineteenth century, sexual confessions produced the truth about perversions, much in the same way that religious confessions produced the truth about sin. At the end of the twentieth century too, a confession of involvement with the Stasi was generally seen to speak the truth about life in the GDR. Unless, of course, the confession was revised by a new confession, as was the case with Sascha Anderson, whose confessions to the truth were only ever half the truth.2 But in most other instances, a confession wrung from a former secret police informer seemed to reveal all that was once hidden from the truth about life in the other Germany.