4 - Collaboration as Collapse in the Life Writing and Stasi Shadow-Documents of Monika Maron and Christa Wolf

Summary

WHEN THE STASI FILES WERE OPENED IN 1992, commentators expressed concern that the resulting revelations would turn the Stasi's former collaborators into the scapegoats of the newly unified Germany. However, suggestions that the archive should be buried or burned to prevent the hounding of former Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (unofficial collaborators, or IMs) by the press were met with an outcry against the impossibility of doing justice for victims if the files were simply destroyed. Archival access was firmly supported by a collective of poets and authors who had been victims of the Stasi, and who in 1992 together published the volume of writing Aktenkundig (On File), in which they made the case for the files that were held in the archive to be brought to light, and to court, in the lifetimes of those affected by them. The precise nature of the Kunde (knowledge) held by these files of a shadowy, now-defunct spy organization has been a matter of controversy, not least in cases where the files testify to collaboration by unofficial informants against their fellow civilians. In this sense, I suggest below that the files represent a rather fragmented resource for reconstructing East German history. And yet, when read in dialogue with the literary writing, and in particular the literary life writing of former IMs, the files nonetheless offer rich material for grappling with the ethics of collaboration in the recent German past. As I show in this chapter, a coreading of files and literary works can furnish a vocabulary for evaluating the problem of complicity with bodies of power such as the Stasi—a vocabulary of illumination and obscuration, of resistance and occupation, and of resilience and dissolution—that may yet uncover the finer motivations and deeper consequences of collaboration, in a manner that the scandal-hungry press of the early unification years could not.

This chapter begins with a collection of Richtlinien (guidelines), issued by Chief of the Stasi Erich Mielke throughout the life of the spy organization and now residing in the archive of the Bundesbeauftragte fur die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (BStU, Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former GDR). This collection of procedural files reveals the methods behind the training of Stasi officers to recruit, test, and work with their unofficial collaborators.