After the Stasi (Bloomsbury, 2015; Paperback edition 2017)

After the Stasi : Collaboration and the Struggle for Sovereign Subjectivity in the Writing of German Unification, 2015

I would like to thank Andrew Webber, whose mentorship I have been privileged to enjoy throughout the duration of this project, as well as the many other colleagues and friends who commented on chapters in preparation. Parts of Chapter 4 appeared in the journal article "The (w)hole in the archive, " Paragraph, 37, and are reprinted by permission of Edinburgh University Press. Sections of Chapter 3 will be published in an abridged version in a volume on secret police files, edited by V. Glajar, A. Lewis, and C. Petrescu and forthcoming with Camden House. The extract from "Porträt des Künstlers als junger Grenzhund" is reproduced by permission of the copyright holder, Suhrkamp Verlag, the pages from the Stasi archive appear by permission of the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Files (BStU), and the image from Wolfgang Hilbig's GDR passbook is reprinted by permission of the S. Fischer Stiftung. Introduction: Collaboration and the Problem of Sovereign Subjectivity Twenty-five years after the disbandment of the East German Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security; Stasi), the question remains as to why so many citizens of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) agreed to collaborate with the Stasi as unofficial spies. The Stasi's demise and the opening of its vast archive brought to light the collaboration by ordinary East Germans as Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (unofficial informants; IMs) for the Ministry. The revelations in front-page scandals and in speeches by prominent public figures tended to cast the former IMs as co-perpetrators in a totalitarian regime of power. Wolf Biermann, in his acceptance speech for the Georg Büchner Literature Prize of 1991, in which he outed the star underground poet Sascha Anderson as a Stasi informant, spoke damningly of IMs as the "Kreaturen" (creatures) which the East German state had set "an die Spitze der Opposition, um sie besser abbrechen zu können" (at the very top of the opposition, in order to lop it off it more effectively; Biermann, 1991, unpaginated). Biermann's language indicated a contempt for those who had permitted themselves to be subjugated by the Stasi as mere "creatures. " The West German press meanwhile relished uncovering the IM pasts of such former supporters of socialism as Heiner Müller and Christa Wolf, at the same time as celebrating the advent of capitalist liberal democracy in the East. By contrast, though the literary sphere in the GDR had been saturated with informants, literary writing by East Germans after 1990 has dealt more ambivalently with the phenomenon of IMs, and with the questions of subjectivity in relation to power that it raised. Those literary works, by GDR-born writers publishing after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and after the Stasi, are the concern of this book. Alongside the outcries in press and public discourse, a body of literary work has emerged since 1990 that offers a more nuanced and ultimately more

German Politics and Society, 2002

Volker Weidermann, a journalist writing for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, seemed somewhat puzzled when he reviewed the spring 2002 literary season. After having just told his readers that for many years the GDR had been curiously absent from discussions in the Federal Republic, he exclaimed with a palpable sense of surprise: "But now it's back again, the GDR." (Doch jetzt ist sie wieder da, die DDR). 1 Weidermann is not the only journalist to have reacted this way to the sudden accumulation of books about life in the former GDR, which included the first postwall biography of Christa Wolf, written by Jörg Magenau; Christa Wolf's novel Leibhaftig, and several autobiographical novels by the former GDR's most unsavory authors: Hermann Kant, the long-time president of the GDR's author's union and an active Stasi collaborator, Fritz Rudolf Fries, author and Stasi informer, and, finally, Sascha Anderson, the infamous poet and cultural manager of the Prenzlauer Berg, who presented his autobiographical novel Sascha Anderson to a public eager to learn the details of his strange life as avant-garde artist in the service of the Stasi. Finally, a group of younger authors entered the scene with stories about everyday life in the GDR of the 1980s. 2 The reception of the younger authors was mixed. Their books about growing up under Honecker were often criticized as docu

American Journal of Cultural Sociology

As Émile Durkheim (2008 [1912]) observed, societies create their own understanding of time, of their collective lifespans and life-cycles. They have their vistas of the future and memories of beginnings. For significant segments of Eastern European societies, one such beginning occurred nearly three decades ago, during the Autumn of 1989. The fall of State Socialism, which set Eastern Europe on a path from totalitarianism, was swift and unexpected even for its citizens. It was, in fact, so surprising that in a 1990 survey conducted in the East Germany fully 76% of respondents confessed that they would have never predicted it a year ago (Kuran 1991: 10).

Marked Identities, 2015

It is only through memory that "the self of yesterday [is] connected to the self of today and of tomorrow" . Yet, while we as individuals might remember -as indeed we must, for in this lies the constitution of our very selves -it is society which influences what is memorable, and what should be cast out into the abyss of oblivion. This dynamic is perpetually renegotiated, as different versions of the past are called up in response to biographical life circumstances and the winds of historical change. The study which I will describe in this chapter is an attempt to make sense of a small group of life stories as told to me twice, twenty years apart, in a context of acute political change. In 1992 I conducted interviews with 40 East Germans, most of whom were anti--state activists who had participated in significant ways in what has been called 'the bloodless revolution' of 1989. Twenty years later, in 2012, I conducted follow up interviews with 15 of the people with whom I had originally spoken. Although much has been written on the events of 1989, and the twentieth anniversary of those events was greeted with much media fanfare from around the world, there has in fact been very little investigation into the long--term experiences of those who have lived through these changes. That is

Post-Fascist Fantasies : Psychoanalysis, History, and the Literature of East Germany. , 1997

This book critically analyses the role of Communist exile and GDR-era literature in the creation of East Germany's anti-fascist narrative. The analysis is faced on Claude Lefort's theory of totalitarianism to which the author adds a psychoanalytic lens.

Crime, Histoire & Sociétés, 2003

Journal of Cold War Studies, 2012

Website, Jerusalem Universität, 2017

Vortrag bei einer internationalen Konferenz in Jerusalem im Januar 2017

Oxford German Studies, 2009