4 - Literature and the Stasi

Summary

the only ones who aren't with the stasi are the ones who are with it.

Rainer Schedlinski

AUTHORS AS STASI

Even before German reunification officially occurred on October 3, 1990, debates about the role of literature in the German Democratic Republic began to center around the problem of the national Ministry for State Security (Staatssicherheit or “Stasi” for short) and its influence on East German literature. As early as 1990, Leipzig writer Erich Loest, who had emigrated to the FRG in 1981 and had managed to acquire some of his own Stasi files via friends in citizens' committees, decided to publish them in book form as Der Zorn des Schafes [The Rage of the Sheep] to demonstrate the extent of personal spying and betrayal in the GDR under the old regime. Reiner Kunze, a writer who had left the GDR in 1977, also published a book based on his Stasi files, revealing in Deckname “Lyrik” [Codename “Lyric”] that Ibrahim Böhme, one of the founders of the East German SPD, had spied and informed on him for the Stasi. In Was bleibt, Christa Wolf reflected not only on her own persecution by the Stasi but also on the vast influence the Stasi had on East German society through spying, informing, betraying, and threatening. Large numbers of East Germans worked for the Stasi as either official agents or so-called “Informelle Mitarbeiter” (informal collaborators) or IMs.