Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing 9781571139269, 1571139265

Table of contents :
Frontcover
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
Part I: File Stories
1: The Secret Lives and Files of Stasi Collaborators: Reading
Secret Police Files for Identity and Habitus
2: “You’ll Never Make a Spy Out of Me”: The File Story of
“Fink Susanne”
3: Witness for the Prosecution: Eginald Schlattner in the
Files of the Securitate
Part II: Files, Memory, and Biography
4: Collaboration as Collapse in the Life Writing and Stasi
Shadow-Documents of Monika Maron and Christa Wolf
5: Perpetrator as Victim in Jana Döhring’s Stasiratte
Part III: Performing Files and Surveillance
6: Before “It Gets All Wiped Out”: Document-Affect
and History-Effect in the Hungarian Performance
Apaches on the Danube
7: The Stasi Files on Center Stage: Life Writing, Witnessing,
and Memory in Recent Performance
8: Surveillance and the Senses in a Documentary Portrait of
Radio Free Europe
Notes on the Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Europe kept detailed records not only of their victims but also of the vast networks of informants and collaborators upon whom their totalitarian systems depended. These records, now open to the public in many former Eastern Bloc countries, reflect a textually mediated reality that has defined and shaped the lives of former victims and informers, creating a tension between official records and personal memories. Exploring this tension between a textually and technically mediated past and the subject/victim’s reclaiming and retrospective interpretation of that past in biography is the goal of this volume. While victims’ secret police files have often been examined as a type of unauthorized archival life writing, the contributors to this volume are among the first to analyze the fragmentary and sometimes remedial nature of these biographies and to examine the subject/victims’ rewriting and remediation of them in various creative forms. Essays focus, variously, on the files of the East German Stasi, the Romanian Securitate (in relation to Transylvanian Saxons), and the Hungarian State Security Agency. Contributors: Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Ulrike Garde, Valentina Glajar, Yuliya Komska, Alison Lewis, Corina L. Petrescu, Annie Ring, Aniko Szucs. Valentina Glajar is Professor of German at Texas State University, San Marcos. Alison Lewis is Professor of German in the School of Languages and Linguistics, the University of Melbourne, Australia. Corina L. Petrescu is Associate Professor of German at the University of Mississippi.

Edited by

Glajar, Lewis, Petrescu

Cover design: Frank Gutbrod

and

Cover image: Document and film negatives from the Romanian secret police file ACNSAS (National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives), FI, file 1264512, Bucharest.

Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc

he communist secret police services of Central and Eastern

Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc

Between Surveillance and Life Writing Edited by

Valentina Glajar, Alison Lewis, and Corina L. Petrescu

Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc

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Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture

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Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc Between Surveillance and Life Writing

Edited by Valentina Glajar, Alison Lewis, and Corina L. Petrescu

Rochester, New York

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Some research for chapter 1, by Alison Lewis, was supported under Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (project number DP120101152). Copyright © 2016 by the Editors and Contributors All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2016 by Camden House Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.camden-house.com and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-926-9 ISBN-10: 1-57113-926-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

CIP data is available from the Library of Congress.

This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

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For Sergio, Herbert, and Aki

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Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Abbreviations

xiii

Introduction Alison Lewis, Valentina Glajar, and Corina L. Petrescu

1

Part I: File Stories 1: The Secret Lives and Files of Stasi Collaborators: Reading Secret Police Files for Identity and Habitus Alison Lewis

27

2: “You’ll Never Make a Spy Out of Me”: The File Story of “Fink Susanne” Valentina Glajar

56

3: Witness for the Prosecution: Eginald Schlattner in the Files of the Securitate Corina L. Petrescu

84

Part II: Files, Memory, and Biography 4: Collaboration as Collapse in the Life Writing and Stasi Shadow-Documents of Monika Maron and Christa Wolf Annie Ring 5: Perpetrator as Victim in Jana Döhring’s Stasiratte Carol Anne Costabile-Heming

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CONTENTS

Part III: Performing Files and Surveillance 6: Before “It Gets All Wiped Out”: Document-Affect and History-Effect in the Hungarian Performance Apaches on the Danube Aniko Szucs

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153

7: The Stasi Files on Center Stage: Life Writing, Witnessing, and Memory in Recent Performance Ulrike Garde

178

8: Surveillance and the Senses in a Documentary Portrait of Radio Free Europe Yuliya Komska

201

Notes on the Contributors

229

Index

233

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Illustrations Fig. 6.1

The Hungarian Indians in front of their tepees, 1963, from Apacsok (2009).

156

Horváth and Szoboszlay meet a real Native American, 1961, from Apacsok (2009).

159

Fig. 6.3

Interrogation, 1961, from Apacsok (2009).

162

Fig. 6.4

Birthday Dinner, 2009, from Apacsok (2009).

165

Fig. 6.5

The informant reports, 1963, from Apacsok (2009).

169

Fig. 7.1

Vera Lengsfeld, Staats-Sicherheiten.

181

Fig. 7.2

Staats-Sicherheiten.

188

Fig. 8.1

Former Securitate Colonel Ilie Merce in his government office, from Cold Waves (2007).

212

Studio tableau with an RFE recording room abutting a Romanian kitchen, from Cold Waves (2007).

214

Studio tableau with an RFE announcer in the recording room, from Cold Waves (2007).

214

Poet and teacher Ana Hompot inside the Cluj Lyceum for the Blind, from Cold Waves (2007).

220

Allegorical figure of RFE listener, from Cold Waves (2007).

222

Poster inside the Psychology Department of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, from Cold Waves (2007).

222

Fig. 6.2

Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 8.4 Fig. 8.5 Fig. 8.6

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Acknowledgments

A

LISON LEWIS WOULD LIKE to acknowledge the Australian Research Council for providing funding under its Discovery Projects program (project number DP120101152). Valentina Glajar and Corina L. Petrescu would like to thank their respective institutions for their generous financial support. We also offer our gratitude to Jim Walker of Camden House for his confidence in our project, his thorough and meticulous reading, and his consistent encouragement throughout the project’s development. Our readers, Debbie Pinfold and Roger Woods, deserve particular recognition for their positive and thoughtful comments and suggestions, which have helped us improve our work. Special thanks go out to Alexandru Solomon for allowing us to reprint stills from his film Cold Waves, and to Radnóti Theater and Stefan Gloede for permissions to use the images by Zsuzsa Koncz from Apacsok and by Stefan Gloede of Hans Otto Theater, Potsdam, for Staats-Sicherheiten.

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Abbreviations ÁBTL

Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára, Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security, Budapest

ACNSAS Arhiva Consiliului Naţional pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securitaăţii, The Archive of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives, Bucharest

BStU

FD

Fond Documentar, Documentary Fond

FI

Fond Informativ, Informative Fond

FP

Fond Penal; Penal Fond

FR

Fond Reţea; Network Fond

Der Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik; Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former GDR, Berlin AIM Archivierter IM-Vorgang oder IM-Vorlauf, Archived Informant Recruitment Procedure AOP Archivierter Operativer Vorgang, Archived Operative Procedure BVfs Bezirksverwaltung für Staatssicherheit, District Office for State Security

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MfS

Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, Ministry for State Security

VVS

Vertrauliche Verschlusssache, Classified Document

ZA

Zentralarchiv, Central Archive

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Introduction Alison Lewis, Valentina Glajar, and Corina L. Petrescu In a system of ubiquitous spying, where everybody may be a police agent and each individual feels himself under constant surveillance [. . .] every word becomes equivocal and subject to retrospective “interpretation.” —Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

The Secret Police Files of the Eastern Bloc

W

EASTERN BLOC were dismantled at the end of the Cold War, they left an ambivalent legacy for successor governments. The extensive historical archives that were salvaged during the transition—the copious quantities of paper documents either left behind in the confusion of shifting relations of power or rescued by farsighted reformers—are damning evidence of the activities of the disproportionately large political police forces that mushroomed in Central and Eastern European countries under communist rule. Unlike many physical remains of these regimes that have been consigned to the dustbin of history, the files have miraculously survived. As material remnants of the Cold War from a predigital era of surveillance, they have proved to be an invaluable source of knowledge about the pervasive systems of personalized secret policing of domestic populations that involved alarming numbers of collaborators. However, for each of the three countries at the center of this book—Germany, Romania, and Hungary— the secret police files have posed considerable challenges. The archives contain many personal and state secrets, and exposing these has been a fraught and controversial process. The files are for the most part textbased artifacts and must be read with particular care. Often encrypted in impenetrable textual formats and encoded in arcane language—the now historical lingo of Cold War espionage—the archives’ secrets must first be deciphered before they can be meaningfully used. The secret police files reflect a textually mediated reality about Cold War surveillance practices that sheds light on the deeply suspicious mindsets of Eastern bloc regimes. When the activities of secret police services in Eastern Europe were first revealed in the early 1990s, it was not their HEN THE SECRET POLICE SERVICES OF THE FORMER

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foreign intelligence branches that came under most scrutiny but the surveillance of their own populations. While the communist regimes expected unconditional loyalty from their own citizens, all too often they refused to reciprocate this trust, turning individuals into “enemies of the people” and “traitors of the nation,” sometimes at the slightest hint of nonconformist behavior. In the German Democratic Republic, so great was the fear of internal rather than external threats to security that the regime put increasing resources into the domestic branch of its Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security), or Stasi. By the time the regime collapsed, the Stasi was far and away the largest secret police outfit in the Eastern bloc, also far outstripping the Gestapo of the National Socialist era both in size and in ratio of officers to population.1 In Romania, the Departamentul Securității Statului (Department of State Security), called Securitate for short, relied on torture, illegal house arrests, imprisonment, and deportations until the early 1960s, and thereafter capitalized on the fear it had instilled in the population and the soft power of surveillance. In Hungary, the Államvédelmi Hatóság (Hungarian State Protection Authority)—ÁVO, or ÁVH as it became known after 1950—belonged to one of the most brutal political police forces of the Stalinist era. Like the Stasi, it gathered intelligence through large secret networks of informants, and like the Securitate, it used torture to extract confessions for political trials. From the sheer size of the archives, we can infer the scale of the threat that these security forces imagined their citizenries posed: most former Eastern bloc countries have quantified them in terms of the number of kilometers the files would reach if placed end to end. The Stasi archive is estimated to amount to 180 kilometers of files, where, according to political scientist Lavinia Stan, each meter contains approximately 5,000 documents, and each file averages 200 pages in length.2 The Stasi’s coverage of the population has been described as “flächendeckend” (comprehensive, or all-encompassing),3 earning it the epithet “the octopus.”4 The Securitate also left a disturbing paper trail of more than 25 kilometers of files5 that have not yet received proper attention—a phenomenon that historian Lucian Boia calls the “concealment of communism” within the context of a Romanian “methodology of forgetting.”6 Hungary was the only country in the Eastern bloc to rein in its security police when it issued an amnesty in 1963 for the revolutionaries of the 1956 uprising. Still, ÁVH’s archive is comprised of 400 meters of secret documents.7 The vast archives of records left behind by Soviet-era secret police services in Germany, Romania, and Hungary have exposed, among other things, collaboration on a disturbing scale. For as long as the archives remain open to researchers and affected citizens—and in a number of countries, the files’ future is by no means certain—they continue to offer a unique record of twentieth-century European history. For those

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affected, they can serve as a resource for revisiting the past and writing personal narratives. For historians, they can help recover lost stories about the past and have proved useful for constructing biographical narratives about those who were implicated in these regimes. All of these stories can contribute to excavating the Eastern European past and to “recreat[ing] the biography of [. . .] lost state[s]”8 more generally. More specifically, the secret police archives are able to illuminate the surveillance methods deployed by the various political or security police services of the Eastern bloc. Although the German, Romanian, and Hungarian secret police forces varied greatly in the nature of their recordkeeping practices, they all documented their activities—including their human rights abuses—and did so carefully, often in painstaking detail. The records include transcripts of interrogations and intercepted telephone calls, reports of meetings between officers and informants, plans to arrest or charge targets, and descriptions of operations to intimidate, harass, and blackmail. The files also contain many confiscated objects such as letters, manuscripts, and other personal effects. The secret police forces collected information on so-called security objects, opening files on virtually all areas of society, from formal groups such as writers’ organizations to informal church or ethnic groups such as the Transylvanian Saxons in Romania and the Dresden and Berlin literary and artistic undergrounds in the GDR. They also kept files on specific individuals whom they deemed to warrant special, targeted surveillance. It is the personal files that offer particularly instructive insights into the existence of those whose lives were most affected by the secret police. They tell us much about the fates of the victims of surveillance, but they also tell us much about those who were enlisted as informants or sources; the personal files are at their most revealing when people the secret police services recruited as informants proved recalcitrant. Disobedience or unreliability could result in a flurry of activity on the part of security officers, who would then commission further security checks, often enlisting other informants to keep collaborators honest. This in turn produced stacks of paperwork, and, for postcommunist societies, another rich seam of detail to mine. The Stasi amassed a small army of casual employees, or informants (Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter), who were supposed to be the regime’s eyes and ears on the ground. By 1989, the Stasi had grown to employ between 85,000 and 99,000 full-time officers9 and around 180,000 informants, excluding those deployed in foreign intelligence, the police, and the military.10 Like the Stasi, the Securitate also relied increasingly on the services of sources (surse; collaborators), whose numbers grew from around 73,000 in 1968 to 144,289 in 1989.11 76 percent of Securitate informers had a high school diploma and 39 percent were university-educated.12 Overall, the records of the Securitate show that just “1.5 percent [of its informers were recruited] through offers of financial compensation, and

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1.5 percent through blackmail,” while fully 97 percent were motivated purely by “political and patriotic feeling.”13 In Hungary, the surveillance apparatus was smaller by comparison; by 1989 the ÁVH had enlisted 50,000 agents (ügynökök)14 and 7,203 informers (titkos megbízottak).15 Curiously, women were underrepresented in all of these three secret police forces. In Germany, for instance, only 10 to 15 percent of all informers were women in 1989.16 Traditionally thought to be unreliable, they were often only co-opted if their husbands were agents or other members of their family worked for the security forces.17 Women could also be deployed as decoys if it was thought that their romantic attachments or liaisons could lead the secret police to key information, or if these constituted good grounds for blackmail.18 It was only rarely that they would be recruited because they were in positions of influence or power. In Romania, no woman held a position in the Securitate’s leadership, and women only represented a small percentage of all agents, as spying was generally deemed too dangerous for them. Women were also considered too talkative to maintain their operative covers and thus be good agents. On April 29, 2015, the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archive updated its database of identified Securitate officers and collaborators. Of the 2,954 full-time officers, only thirty-four were women, and of the 365 collaborators, only eighteen were women.19 Many of the surviving secret police records can help to pinpoint those areas in society where the regimes felt most vulnerable. From perusing the files, it is striking how dangerous these regimes perceived literary texts and writers to be. It was not only writers of political literature that were seen as threatening or subversive; writers of apolitical modernist or avant-garde works were also eyed with particular suspicion. Writers were accorded a special place in the intelligentsia, and following their description by Stalin as “engineers of human souls,” communist regimes in the Eastern bloc pursued writers with special vengeance. For this reason, the secret archives hold up a disturbing mirror to literary life in the Eastern bloc, as this volume will show in numerous cases of secret police surveillance of writers and literary circles, and of writers who were informants. The archives reveal an obsession with the writing profession that is hard to imagine in the twenty-first century. But writers were first and foremost influential intellectuals, and all of these regimes struggled to win the support of the intelligentsia, therefore continuing to harbor deep-seated suspicions about the power of the written word and the human imagination.

Opening the Secret Police Files One distinctive feature of the transition to democracy in former Eastern bloc countries has been the manner in which they have dealt with the legacy of their secret police services. Unlike postdictatorship societies in

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Latin America, most former Eastern bloc states elected neither to issue blanket amnesties for perpetrators nor to go down the path of criminal prosecutions. Instead, they focused on removing old elites and identifying secret police collaborators. During the transition, the secret police quickly had become a symbol of all that had been wrong with and repressive about these former regimes. But the secret police was far more than an ephemeral symbol or sign of past injustice that needed to be exposed. With their voluminous material legacies, the secret police services acquired an afterlife that continues to cast deep shadows over the present. While some countries have been quicker to open their secret police archives than others, all have decided to preserve rather than destroy their files. Germany immediately recognized the benefits of granting comprehensive access to the secret police files once the bulk of the archives were secured during the peaceful revolution of 1989. Most other Eastern European countries, by contrast, waited for more than a decade to “lift the curtain” on this chapter of their past.20 Despite widespread agreement that secret police records should be conserved, there has been little consensus among the various countries about how former informers and collaborators should be dealt with. All countries chose a model usually described as lustration to handle past human rights abuses. Lustration—the purification of governments through legislation which disqualifies those associated with the former regime from holding public office—is designed to effect a clean break with the past and bolster the legitimacy of the new regime. The lustration process is usually extended to those who collaborated with the secret police. In the post-Soviet political order, however, there have been large differences in the way new governments in Eastern Europe have gone about lustration.21 Germany and the Czech Republic passed legislation early on that prohibits former informers and collaborators from holding public office, but in other countries the adopted laws were far less rigorous. In Romania, for example, Law No. 187/1999 reduced the number of perpetrators to only those people who had been involved in “political police” actions,22 as opposed to all former leaders of the Communist Party and the Securitate’s entire personnel. It also did not prescribe the loss of public positions for officials with a compromised past; rather, it allowed for disclosure of the identity of former Securitate officers and collaborators and left it up to the public to vet these individuals, particularly if they were politicians. Arguments for and against lustration were debated hotly in the Romanian parliament in 2006, when Law No. 187/1999 was amended to transform it into a tool for lustration, and again in 2008 when Ordinance No. 24 redefined “collaborator” to mean someone who had supplied information that infringed human rights,23 and thus revealed “feeble support” for lustration legislation.24 For the former Eastern bloc countries of particular interest here—East Germany,

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Romania, and Hungary—the opening of the secret archives has been a major factor driving lustration. While each of these countries has resolved the question of access to the secret police records differently, in all three the secret archives continue to present enormous challenges to their respective postcommunist societies. In Germany, the demand from affected citizens for access to the files grew quickly in the ten to fifteen years after the files were opened in 1992, peaking in 2009 with over one hundred thousand applications for access.25 In 2014, the Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (BStU; Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former GDR), listed a total of almost seven million applications and inquiries.26 In Romania, access was hampered by the fact that the files were still housed by Serviciul Român de Informații (SRI; Romanian Intelligence Service) until 2005. Since then, the number of individuals asking to see their files has risen constantly, so that between 2009 and 2014 it reached a total of 25,563 requests.27 Hungarians have also been busy in this regard: by December 2013, the total number of individuals accessing their files or those of deceased relatives reached 32,272.28 As a result of the slow speed of processing applications, many years later, new cases of former informers are still being revealed to the press, and there are many more expected to come. These different histories of dealing with the legacy of Eastern Europe’s secret police services reflect the varied public attitudes across the region to the files themselves.29 In Hungary, the lustration laws passed in 1994 allowed for the files of tainted officials, secret agents, and informers to be scrutinized by a panel of judges, and those individuals found compromised were encouraged to resign rather than face exposure or dismissal.30 A later amendment to the legislation allowed citizens to access their own files and gave limited access to third parties, also setting up the Historical Archive Office.31 In Germany and Romania, the files have formed the by no means uncontroversial centerpiece of transitional justice mechanisms. In Germany, the files, which were made available to employers, were used in rigorous screening processes, usually leaked to the media, and only victims of the Stasi were granted access to their own files. Because the archives were found largely intact, and the documentation of surveillance cases was so comprehensive, the Stasi files were used widely in the renewal of public institutions. In Romania, however, there were attempts by the postcommunist security forces to destroy large numbers of secret police files. The most publicized case was that of the village Berevoieşti, where some estimate that seven tons of files were burned in 1991.32 For the victims of violence and civil rights abuses, the archives have played a vital role in uncovering the truth. Despite recurrent fears about the files’ inaccuracies, they have furnished evidence that has helped

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victims identify those who were responsible for the wrongs done to them. Opening the files has provided a degree of certainty many societies in transition from dictatorship to democracy in other parts of the world do not have.33 As a result, the secret police archives have been an extremely useful resource for victims in supporting their claims for compensation and rehabilitation. According to Lavinia Stan, public access to declassified secret police files “democratizes truth seeking” because it allows victims to control the process and does not involve intermediaries such as the state or the courts.34 Moreover, this method of retrieving truth makes no attempt to control how citizens interpret the files, nor does it limit how individuals use the files’ contents to revise their recollections of the past.35 Although affected citizens are using the files to “set the record straight,” as the common metaphor goes, there is nothing prescriptive or straightforward in the ways the files are being read. Whereas truth and reconciliation commissions and courts of law hand down versions of the truth that, once on the record, can form the basis of collective memory, reconstructing memories “recovered” from the archives is a long-term project that has no built-in completion date or point of closure. There is no one moment in a nation’s history at which the truth is recovered and goes on the record, thereby entering the public domain, since individuals and historians continue to access the files in their own time and revisit their pasts at their own pace. As Stan has remarked, “[O]nce a state opens the files, the reconstruction of the past belongs not only to historians, but also to those who lived through times of repression.”36 A far more controversial use of secret police files has been by the media. Of course, the media’s intense interest has been primarily fueled by a legitimate desire to identify perpetrators and collaborators. In Germany, for instance, journalists were granted access to individuals’ secret police files because it was thought to be in the public interest to expose informants and “Personen der Zeitgeschichte” (persons of contemporary history). And we still find today that if there are justified grounds for suspicion, anyone in public life can be investigated.37 But there were many who harbored reservations about the value of opening the files, such as Pastor Rainer Eppelmann, who feared that the new freedoms might be jeopardized by witch hunts and denunciations, or Germany’s Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, who preferred to focus on rebuilding Germany.38 The Stasi Documents Agency, charged with overseeing the files, states on its website that it aims to continue to guarantee “transparency” in politics, economics, and society.39 Moreover, in granting the media free access to declassified file material about collaborators, the agency has sought to put an end to speculation about who was a collaborator, and thus to restore East Germans’ confidence in the new unified state. For instance, Wolf Biermann’s exposure of Sascha Anderson in October 1991

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proved divisive until clear evidence from Anderson’s former victims was adduced with the aid of declassified Stasi files obtained from the newly constituted Stasi Documents Agency. From the media’s perspective, the files have been an unexpected boon, because they have meant that journalists have had to rely less on confessions, and on ascertaining the veracity thereof. The files appear to deliver proof, at least in most instances. As one journalist for Die Zeit remarked in 1991 in the case of Sascha Anderson, who was evading telling the truth, “[D]ie Wahrheit ist eine Akte. Wer die Akte kennt, kennt die Wahrheit” (the truth is a file. Whoever knows the file knows the truth).40 Moreover, due to the existence of extensive secret archives, the emphasis on factual truth in the transitional justice process has represented an important shift away from the individual to the files and allowed the latter to bear the burden of proof about collaboration. In general, this has meant that transitional justice has been less reliant on perpetrators being willing to confess to having collaborated or on amnesties being offered as an incentive to confess and reveal the truth about human rights violations or other crimes. In contrast to Germany, Romania never adopted a coherent strategy to implement transitional justice: decommunization was not seen as “a key to democratization but as a factor that could further divide an already polarized society”41 living through a long and painful transition. Furthermore, revelations that important prolustration public figures had been Securitate agents or collaborators further delegitimized the process and made it seem a witch hunt rather than an opportunity for “moral rebirth.”42 Hungary embraced a “forgive-andforget approach,” and there, lustration came to be seen as ammunition against political opponents rather than a method to come to terms with the communist past.43 The emphasis in countries such as Germany and Romania on truth recovery through the files, however, has not been without its critics. The German approach has sometimes been found wanting because of its focus on factual or forensic truth at the expense of reconciliation or justice. Jennifer Yoder, an expert on postcommunist politics and society, has described it as a case of “truth without reconciliation.”44 In 1992, Polish novelist and politician Andrzej Szcypiorski was highly critical of the German decision to publicize the Stasi files, calling it “a sign of German masochism.”45 He rejected any suggestion that the Poles should do the same, contending that the network of informants was much smaller in Poland, and that at least half of the filed documents were false. In the Polish case, he maintained, it served no meaningful purpose to elevate the files to a position of moral authority, especially since many informants only agreed to collaborate after being coerced or tortured, often over the course of several interrogations.46

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Secret Police Files as Life Writing The files are a testament to the willingness of citizens of Eastern bloc dictatorships to collude in authoritarian systems of power. Hence, they are important for assessing the extent of participation in these regimes and for investigating human rights abuses and civil rights violations. But reading the files, as rich and extensive as they are, presents us with a number of challenges. They contain texts that often appear to straddle the divide between fiction and fact. To be sure, the files are bureaucratic texts— cold, dry records that capture lives in a typically impersonal manner. And yet they are also an extraordinary treasure trove of stories about lives, and occasionally even about emotions. Rather than thinking of them as mere sources, it seems therefore useful to think of the files as containing fragments of lives, or life stories. As Valentina Glajar suggests in her chapter, we can think of them as “file stories.” File stories can bear uncanny resemblances to fictional stories of espionage or to love stories and romantic tales. And sometimes these file stories can be stranger than fiction, be larger than life, and present scenarios that beggar belief. Secret police file stories often start out as paranoid or suspicious narratives—of treason or counterrevolutionary activity—that attribute illegal or subversive behavior to targets or suspects. Almost all secret police files begin with a suspicion or a hint of a dissenting political position that the regime needs to prove. Propelling each file are wider metanarratives about sabotage and enemy influence, capitalist conspiracies against international communism, which seem to urge the writer of the file—usually an officer—to try to make the story fit the crime, and the file’s subject fit the negative profile of a political dissenter. And once in writing and on file, these narrative profiles of the regime’s victims proved stubborn and enduring. As we shall see, in the post-Soviet era it took immense courage for victims to rid themselves of this chapter of their past and write their own stories. But for informants who willingly gave their consent to collaborating, it has proved even harder to write themselves out of secret police narratives in which they were such active participants. In terms of text type, secret police files have been difficult to classify. Various scholars have argued that we should think about them as a form of life writing. If we define life writing in broad terms as a form of nonfictional writing about the lives of real people, whether biographical or autobiographical, then file writing clearly seems to belong alongside other forms of writing about lives. Moreover, files tell narratives not only about lives; they are accounts of secret lives and were, at least originally, top-secret accounts of those lives—of the officers, their targets, and their informants—inscribed in the files. The cases represented in this book are, for instance, often about the secret lives of writers or other persons of public interest. According to Cristina Vatulescu, the secret police file is “a

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variation on the genre of the criminal record” that, in the case of Sovietstyle secret police files, extends beyond a crime to the whole biography of a suspect.47 For this reason, most scholars have argued that the literary genre the file most closely resembles is biography.48 But unlike ordinary biographies, secret police files tell the story of a life from a particular political and bureaucratic perspective. The files were written, as Sara Jones points out, “with different goals and different addressees” in mind.49 Often intended for a superior or someone higher up the chain of the secret police bureaucracy, the files offer paranoid and negative accounts of their subjects, making them comparable to “hostile unauthorized biographies.”50 Underpinning these biographies are often virulent “fantasies about conspiracies against public order”51 that seem to condemn the targets before they have been investigated. For the most part, files are either “arresting biographies,” as Vatulescu argues, or at the very least “incriminating biographies” that wrote targets into “self-perpetuating dossiers” or mythologies “over which they had little control,”52 as Fiona Capp (author and expert on Australian secret police files) explains. The aim of these bureaucratic biographies was simply social control, “to create acquiescent social subjects.”53 As texts, therefore, they were implicated in the workings of power, making them a pernicious “technology of power”54 deployed to demonize, harass, and intimidate suspects, and to arrest and even torture them.55 Despite the dry, bureaucratic nature of these texts, victims of the Stasi have frequently compared the German secret police files to literature. Some writers have commented on the hyperrealism of their files,56 while others have remarked on their hostile perspective57 and the wealth of banal, repetitive detail in them.58 Wolf Biermann was struck by the fantastical nature of the reports in his files, their often intimate quality, and the tediousness of the secret police’s language.59 Readers of Securitate files too have often commented on their wooden language. However, Lavinia Stan has argued that when reading security files, we need to bear in mind their original context as “corpora delicti,” as evidence of a crime, and reminds us that secret police files tend to convert everything into legal discourse.60 If we are to use the files in postcommunist contexts, legal and ideological terms need to be carefully deconstructed. If we read these secret police files like we would read literary texts, we discover that they contain extensive narratives of lives—secret, shocking, disturbing, even gripping accounts. We can read them for plot, for character development, or for turning points and denouements in the narrative. Or we can read them exclusively for endings—for an arrest, a sentence or fine, or a coerced agreement to collaborate. We find that files display a preoccupation with lies and deception, loyalty and betrayal, simulating and dissembling. They often have a unique structure and rhythm

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and emplot lives in particularly uneven ways, singling out only certain events in a target’s life that are deemed to be significant, usually in relation to fears about security risks, while ignoring other salient moments altogether. And importantly, files do not merely record lives; they impinge on and impact them in real ways as they tell their stories. They are a form of writing that leaves indelible traces on the lives of their subjects—marks and scars that can take a lifetime to heal. When we read the files, we are privy to secrets that were, as historian Kristie Macrakis points out, “jealously guarded [. . .] [and] have to be patiently excavated like artifacts at an archaeological dig.”61 Like relicts from a defunct era, these artifacts contain compelling microhistories of the past that we can use to forge narratives.62 If reinvested with the empathy and compassion that were lacking in the original contexts in which they were written, and subjected to a critical and ethical reading, the files can be made to tell rather different stories about the past. When reading declassified secret police files, scholars need to be critical of the veracity of the material while also acknowledging the injustices perpetrated by the secret police apparatus. Subjects once demonized as enemies of the state need to be carefully extracted from the rubble of denigrating ideology under which they were buried. For the colluders and collaborators in these secret police services, the mode of reading proposed here is also empathetic but one that does not suspend moral judgment. Sympathy for the complex and often messy stories of informers needs to be balanced carefully against the harms they were complicit in doing to others. In the case of the file stories presented in this volume, “ethical considerations” extend, as Eakins suggests, to “checking [the] potential for harm.”63 The harms that may stem from revealing intimate details about citizens who collaborated, or in the “public airing of private hurt,”64 need to be weighed up against the tangible benefits for those victims seeking truth, justice, and reconciliation. Through these kinds of reading, the chapters in this volume unlock those love stories, crime stories, spy stories, and stories of betrayal and revenge that are embedded within the secret archives. The focus of this book is on Cold War stories that can be excavated through reading secret police files and working through the revelations therein. The stories captured in the files have to do with the lasting effects of Soviet-style surveillance on the one hand, and collaboration, collusion, and betrayal on the other. Spanning the three former Soviet-bloc countries of East Germany, Romania, and Hungary, the essays collected here explore the implications of thinking about secret police files as biographical narratives of persons and institutions. In particular, they focus on the lives of writers, those associated with groups of writers, and other opinion makers and producers of culture.

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Part I: File Stories The chapters in part 1 seek to capture the files’ relationship to reality in metaphors or similes. Despite the original contexts in which informer files were embedded, they can be repurposed, as Alison Lewis argues in chapter 1, and read against the grain, to give readers insights into lives under communism and even into the emotions and habitus of informers. In this chapter, Lewis examines the files of the East German writers Paul Wiens (1922–82), Sascha Anderson (b. 1953), and Paul Wiens’s daughter Maja Wiens (b. 1952) and argues that their files reveal different instances of identity and habitus. Lewis understands habitus in the context of these Stasi informer files as “a subtle balancing act between personal motivations and official expectations” and as markedly influenced by external factors such as class, milieu, income, and generation. Based on his longlasting collaboration, Paul Wiens’s file points to him as a loyal, longstanding, complicitous, Stasi cultural functionary. The equally extensive file of Sascha Anderson, Lewis’s second case study, reveals a simultaneous “complicitous-and-dissident” habitus. Lewis’s third case study, Maja Wiens, who has both a collaborator’s and a victim’s file, could be characterized as having a sequentially “complicitous-and-dissident” habitus. While various parts of these files allow glimpses into these informers’ motivations and opinions, they also expose self-important and inflationary fantasies of the self as artist and cultural functionary, delusional defenses of betrayal—even fragmentary, schizoid narratives of double lives—but also honest confessions or recusant attitudes. Valentina Glajar’s and Corina L. Petrescu’s chapters turn to Securitate files from Stalinist Romania of the 1950s and to two political trials involving ethnic Germans from the Transylvanian town of Braşov: the Black Church Trial of 1958 and the German Writers’ Trial of 1959. In her approach, Glajar claims these files resemble a “shattered mirror, whose scattered pieces reflect and refract life fragments,” in part taking up East German dissident Vera Wollenberger’s comment that the files seem to hold up a distorted mirror to life—a “Zerrbild.” Telling stories from the files, as Glajar shows, means examining the splinters of these lives. Similarly, Petrescu regards the information embedded in files as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and explains that reading them is like piecing together a puzzle in which the individual shards or parts do not fit neatly together. There are always gaps and overlaps that raise new questions. Glajar and Petrescu focus on the file stories of two controversial figures involved in these trials: Marianne Siegmund (b. 1934) and Eginald Schlattner (b. 1933). Glajar writes about the recently unearthed and compelling file story of Siegmund, a Transylvanian Saxon who was coerced into collaborating with the Romanian secret police under the code name “Fink Susanne,” as she and Heinz Hahn (her West German fiancé and

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later husband) had inadvertently become involved with the GermanRomanians associated with the Black Church Trial of 1958. In spite of the dull redundancies inherent in every file, “Fink Susanne’s” file story turns out to be a pageturner. Glajar focuses specifically on the agent’s failed collaboration: the arrest, the agreement to serve as an informer, the information she provided, and her abandonment by the Securitate on grounds of ineffective collaboration. As Glajar shows, this file in particular is a revealing document about the Securitate’s strategies and repeated attempts to recruit Siegmund’s West German husband to spy for Romania. The wellthought-out plans and the “technical operations” (bugging) employed to achieve this goal expose the scheming inventiveness of the Securitate but also its limitations and failures, being often hampered by very rigid regulations and uncooperative informers. Petrescu investigates Schlattner’s entanglement with the Securitate and the role he played in the German Writers’ Trial of 1959, for which he served as witness for the prosecution.65 As his file reveals, he was arrested in December 1957 but refused to collaborate with his interrogators for four months, after which he began to zealously testify against his friends and against his own brother. For his collaboration he received a shorter sentence and was released in December 1959, while the other victims received sentences ranging from six years to life in prison with hard labor. (Fortunately, none of them finished their sentences, as they were all released after Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, Romania’s first communist leader, decreed several pardons between 1962 and 1964.) Since his release from prison, Schlattner has faced a barrage of accusations for betraying the five writers involved in the trial.66 He finally addressed this betrayal in his mea culpa autobiographical novel Rote Handschuhe (Red Gloves) in 2001. However, his depiction of the events and controversial representation of the victims, who by it felt victimized for a second time, attracted fierce criticism.67 Petrescu’s article addresses the accusations brought against Schlattner through the lens of both the incriminating and the exculpatory documents in his file.

Part II: Files, Memory, and Biography The following two chapters are concerned with the role that secret police files play in remembering the past and confronting writers’ own collusion with the regime, as well as the collaboration of family members. Victims of persecution of Eastern bloc regimes, who have examined their declassified files, have found them indispensable for reconstructing the truth. Yet many have found that confronting the truth about the past has been painful, especially when they discovered that close friends or even family members had betrayed them. For the perpetrators of the regime—specifically, for secret police informants—reading the files or learning about

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them has been no less troubling, since they have been forced to confront deeply uncomfortable truths about themselves. Annie Ring and Carol Anne Costabile-Heming both focus in their chapters on cases of East Germans who were exposed as Stasi informants and were subsequently forced to face the legacy of a past they had largely repressed or forgotten. Ring’s chapter is devoted to two well-known writers, Christa Wolf and Monika Maron, who, despite having amassed substantial victim files, were also found to have small informer files. She proposes reading these Stasi documents as “shadow-documents” in dialogue with more conventional forms of life writing. She reads Wolf’s and Maron’s autobiographical works against the backdrop of official Stasi documents designed to train officers in how to handle agents. Official guidelines stressed reliability and self-control as the main virtues of a successful informant. By contrast, Maron and Wolf both frame their past complicity in terms of a loss of agency and control, as a personal and ethical collapse. Using Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself, Ring argues that this collapse prevents them from fully remembering and, hence, from giving credible accounts of their actions and providing an ethical response to their critics. Both Wolf and Maron explore in their life writings the difficulties of assuming responsibility for past actions and the difficulties in illuminating memory’s blind spots. As Costabile-Heming demonstrates in her chapter, the legacy of the Stasi files continues to impact personal biographies and remains relevant in contemporary literature. She addresses a work of fiction, Stasiratte (Stasi Rat, 2012) by Jana Döhring, which was marketed as a novel but relates the author’s life as a Stasi informer. Döhring’s protagonist lives in denial of her past association with the Stasi until a former target of her surveillance starts to stalk her, which blurs the boundaries between perpetrator and victim. Under duress, she is forced to confront the incriminating biography about herself that the Stasi has on file and to present her side of the story. While informers typically write hostile biographies of others, in this instance, Costabile-Heming argues that the Stasi also created a hostile biography for the informer herself. She examines the narrative strategies that Döhring uses to assuage her feelings of guilt and to reclaim her life story.

Part III: Performing Files and Surveillance The last three chapters address performative approaches to the files and their stories of surveillance. As these chapters show, playwrights have struggled with the methodological challenges raised by any attempt to take the stories from the archives to the general public. Yet recent projects by performance collectives such as Rimini Protokoll have been successful in bringing files to the stage, to public spaces as street performances, or

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to the airwaves as radio plays. Helgard Hang, Stefan Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel have worked together under the name Rimini Protokoll since 2002. According to the trio’s website, they are a team of “‘author-directors’ active in the realm of theater, sound and radio plays, film, [and] installation.” The driving force behind their projects is “the continuous development of tools of the theater to allow for unusual perspectives on our reality.”68 Their goal and that of similar collectives is to educate their audiences through alienating visual, aural, and tactile experiences that recreate an uncomfortable and still unresolved past. Aniko Szucs analyzes the play Apaches on the Danube coauthored by Krisztina Kovács and Géza Bereményi after the former read the ÁVO’s files on a group of friends who secretly reenacted the traditions of the Native American Apache tribe in late 1950s, early 1960s Hungary as a means of carving out a niche for themselves within the country’s communist regime. The plotline juxtaposes two distinct historical periods—the early 1960s, when an ÁVO informant betrays his friends, and the present, when his grandson accidently meets the son of his former victim—in order to bring about a confrontation with the past. The play opened in Budapest in October 2009. While it relies on the archive files to create a historically authentic narrative, the play is a fictitious reconstruction of the group’s dissolution resulting from the reports of an informant whose actions ultimately lead to the murder of the group’s leader. This combination of facts and fiction provides the audience with an affective experience of life under surveillance in order to show that it is impossible to reconstruct historical events accurately only on the basis of archival documents due to their fragmented and often unreliable nature. Szucs introduces the term “document-affect” and defines it as “the vivid and visceral evocation of [. . .] historical records to authenticate [. . .] fictitious characters and historical events.” She employs it alongside Roger Bechtel’s “history-effect” to analyze how the play invites its audiences to distinguish between the generation who lived under the surveillance of the communist state and the generation who learns about it as a historical reality. Ulrike Garde’s chapter focuses on the intersections that dramatic artists confront between aesthetic choices and their sociopolitical impact when they deal with secret police files as source material. Garde does this by analyzing two performances: the documentary-style production Staats-Sicherheiten (State Securities, 2008) directed by Clemens Bechtel and the documentary-based audio tour and radio play 50 Aktenkilometer (50 Kilometers of Files, 2011) by the performance collective Rimini Protokoll. In Staats-Sicherheiten, former Stasi detainees in the notorious prison Hohenschönhausen give accounts of their experiences as victims in or out of prison directly to the audience. In 50 Aktenkilometer, individuals recreated their experiences with secret police surveillance through interviews with the Rimini Protokoll team, which recorded and later used

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fragments of these interviews either for a “radio play for walkers” through Berlin or for a traditional radio play. As Garde shows, despite their different formats, both productions bring file stories to life, on the one hand by not allowing them to be simply stored away in the archives of the Stasi and on the other by allowing the real victims and perpetrators to give voice to and be the protagonists of their own stories on the air as audio tours or radio plays. Yuliya Komska’s contribution looks at the biographical story of Radio Free Europe under the Securitate’s careful surveillance, as depicted in Alexandru Solomon’s documentary Cold Waves (2007). Komska argues that unlike other cinematic depictions of the station’s existence, Solomon’s work casts surveillance as a force that takes over both the minds and the bodies of all parties involved. Illegal throughout the Eastern bloc because of its open criticism of the region’s political regimes, Radio Free Europe was not only under surveillance by the Securitate, which worked diligently at infiltrating it with informants,69 but also the target of a bombing in 1981 meant to silence it. Romania’s authorities saw the station as a major threat, and the Securitate waged a war on it under the operation it called “Ether,” which included intimidation, threats of murder and kidnapping, physical attacks on journalists working for the station, and the aforementioned attack on its headquarters in Munich.70 Komska singles out Cold Waves not only for its unconventional aesthetics—its at times autobiographical take on surveillance, as the film’s director lived through some of the events he brings to the screen, and its use of experimental techniques that articulate the importance of sight and hearing—but also for its singular Eastern European vantage point. Komska examines the sonic and visual constitution of the station’s depiction in Solomon’s film from the viewpoint of film and radio history and theory, arguing that Solomon’s montages reference the concepts of the “KinoEye” and “Radio-Ear” coined by Soviet propaganda filmmaker Dziga Vertov and embodied in his Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass (1931). While Vertov used his art to shape a world order that validated the secret police and its entire modus operandi, Solomon helps deconstruct that same order and thus comes to terms with its legacy. Rather than being a mere source, secret police files tell complex stories about a communist past that continues to define and shape the lives of former victims and informers. These file stories have fascinated writers, directors, and playwrights across Europe and beyond, and continue to inspire them. From the cinematic depiction of a Securitate collaborator in Faţă în faţă (Face to Face; Barna, 1999) to the Hollywood-type, glamorized Stasi story in Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others; von Donnersmarck, 2006), the recent television series Weißensee (2010–) and Deutschland 83 (Germany 83, 2015), and the lesser known documentary Vaterlandsverräter (Traitor to the Fatherland; Hendel, 2011); from the

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publication of Christa Wolf’s informer file (Akteneinsicht Christa Wolf; Access to the File Christa Wolf, 1993) to Herta Müller’s disparaging depiction of her confrontation with her own Securitate victim file (Cristina und ihre Attrappe; Cristina and Her Double, 2009); from the failed fictionalized mea culpa account in Eginald Schlattner’s Rote Handschuhe to self-victimizing renditions of collaboration in Jana Döhring’s Stasiratte (Stasi Rat, 2012)—in all these cases, films and literary texts alike have contributed to and further fueled an almost obsessive preoccupation with files and the secrets they entail. Over and above their appeal as captivating stories, these files are about real people and their lives, about statesponsored surveillance and human rights abuses, about collaboration and betrayal, and about an uncomfortable past whose impact on the present has yet to be fully grasped.

Notes 1

Bruce, The Firm, 13.

2

Stan, “Inside the Securitate Archives.”

3

Gieseke, Die Hauptamtlichen Mitarbeiter, 96.

4

Macrakis, Seduced by Secrets, xiv.

5

This number refers to the files that have been transferred from the postcommunist Serviciul Român de Informații (SRI; Romanian Intelligence Service) to CNSAS (National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archive) by December 2014, and it amounts to 1.3 million files (a total of 1.5 million volumes). Each year, new files are being transferred; in 2014, 475 meters were added, amounting to 11,207 files. By the end of 2014, 99 percent of all the Securitate files had been transferred. See Consiliului Naţional pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securităţii [National Council for the Study of the Securitate], “Raport de Activitate 2014” [Annual activity report 2014], 7, 33–34, accessed July 25, 2015, http://www. cnsas.ro/documente/rapoarte/Raport%20CNSAS%202014.pdf. 6

Boia, History and Myth, 232.

7

According to the Hungarian legislation, file access relies on the willingness of the postcommunist information services to declassify the ÁVH’s files and make them available to the Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára (Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security), the institution charged with making the files available for research. The number listed above relies on the statements of the postcommunist secret services and is not generally accepted as accurate. Stan offers the following breakdown of the Historical Archive’s holdings: “[S]ome 70000 investigation files, 15000 operative files, 5600 recruitment files, 8000 work files and almost 4000 ‘building’ files (covering life in economic units), reports, studies, lists and manuals” (Stan, “Goulash Justice,” 286). In 2005, the opposition party Fidesz estimated the total number of files to cover one kilometer (ibid., 287). Ungváry and Tabajdi give the number 3627.49 meters of files (July 1, 2005; “Ungarn,” 549).

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8

Müller, Narratives of Guilt and Compliance, 132.

9

See Gieseke, Die Hauptamtlichen Mitarbeiter, 25–26.

10

See Walther, Sicherungsbereich Literatur, 554.

11

Stan, Transitional Justice, 62. In this volume we are using the term “source” to refer to Securitate informers for the following reasons: According to Article 3, Paragraph b of Romanian Law No. 293/2008, a collaborator is someone who “has supplied information regardless of its form, such as written notes and reports, verbal communications written down by employees of the Securitate, through which actions or attitudes were denounced which were hostile to the totalitarian communist regime and aimed at limiting fundamental human rights and liberties” (care a furnizat informaţii, indiferent sub ce forma, precum note şi rapoarte scrise, relatări verbale consemnate de lucrătorii Securităţii, prin care se denunţau activităţile sau atitudinile potrivnice regimului totalitar comunist şi care au vizat îngrădirea drepturilor şi libertăţilor fundamentale ale omului; in Monitorul Oficial al României [Official Monitor of Romania], part 1, no. 800, November 28, 2008). The two conditions must be fulfilled simultaneously and cumulatively. If none of the conditions are met, CNSAS issues a certificate of noncollaboration (“Adeverinţă”). If just one condition is met, CNSAS issues the same certificate of noncollaboration but with an addendum explaining which of the two conditions were met and in what context. Given the complex implications of the term “collaborator,” we chose the more neutral one, “source,” to refer to any person who provided information to the Securitate during its existence between 1948 and 1989 irrespective of the CNSAS’s pronouncement about that person’s involvement with the secret police forces. 12

Stan, “Inside the Securitate Archives.”

13

Ibid.

14

Kiss, “Hungary,” 230.

15

Ungváry and Tabajdi, 544.

16

Maennel, Auf sie war Verlass, 121.

17

Ibid., 126.

18

Ibid., 128.

19

For officers see http://www.cnsas.ro/cadrele_securitatii.html and for collaborators see http://www.cnsas.ro/colaboratori.html, both accessed May 22, 2015. Between May 8 and June 5, 2008, alone, CNSAS issued ninety-nine certificates of noncollaboration for women. Among them seven fulfilled one of the two conditions, so that in accordance with the law they could not be identified as collaborators, but they were also not unquestionably cleared of any ties to the Securitate. This distinction is important as it shows that the ties between the Securitate and women were equally complex as those between the Securitate and men. 20

Romania passed its first law (Law No. 187) granting access to the files both to victims and victimizers in 1999 and modified it several times since to facilitate access to the files not only for its citizens but also for citizens of other NATO countries. Act 140 of 1996 gave Czechs access to their own files. In Hungary it was Act XXIII of 1994, which offered only limited access to very few files, until it was amended to include larger numbers of files open to the public. Poland

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regulated its citizens’ partial access in 1997 but only for the victims of the communist regime. Slovakia recognized its citizens’ right to view their own files only in mid-2002. See Stan, ed., Transitional Justice in Eastern Europe, “Romania,” 128–51 (Stan); “Czechoslovakia and the Czech and Slovak Republics,” 37–75 (Nadya Nedelsky); “Hungary,” 102–27 (Stan); “Poland,” 76–101 (Stan). Albania waited until 2015 to reluctantly pass a law that would allow access to files, but it has yet to be implemented (see Mejdini, “Albania Secret Police Files”). 21

Horne and Levi, “Does Lustration Promote Trustworthy Governance?,” 53.

22

Article 5 of Law No. 187/1999, accessed March 23, 2015, http://www. cnsas.ro/documente/cadru_legal/LEGE%20187_1999.pdf. Point 1 of Article 5 defines the Securitate as a political police as follows: “By political police one understands all those activities of the state security or of other structures and institutions with a repressive character, which pertained to the instauration and preservation of the totalitarian communist power, alongside the annihilation or limitation of the fundamental rights and liberties of man” (Prin poliţie politică se înţeleg toate acele activităţi ale securităţii statului sau ale altor structuri şi instituţii cu caracter represiv, care au vizat instaurarea şi menţinerea puterii totalitar comuniste, precum şi suprimarea sau îngrădirea drepturilor şi libertăţilor fundamentale ale omului). 23

Ordinance No. 24, accessed March 23, 2015, http://www.cnsas.ro/ documente/cadru_legal/OUG%2024_2008.pdf. 24

Stan, Transitional Justice, 86.

25

Der Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, “BStU in Zahlen,” http://www. bstu.bund.de/DE/BundesbeauftragterUndBehoerde/Aktuelles/20150107_ statistik-2014.html. Hereafter this source will appear with the abbreviation BStU. 26

Ibid., 2014.

27

CNSAS, “Raport de Activitate 2014,” 20, accessed July 25, 2015, http:// www.cnsas.ro/documente/rapoarte/Raport%20CNSAS%202014.pdf. According to this annual report, 3,514 affected persons and researchers visited CNSAS and looked at 19,327 volumes in 2014 (20). 28

Annual Report of the Historical Archives, 14, accessed April 23, 2015, http:// www.abtl.hu/sites/default/files/beszamolok/2013_eves_beszamolo.pdf. The editors thank Dr. Krisztina Slachta for her help with the Hungarian originals. 29

Some countries such as Poland have taken a more lenient approach to the communist past, and lustration laws have allowed collaborators to keep their secret police files confidential as long as they were willing to admit to having been collaborators (Horne and Levi, “Does Lustration Promote Trustworthy Governance?,” 53).

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30

David, Lustration and Transitional Justice, 77–78.

31

Ibid., 80.

32

Stan, “Neither Forgiving,” 380.

33

See Stockwell, Reframing the Transnational Justice Paradigm, 32.

34

Stan, Transitional Justice, 60.

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35

Ibid.

36

Ibid.

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37

BStU, “Die Akteneinsicht in der Stasi-Unterlagen-Behörde,” http://www. bstu.bund.de/DE/Akteneinsicht/Akteneinsicht_node.html. 38

Dennis, Stasi, 236–37.

39

Ibid.

40

Radisch, “Warten auf Montag,” 40.

41

Stan, “Neither Forgiving,” 366.

42

Stan, Transitional Justice, 87.

43

Kiss, “Hungary,” 235.

44

Yoder, “Truth without Reconciliation,” 59.

45

“ein Zeichen des deutschen Masochismus”: Szcypiorski, “Die Deutschen quälen sich,” 368. 46

Ibid.

47

Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics, 32.

48

Capp, Writers Defiled, xv; Saunders, “Anecdote in Biographic Representation,” 125–31; Lewis, “Reading and Writing,” 383; Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics, 13; Jones, “Conflicting Evidence,” 191. 49

Jones, “Conflicting Evidence,” 191.

50

Lewis, “Reading and Writing,” 383.

51

LaCapra, History and Criticism, 126.

52

Capp, Writers Defiled, 5.

53

Ibid., 4.

54

Lewis, “Reading and Writing,” 388.

55

Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics, 13–15.

56

Wagner, “Stasi-Gift,” 9.

57

Rathenow, “Teile zu keinem Bild,” 78; Wagner, “Stasi-Gift,” 7.

58

Biermann, “Tiefer als unter die Haut,” 114, 123.

59

Ibid., 113, 116, 126.

60

Stan, Transitional Justice, 82.

61

Macrakis, Seduced by Secrets, xiv.

62

Ginzburg, “Microhistory,” 26.

63

Eakin, Ethics of Life Writing, 4.

64

Ibid., 3.

65

Both Schlattner’s personal surveillance file and the files pertaining to the trial are housed by CNSAS and not by the archives of the military courthouse in Braşov where the trial was held in 1959. In the 1950s the Securitate took over the files of all cases tried by military courts and higher courts of appeal. Furthermore, the Securitate had gathered the documentation that served as evidence in both

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the Black Church Trial and the German Writers’ Trial, which it filed away in its archive after the trials. 66

Wolf von Aichelburg (1912–94), Hans Bergel (b.1925), Andreas Birkner (1911–98), Georg Scherg (1917–2002), and Harald Siegmund (1930–2012). 67

In July 2014 in an interview with Glajar, Schlattner insisted that his depiction is indeed heavy-handed (“rücksichtslos”) but accurate. 68

Rimini Protokoll website, accessed March 16, 2015, www.rimini-protokoll.de/ website/en/about.html. 69

One of the most painful discoveries in this sense was that of Constantin Bălăceanu-Stolnici’s willing collaboration with the Securitate. See Munteanu, “Top 5.” 70

Cummings, “Ether War,” 172–75.

Bibliography Államvédelmi Hatóság [Hungarian State Protection Authority]. “Egy átlagos munkaév” [Annual reports]. Accessed April, 2015. http://www.abtl.hu/ leveltar/eves_beszamolok. Barna, Marius, dir. Faţă în faţă [Face to Face]. Romania, 1999. Berger, Edward, and Samira Radsi, dir. Deutschland 83. Germany, 2015. Biermann, Wolf. “Tiefer als unter die Haut: Über Schweinehunde, halbe Helden, Intimitäten und andere Funde aus meinen Stasi-Akten.” In Der Sturz des Dädalus oder Eizes für die Eingeborenen der Fidschi-Inseln über den IM Judas Ischariot und Kuddelmuddel in Deutschland seit dem Goldkrieg, 112– 38. Cologne: Kiepeneuer & Witsch, 1992. Boia, Lucian. History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2001. Bruce, Gary. The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Der Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik. “Die Akteneinsicht in der Stasi-Unterlagen-Behörde.” Accessed November 11, 2014. http:// www.bstu.bund.de/DE/BundesbeauftragterUndBehoerde/Chronik_der_ Behoerde/_node.html#doc2638696bodyText3. ———.“BStU in Zahlen.” Accessed November 11, 2014. http://www.bstu. bund.de/DE/BundesbeauftragterUndBehoerde/BStUZahlen/_node.html. Capp, Fiona. Writers Defiled: Security Surveillance of Australian Authors and Intellectuals. Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1993. Consiliului Naţional pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securităţii [National Council for the Study of the Securitate]. “Rapoarte anuale” [Annual reports]. Accessed July 2015. http://www.cnsas.ro/rapoarte.html. Cummings, Richard H. “The Ether War: Hostile Intelligence Activities Directed against Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and the Émigré Community in Munich during the Cold War.” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 6, no. 2 (2008): 168–82.

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David, Roman. Lustration and Transitional Justice: Personnel Systems in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Dennis, Mike. The Stasi: Myth and Reality. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014. Döhring, Jana. Stasiratte [Stasi Rat]. Cologne: Hartriegel, 2012. Eakin, John Paul, ed. The Ethics of Life Writing. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. Fromm, Friedemann, dir. Weißensee. Germany, 2010–present. Gieseke, Jens. Die Hauptamtlichen Mitarbeiter der Staatssicherheit: Personalstruktur und Lebenswelt 1950–1989/90. Berlin: Ch. Links, 2000. Ginzburg, Carlo. “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know About It.” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 1 (1993): 10–35. Hendel, Annekatrin, dir. Vaterlandsverräter [Traitor to the Fatherland]. Germany, 2011. Horne, Cynthia M., and Margaret Levi. “Does Lustration Promote Trustworthy Governance? An Exploration of the Experience of Central and Eastern Europe.” In Building a Trustworthy State in Post-Socialist Transition, edited by János Kornai and Susan Rose-Ackerman, 52–74. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Jones, Sara. “Conflicting Evidence: Hermann Kant and the Opening of the Stasi Files.” German Life & Letters 62, no. 2 (2009): 190–205. Kiss, Csilla. “Hungary.” In Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice, vol. 2, edited by Lavinia Stan and Nadya Nedelsky, 230–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. LaCapra, Dominick. History and Criticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Lewis, Alison. “Reading and Writing the Stasi File: On the Uses and Abuses of the File as (Auto)Biography.” German Life & Letters 56, no. 4 (2003): 377–97. Macrakis, Kristie. Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Maennel, Annette. Auf sie war Verlass: Frauen und Stasi. Berlin: Elefanten Press Verlag, 1998. Mejdini, Fatjona. “Albania Secret Police Files Stay under Wraps.” Balkan Insight, July 8, 2016. Accessed July 11, 2016. http://www.balkaninsight. com/en/article/albania-fails-to-open-the-communists-secret-files-0707-2016. Monitorul Oficial al României, part 1, no. 800. November 28, 2008. Müller, Barbara. Narratives of Guilt and Compliance in Unified Germany: Stasi Informers and Their Impact on Society. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 1999. Müller, Herta. Cristina und ihre Attrappe oder Was (nicht) in den Akten der Securitate steht. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009. Munteanu, Neculai Constantin. “Top 5: Cei mai scârboşi informatori” [Top 5: The Most Disgusting Informants]. Radio Europa Liberă [Radio Free Europe], October 11, 2011. Accessed April 20, 2015. http://www.europalibera.org/content/article/24356620.html. Nedelsky, Nadja. “Czechoslovakia and the Czech and Slovak Republics.” In Stan, Transitional Justice in Eastern Europe, 37–75. Radisch, Iris. “Warten auf Montag.” Die Zeit, November 22, 1991, 40.

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Rathenow, Lutz. “Teile zu keinem Bild oder das Puzzle von der geheimen Macht.” In Aktenkundig, edited by Hans Joachim Schädlich, 62–90. Berlin: Rowohlt, 1992. Saunders, David. “Anecdote in Biographic Representation.” In Not the Whole Story: Tellings and Tailings from the ASPACLS Conference on “Narrative,” edited by Ian Reid and Sneja Gunew, 125–31. Sydney: Local Consumption Publications, 1984. Schlattner, Eginald. Rote Handschuhe [Red Gloves]. Vienna: Zsolnay, 2001. Stan, Lavinia. “Goulash Justice for Goulash Communism? Explaining Transitional Justice in Hungary.” Studia Politica: Romanian Political Science Review 7, no. 2 (2007): 269–91. ———. “Poland.” In Stan, Transitional Justice in Eastern Europe, 76–101. ———. “Hungary.” In Stan, Transitional Justice in Eastern Europe, 102–27. ———. “Romania.” In Stan, Transitional Justice in Eastern Europe, 128–51. ———. “Inside the Securitate Archives.” Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2010. ———. “Neither Forgiving Nor Punishing? Evaluating Transitional Justice in Romania.” In After Oppression: Transitional Justice in Latin America and Eastern Europe, edited by Vesselin Popovski and Mónica Serrano, 363–89. Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2012. ———. Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Romania: The Politics of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. ———, ed. Transitional Justice in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. New York: Routledge, 2009. Stockwell, Jill. Reframing the Transitional Justice Paradigm: Women’s Affective Memories in Post-Dictatorial Argentina. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2014. Szcypiorski, Andrzej. “Die Deutschen quälen sich mit der Vergangenheit.” In MachtSpiele: Literatur und Staatssicherheit, edited by Peter Böthig and Klaus Michael, 367–72. Leipzig: Reclam Leipzig, 1993. Ungváry, Krisztián, and Gabor Tabajdi. “Ungarn.” In Handbuch der kommunistischen Geheimdienste in Osteuropa 1944–1991, edited by Łukasz Kamiński, Krzysztof Persak, and Jens Gieseke, 481–554. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009. Vatulescu, Cristina. Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. von Donnersmarck, Florian Henckel, dir. Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others). Germany, 2006. Wagner, Bernd. “Stasi-Gift: Über Akten, Verbände, Literatur und einige IMs.” StasiSachen 4 (Europäische Ideen 84) (1993): 7–14. Walther, Joachim. Sicherungsbereich Literatur: Schriftsteller und Staatssicherheit in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik. Berlin: Ch. Links, 1996. Wollenberger, Vera. Virus der Heuchler: Innenansicht aus Stasi-Akten. Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1992. Yoder, Jennifer. “Truth without Reconciliation: An Appraisal of the Enquete Commission on the SED Dictatorship in Germany.” German Politics 8, no. 3 (1999): 59–80.

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Part I File Stories

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1: The Secret Lives and Files of Stasi Collaborators: Reading Secret Police Files for Identity and Habitus Alison Lewis

Secret Police Files and the Life Stories of Stasi Informers

B

in the early nineties, the secret police files of Stasi informers (or Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter) employed by the domestic branch of the East German secret police in the Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit) represented top-secret narratives that were never intended to become public documents. Once unmoored from these original contexts, the files have become a public good, used to tell stories about the communist past and individuals’ entanglement with authority. Security files are a rich archive about power and the secret life of power. And because Cold War surveillance needed humans, rather than technology, to execute it, the Stasi archive is a powerful source of information about human lives— the secret lives of “enemies of the state” under surveillance as well as of those who performed the surveillance. To turn this information into stories, secret police files must first be made intelligible, and this involves acknowledging their narrative character. According to Paul Ricoeur, life stories, whether historical or fictional, “become more intelligible when what one applies to them are the narrative models or plots borrowed from history or fiction.”1 With careful interpretation, therefore, the secret police dossiers of Stasi informants can be repurposed to offer up valuable insights into the secret lives of the regime’s collaborators.2 This chapter argues for the usefulness of reading the Stasi files and their emplotment of lives in terms of life writing. As will be demonstrated in three case studies, the files of informers offer detailed and complex backstories of individuals’ entanglements with the secret police—stories that sometimes accompanied their public and private lives like an insistent shadow and sometimes ran at odds with them. Each of these file stories has its own beginning, middle, and ending, some EFORE THEY WERE DECLASSIFIED UNDER LUSTRATION LEGISLATION

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resulting in a relatively stable, enduring relationship between the informant and the Ministry for State Security and some ending in tears, with a falling-out or a gradual parting of ways, usually prompted by the emergence of irreconcilable ideological differences between informer and the Stasi. These stories of secret entanglements can help shed light on the role the Stasi played in structuring ordinary East German lives as well as on informers’ motivations. In one of the following cases, there are no autobiographical accounts to augment the files’ stories; in another, the autobiographical narratives are inconclusive; and in the third, the informer has been unwilling to present her side of the story. Although all security files involve espionage, as texts they rarely display the high drama we have come to expect from spy novels or detective fiction. To be sure, the informer file has at its center a lone undercover agent as protagonist, and his faceless handler. Broadly speaking, the file’s purpose is to uncover evidence of subversive or treasonous activity or intent, which is a plot not far removed from popular fiction or film. The informer is, curiously, frequently more detective than secret agent, and his or her main objective is to detect suspicious behaviors and to report on possible enemy influences rather than to engage in risky undercover adventures of a more conventional espionage kind. Hence, the files of domestic agents rarely involve the sort of life-threatening and thrilling spying missions that have come to be identified with the fictional world of foreign espionage. The reality of the life of the domestic Stasi agent was far more prosaic, his or her policing activities frequently unexciting and tedious. In their description of the lives of writers and intellectuals, the now declassified contents of Stasi files reproduce this banality of the everyday life of undercover agents. This is one reason we might be tempted to dismiss the files as worthless pieces of testimony. However, this would be to overlook the richness of the files and pass up an opportunity to mine this rich seam of seemingly insignificant data about the past for the purposes of illuminating the workings of communist power. As we shall see, the banal detail itself offers vital clues as to the diversity of collaborators’ motivations, desires, and behaviors, or what will be called here their “habitus.” The pedestrian nature of much file writing stems largely from the fact that secret police files are bureaucratic documents. The files typically contain “exact”3 and “dry” narratives, usually devoid of emotion or pity, as befits the ideological and bureaucratic purpose for which they were written. They are especially good at capturing the surface minutiae of everyday life, often in excruciating, hyperrealistic detail. Reading the files, however, we soon discover that in this context, no amount of detail is redundant or superfluous, since any snippet of information can reveal itself later to be an important piece of intelligence. The individual entries in Stasi files were like jigsaw puzzle pieces waiting to be pieced together

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into a meaningful pattern by a perceptive officer or even a discerning informer. Some pieces didn’t fit into any pattern, but this neither stopped informers from offering up tidbits of gossip to their handlers nor deterred officers from filing irrelevant information. The seemingly harmless surface meaning of many informers’ texts, of course, stands in stark contrast to the deeper meaning that could be inferred from them at any time by the ministry. Once the material was filed, departments were able to reinterpret intelligence in light of later developments, credit it with fresh weight, and use it in new operational contexts. As classified official documents of an authoritarian regime, however, Stasi files were always underpinned by a pervasive and all-consuming paranoia. All records kept by the Stasi, whether in victim or informer files, were at some level figments of a chronically suspicious imagination; even when the Stasi came to trust a source, it was only a conditionally bestowed trust. Fantasies and fears about the “enemy” were what propelled the modes of emplotment of the sometimes random facts in the files. It is these overarching phantoms or figments of the imagination that turn the data in the files into stories—stories about treachery, treason, defection, and betrayal. The activities of the Stasi were above all fueled by powerful metanarratives—what has been called the files’ “Herrschaftswissen” (knowledge of power)4—about attacks on the East German state, capitalist plots, and secret enemy infiltration. These subtexts are what determine what kind of story informers’ files tell. We should not lose sight of the fact that for all their similarity to detective and spy fiction, Stasi files are (like all bureaucratic documents) referential narratives about real people and their real-life actions. The files are not only about real people; they are official narratives that were written specifically for a secret political archive. The most revealing sections of informers’ files (IM-Akte) are the “Treffberichte” (meeting reports), which the officers filed after carrying out their clandestine meetings with their sources. Attached to these reports are the informers’ own authored reports, which were either recorded during the meeting and transcribed later or hand-written by the informer beforehand and turned in at the meeting. In the latter case, these sections of the files contain first-person narratives, which offer the most immediate accounts of informers’ motivations, opinions, and psychology. Even when the officer recording and transcribing the informer’s oral report overwrote the original account with his own interpretation, or summarized the informant’s account, these sections of the files provide vital clues as to informers’ attitudes about espionage work and how those evolved over time. It is these dossier sections in particular that bear most similarity to autobiographical texts, even where the officer has changed the first-person narrative into a third-person account. These reports offer us insights into how the Stasi came to structure informers’ identities. They can, for

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example, be read against the grain for evidence of forms of “self-invention” that the informers indulged in5 and tales of double lives. They can also be read for their plot resolutions and the ways associations with the Stasi ended, and whether those should be read as tales of stoic, unbroken loyalty, of conflicted allegiances, or of disillusionment and mutual distrust. Other sections of the secret police dossiers, in particular those that capture the informant in demographic and bureaucratic terms, arguably tell us less about human psychology and feelings, and more about informers as social beings. Classified file material in general contains a wealth of detail on social practices such as the habits of friendship networks, and it provides information on concomitant political dispositions as well as choices. Above all, informants’ dossiers offer instructive glimpses of the habitus of collaborators and the “structuring structures”6 that informed and shaped their behaviors. We can define habitus, following the lead of Pierre Bourdieu, as “the unifying, generative principle of all practices”7 consisting of a set of dispositions, structured by external forces (class, income, milieu, and even generation), that shapes actions. In their study of the literary journal Sinn und Form, Parker and Philpotts distinguish between the categories of personal habitus (as a set of individual attitudes and opinions typical of an individual’s disposition) and the habitus accrued by dint of holding an office.8 An individual’s actions are the result of a subtle balancing act between personal motivations and official expectations.9 Actions taken by a writer at any one point in time are also the product of a tension between the fields of power and culture. Hence, we can think of collaborators’ habitus as being shaped by multiple forces and pressures at any given moment but also as subject to change over time, since subjects can make conscious decisions, such as to continue to collaborate or to break off ties with the Stasi. For this reason, it will be argued that the files, like much literature itself, present a type of “social phenomenology”10 of life under communism. All three cases of collaboration discussed here are taken from the spheres of literature and provide instances of an intense, medium-tolong-term association with the Stasi. As all three cases illustrate, the story of informers’ relationships to the Stasi is rarely an ideal or typical one, in which an informant signs up to collaborate out of a sense of undivided loyalty to the regime, or “on the basis of political-ideological conviction,”11 as it was officially called, and stays unswervingly on track for the duration of their involvement. Although the Stasi liked to present this as a typical scenario,12 there were many other bases for the relationship, many of which resulted from coercion or blackmail or an individual’s urge to make amends for some misdemeanor. From the Stasi’s perspective, all recruitment stories aimed at having a “happy end,” resulting in a successful collaboration and producing “the necessary political and ideological willingness to serve.”13 In reality, however, informers’ stories had rather different plots.

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My first case, Paul Wiens (1922–82), belongs to the first generation of East German writers—the “founding generation,”14 who were fully integrated into official cultural circles. My second and third examples are from the generation of writers often referred to as “those born into the GDR.”15 Sascha Anderson (b. 1953) was a notorious activist in the underground—once celebrated as an avant-garde poet until Wolf Biermann famously denounced him as “Sascha Arschloch” (Sascha Asshole) in 1991 after discovering that Anderson had worked for the Stasi. My last example is the lesser known writer and daughter of Paul Wiens, Maja Wiens (b. 1952), who was a high-caliber Stasi informant and later a victim. All three cases represent instances of Stasi-structured identity and habitus. Connections to the Stasi always had to remain secret, and hence, informers displayed rather different attitudes in public and toward friends, and in some cases expressed views that were diametrically opposed to a disposition that one would associate with the Stasi or a state institution. They were all forced to lead double lives, which the secret police files can help illuminate and thereby reveal those aspects of informers’ habitus that would otherwise be obscured from view. Paul Wiens’s extensive Stasi informer file—the personal sections contain three folders with 961 sheets, and the separately filed reports sections total five folders and 1,723 sheets16—points to him as having been a loyal cultural functionary, though one who came to identify not only with the Party but with the secret agenda of the Stasi as well. Wiens’s file story gets off to a shaky start and breaks off in the middle, but it eventually turns into a stable or enduring narrative of collaboration in which Wiens’s public persona and his secret identity ran happily in parallel until his death.17 Wiens’s public identity and lavish lifestyle, as we shall see, was heavily dependent on the Stasi. Anderson’s equally voluminous secret police dossier, which amounts to eleven folders,18 is a far rarer example of an informant who had multiple, competing identities and conflicted loyalties over the course of his collaboration. This resulted in a simultaneously (as opposed to sequentially, which we will see presently) “complicitous-and-dissident” habitus, which is in evidence in his file. Anderson’s Stasi story also gets off to a shaky start but has an abrupt and undesirable ending with his defection to the West in 1986. Like Paul Wiens, Anderson has only one file story (i.e., a collaborator story), and the emplotment of that story runs counter to his public persona. Maja Wiens’s Stasi dossier consists of ten folders and totals 2,491 sheets, which include her collaborator file (kept from 1978 to 1983/84) and her victim file (spanning the years 1986 to 1989).19 Maja Wiens can be characterized as having a sequentially “complicitous-and-dissident” habitus, which although a more common type of biography is still unusual since both file sections are voluminous and both periods (of collaboration

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and of victimization) are substantial. In contrast to the other two case studies we shall consider, Maja Wiens has two file stories. Her informant story has almost exemplary beginnings but a disastrous ending from the Stasi’s point of view, when it was forced to place her under surveillance. Her file stories are thus underpinned by opposing metanarratives: In her first life, she was a friend of the regime, helping to detect and arrest enemies. In her second life, she was an enemy of the state.

Paul Wiens: Loyal Stasi Agent and Jet-Setting Cultural Functionary Born in Königsberg, Paul Wiens was first enlisted as an informant in 1962 with the flattering undercover name of “Dichter” (Poet) and continued to operate as a high-ranking informant in literary circles until his death in April 1982. He belonged to the category of “Geheimer Informator” (Secret Informer), the precursor to the more common category “Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter” (Unofficial Informant), and by 1976 he had been promoted to the elite ranks of “Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter im besonderen Einsatz” (Informant for Specialist Tasks, or IME). Born to a Jewish mother on August 17, 1922, Wiens emigrated with his family to Berlin at a young age. Right after the National Socialists came to power, he escaped to an elite Swiss boarding school, where he remained safe from persecution for most of the the Second World War. After completing his schooling, however, he went to Vienna, where his mother was living in hiding, and was arrested for seditious behavior in 1943. Between 1943 and 1945 he passed through two concentration camps.20 In 1947/48, he emigrated to the Soviet Zone of Occupation, where he quickly established himself as an editor, writer, journalist, and card-carrying member of the East German Writers’ Union and the East German P.E.N. Club. Like fellow assimilated Jewish communists Stephan Hermlin, Stefan Heym, and Anna Seghers, Wiens saw himself first and foremost as a communist, abandoning his Jewish identity in favor of “red assimilation” because he believed that Jewish emancipation could only be achieved through the communist movement. As Dennis and LaPorte argue, Jewish assimilation in the GDR also required a “high level of political and cultural conformity.”21 With the help of influential contacts such as exiled poet Johannes R. Becher, Wiens threw himself behind the communist nation-building project. In the fifties, he published several affirmative collections of poetry, political songs, and children’s books, and wrote a number of film scripts and radio plays as well as essays and opinion pieces. It is easy to see why Wiens was an attractive prospect for the ministry, with his many national and international contacts, his command of foreign languages, and his cosmopolitan background. By 1959 he had won the National Prize for

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his contributions to literature and was regarded as being closely aligned with official literary culture, becoming president of the Berlin section of the Writers’ Union in May 1961. He was first approached to work for the secret police after the erection of the Berlin Wall. A character assessment on file notes that he “was an extremely clever and intelligent person [. . .]. In his deportment he is always proper and consistent. He is a staunch defender of his opinions and beliefs. He is a very sociable person who is constantly expanding his group of contacts.”22 Wiens’s initial reasons for agreeing to collaborate with the Stasi were a mixture of personal, professional, and political factors.23 Wiens had just divorced his first wife, Erika Lautenschlager, and his financial difficulties are often a topic in his files.24 Wietersheim suggests he may have thought he could influence the direction of cultural politics if he established good working relations with the Stasi, citing opportunism as another possible motive.25 The first six years of cooperation with the Stasi, however, were not smooth sailing, and Lieutenant Schiller noted in 1968 that Wiens took a “negative attitude to cultural politics” and “adopted a partially hostile position.”26 Schiller was also concerned about Wiens’s extreme individualism and stressed the point that Wiens required special handling: “When issuing assignments attention must be paid to choosing the right form so that his self-esteem is not offended.”27 Ironically, in this phase of his career in which he consolidated his standing as a cultural functionary, he came under increasing ideological criticism, and in 1964 he was the victim of censorship when the Aufbau publishing house refused to publish two of his poems. The sixties could be considered his artistically most interesting phase, when he began to distance himself from his earlier agitprop style of poetry and songwriting and embrace great complexity in his poetry.28 The sixties was a time of considerable personal upheaval too: his second marriage to Erika Lange in 1964 ended in divorce, after he starting seeing feminist writer Irmtraud Morgner. By December 1967, relations with the Stasi had soured, particularly after Wiens came back from a trip to the Soviet Union and criticized the censorship there. Then in 1968, during the crisis in Czechoslovakia, Wiens came out in support of the reforms of the Prague Spring, as well as of Reiner Kunze, causing his officers to decry his “anarchism.”29 An example of Wiens’s growing distance from the regime’s cultural policies can be seen from an episode in his file in 1967, when he was allocated a new officer and asked to be allowed to stop meeting on a regular basis. The file states, “He was against any formal collaboration on a clandestine basis since this was not in his interests.”30 It goes on to record his indignation at having to comply with bureaucratic stipulations, which he regarded as beneath someone of his standing: “[H]e would like to ask whether we would also have asked Johannes R. Becher for two passport photographs and an agreed code word.”31

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From 1968 to 1971, Wiens had no contact with the Stasi. During this time, the Stasi bugged his telephone and recorded his telephone conversations.32 It comes as a surprise, therefore, that Wiens’s file starts up again in 1972, when he approached the Stasi with a view to resuming work for them. Although his files give no official reason for Wiens’s decision, it was most likely a mixture of factors—in particular his renewed financial difficulties as well as the breakup of both his second marriage and his third marriage (to Morgner in 1971).33 Another likely factor is Wiens’s predilection for international travel. Sandwiched between meeting reports and other documentation, we find on file a telling list the Stasi compiled of the international trips Wiens had taken, dating back as far as 1953, before he was enlisted.34 While working for the Stasi, he had enjoyed up to six overseas trips annually, and in those few years during which he had withdrawn his support, he had barely traveled once a year.35 Unhindered access to international travel was one of the privileges that accrued to Wiens from his initial gentleman’s agreement with the Stasi, and travel may have proved the key to winning back his support. There is no official record of any agreement to this effect, but as soon as Wiens patched up his relationship with the Stasi, he resumed his international travels, including to capitalist countries. From 1972 until 1982, he traveled regularly as a top-level informant to international writers’ congresses and P.E.N. meetings. Among colleagues, he earned the nickname of “Interpaule,” a play on his given name, his international traveling, and the Interpol (the organization facilitating intergovernmental criminal policing).36 In the latter phase of his collaboration, Wiens adopted a more professional and pragmatic approach to his undercover work, although this involved making calculated decisions to compromise or betray the trust of others such as the dissident Soviet writer Lew Kopelew, whose friendship he abused, and even Irmtraud Morgner, whose letters he passed on to the Stasi during their marriage.37 Whereas Wiens’s political attitudes had often deviated from official dogma in the sixties, in the seventies his views appeared to be far more closely aligned with cultural orthodoxy. For instance, he disapproved of Wolf Biermann during the time of the latter’s expulsion, and adopted the official, critical line with respect to dissident writers.38 It is no surprise then that he was duly rewarded with three Orders of Merit39—the first in bronze in 1973, the second in silver in 1974, and the third in gold in 1977. It seems that the Stasi had struck a good balance between the use of carrots and sticks: the numerous overseas trips in exchange for the rather irksome burden of always being on duty and having to deliver information at regular intervals; the extra income; and the security of having hidden state connections in exchange for publicly always toeing the Stasi’s recommended political line. It seems that as long as Wiens’s desire for the special handling appropriate to his status as a senior cultural functionary was

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respected, and he was earning extra income and was guaranteed access to travel, he was willing to continue. From the copious reports filed from 1972 to 1982, it is obvious that a certain routine set in during the last decade of Wiens’s life, with him meeting his officer Pönig at least twice a month and sometimes weekly. We cannot infer from the files the deep psychological reason for Wiens’s consent to cooperate with the Stasi, but we can read the regularity of his informing work and the large number of reports filed as evidence of a stable relationship that evolved between the two parties. The ten years in which Wiens worked as a senior cultural functionary, jetsetting around the globe on behalf of the Writers’ Union, the P.E.N. Club and secretly for the Stasi, saw him come to accept his double life as a necessary part of his identity. At the same time, it seems fair to say that the Stasi managed to create the impression that Wiens had in his officer a genuine friend, an illusion of trust the Stasi liked to foster, while it remained quietly vigilant.40 For Wiens, the regular appointments came to fulfil on some level a deep-seated human need—whether perhaps to be important, to have powerful connections, or even for some psychological reassurance. Whichever the case, the reason appears to have been sufficient to sustain the collaboration for ten years. Wiens’s file ends abruptly with a brief but poignant report from his hospital bed, only seven days before his death from cancer. At his last meeting with Pönig prior to going into the hospital (he was already seriously ill), Wiens handed over an incriminating report he had written on Sascha Anderson.41 From the Stasi records, we know that Pönig paid Wiens several visits in the hospital and that he took him flowers. Tellingly, Pönig never lost sight of the fact that he was paying Wiens a professional visit and diligently filled out the paperwork to accompany his last visit to the dying man. The language he used is brief and perfunctory, and yet in its very sparseness it bespeaks the emotional occasion of the visit. It was March 30, 1982, and the poet thanked his officer for coming and indicated “that he expects this personal encounter to be the last.”42 Wiens was “resigned,”43 the report notes, and asked his officer to take care of his wife, which Pönig agreed to do. Beneath these cursory handwritten comments we find the next stock header on the meeting form, which reads “New Tasks and Code of Conduct.”44 This time, Pönig has left it blank. Wiens’s file thus ends rather stoically with the death of the Stasi detective who dies “on the job.” However, there is no further record of his death; there are only blanks such as the last section of this final meeting report, and the blank next page of the inside back cover of his informant file. Wiens’s file story thus ends unceremoniously, with no fanfare, no formal closure, no death notice or recognition of his achievements, in a manner rather unbefitting of a gentleman spy. In life, there were secret orders of merit for outstanding service; in death, it appears, there was nothing.

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Wiens’s dossier reads in places like a cross between an appointments diary and an annotated address book. The number of his contacts is staggering. The second to last folder contains an index of 181 persons who are mentioned in the file and who came into his purview. But even apart from the long indexes inserted at the front of each folder, the dossier gives the impression of an extremely well-connected member of the literati. Possibly even more disturbing than the sheer volume of his contacts is the temporal structure of Wiens’s dossier. Due to the long duration and the intensity of his collaboration, his file is thick in the literal sense of the word. It is also thick in the figurative sense used by Clifford Geertz, offering a “thick description” of life—that is, a context-rich account of the social meanings of actions.45 It offers, for instance, a wealth of information about his discussions with West German writers such as Günter Grass and the Group 47; with the controversial East–West German writer Uwe Johnson; and with Stefan Heym, Stephan Hermlin, Günter Kunert, and Reiner Kunze—to say nothing of information on one of the greatest irritations for the regime, Wolf Biermann. The particularly elaborate and discursive manner in which encounters and conversations with central literary figures such as these are emplotted in the files speaks volumes about the intensity of Wiens’s activities for the Stasi behind the scenes. The files represent a type of “singular” mode of narration, whereby each event or occurrence is itemized separately, since appointments with similar scenarios are not summarized or grouped together as they would be in fiction. The effect of these redundancies on reading the dossier, and the impact of this mode of emplotment, is to emphasize the regularity with which Wiens’s public life was punctuated by his covert acts of allegiance to the Stasi and the degree to which collaboration became normalized as a part of his daily life. When faced with the compounded effect of these numerous meetings between Wiens and his handlers over the last ten years of his life, the reader cannot help but wonder what it was that drove him to report with such docility, regularity, and accuracy. While the files are silent on this point, they do nonetheless provide us with many clues. In Wiens’s case, the probable key to the longevity of his collaboration lay in the untroubled and almost harmonious relationship that developed between officer and informer, which appeared to be a relationship between equals. Another factor was the almost ritualistic aspect of the appointments themselves, which was a routine that apparently Wiens felt comfortable with; he rarely if ever missed appointments the way reluctant informers often did. We could go so far as to say that Wiens came to see value in the opportunity to be able to debrief with his officer and have a sounding board with power. After a shaky start in the sixties, when Wiens felt that the Stasi did not respect his own sense of self-worth, officers were able to conduct meetings in a fashion that was more appropriate to the

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man of letters of international standing that Wiens had become. There are no documented examples of further tensions from 1972 onward. The private sessions behind closed doors may also have bolstered his self image and shored up his insecurities at a time when Wiens’s literary output was starting to decline and his major literary successes were behind him.46 It was not a contradiction per se for a cosmopolitan man of letters and senior cultural functionary to have secret police connections; many of his colleagues in the Writers’ Union did, although this was not publicly known. The dependent and affirmative habitus he was required by the Stasi to display overlapped with the more conservative attitudes prevalent in the Writers’ Union itself. If Wiens suffered from moral compunctions at having to betray his own wife or manipulate colleagues like Schädlich, there is no evidence of this on file. He managed to cope with the fundamental ambivalence of having to lead a double life, as Wietersheim suggests, either by suppressing his personal misgivings about the increasingly draconian cultural politics of the times or by compartmentalizing the different parts of his identity.47 We can deduce from reading his file that his motives for collaborating were financial bonuses and relief from his financial problems, the prestige of being able to travel, and the security of knowing he was secretly in favor with the regime after having fallen from grace earlier.48 These are benefits that without the Stasi he would not have enjoyed—and most of which were not forthcoming in the next case I will examine.

Sascha Anderson: Ambivalent Collaborator and Underground Poet Sascha Anderson, born in Weimar, first started working for the Dresden branch of the Stasi under the name “David Menzer” in 1975 on a few low-grade assignments relating to local poetry circles and artists’ groups.49 During an internship in Potsdam’s Babelsberg film studios belonging to DEFA (the state-run film company), from September 1975 onward he informed on Freya Klier, whose brother had tried to flee the country. Anderson initially reported back to his officers in Dresden fairly regularly. Soon after, however, he started to miss appointments, and between May 1976 and January 1977 he missed arranged meetings with his handlers on four occasions. He continued to evade the Stasi in 1977, necessitating a visit from his Dresden officers to Potsdam in March 1977. Over the next three years there are a further five notes on file in which his officers complain that he doesn’t keep appointments or cannot be reached. One report from early in 1977 records financial and personal problems in connection with Anderson’s disappointment that his first volume of poetry had been rejected for publication. His

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officer at the time notes disapprovingly that Anderson did not take a Marxist line on questions of politics.50 In 1977’s notes we read, “In conversations the informant was not explicitly against collaborating with the Stasi, but expressed the view that he wanted to know precisely what exactly the employees expected of him.”51 In November 1978, his reservations are documented as being stronger: “The informant expressed the view in conversations that he was not an informant for the employees but that he was prepared to talk to the employees with regard to concrete occurrences.”52 And in February 1979 he is on record repeating his position, in case they have not understood, that “he did not think much of the idea of collaborating with the Stasi.”53 Coercion and threats—and in fact Anderson did do time in prison in 1979 for fraud for reasons that are still unknown—eventually wore him down. A year after his release in 1980, Anderson finally begrudgingly acquiesced to regular meetings with the Stasi.54 From that agency’s perspective, the urgency of deploying Anderson had increased with recent events in Poland, particularly the formation of Solidarność late in 1980. Early in 1981, his officers were pleased to report that Anderson was always “punctual” and his behavior was “disciplined, open and approachable.”55 There was still mention of the need to carry out further “political” work with him, but it was noted that the Stasi was making progress in developing a “relationship based on trust.”56 The main reason cited for this was the indisputable “quality” of his intelligence on his ever-expanding group of friends in literary and artistic circles in Dresden and Berlin.57 The “thickest” section of his file coincides with this period of compliance, when he was promoted to the category of “Informant mit Feindberührung” (IMB: Informant with Enemy Contact). This was also the time in which he made the most creative impact on the Prenzlauer Berg scene in Berlin, writing poetry, producing limited-edition art books that combined prints and poetry, and organizing cultural events. There is no record of the agreement that Anderson reached with the Stasi, but it was most likely that he be allowed to pursue his writing and publishing in the underground under the condition that he keep its political activities in check. Anderson is sometimes thought to represent an experimental new type of elite informant who did not merely infiltrate enemy circles but attempted to work his way into the leadership of such groups.58 In the context of the underground, this meant being at the forefront of borderline criminal activities and entailed taking greater risks, for instance that he might be arrested or exposed.59 Leading these subversive activities would enable the Stasi to exert greater control over oppositional groups in the hope of neutralizing them from within. The files give little insight into the convoluted schemes that Anderson indulged in for moral justification. What they do show is that Anderson’s habitus—his bohemian lifestyle and avant-garde poetry, living and

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working in the underground on the fringe of state structures—was in no way simulated or engineered by the Stasi as journalists were fond of claiming after the Stasi files were opened.60 In all its permutations, the artistic milieu of Prenzlauer Berg existed prior to and independently of the Stasi’s interest in it. With the exception of Lutz Rathenow, Anderson was the most energetic and prolific of the Prenzlauer Berg poets in the early eighties, facilitating multi-media publications via legal loopholes, organizing private readings and art exhibitions, playing in art-house bands and even producing the first recording of East German punk music. Anderson’s decision to collaborate did not mean he had to change his attitudes toward the Stasi or the state, and he is not described in his file as loyal. An infiltrator merely had to be credible as a member of the group he or she was to infiltrate, and this usually involved a certain amount of pretending to share core values of the group. Anderson was in this sense not a classic infiltrator. However, his secret identity as an informer did require him to keep his officers happy and make concessions to them, and at the very least to provide them with intelligence. Ironically, Anderson’s Stasi connections had the unintended effect of giving him a type of misplaced courage to pursue activities in the underground that the Stasi disapproved of and that others might have thought foolhardy or too risky, such as printing his art books without formal permission. He indirectly also neutralized or deflected the group’s fears of the Stasi and, according to Jan Faktor, “contributed much—also in a positive sense—to the growing fearlessness inside the group.”61 The trade-off was that his conditional loyalty to the regime stopped him from encouraging and supporting some of the more openly political plans of his friends, such as founding an alternative writers’ union. During the years 1980–86, in which Anderson and the Stasi worked out a sustainable modus vivendi, the files suggest that this was because Anderson believed he could square the circle of being loyal to both his friends and his officers simultaneously. Anderson appears to have blossomed, initially at least, interpreting (or rather misinterpreting) his role for the Stasi as an opportunity to profile himself and his generation of poets and artists, a generation that had been excluded from membership in official guilds and hence denied the possibility of making a living as writers or artists. As Jan Faktor argues, Anderson probably compensated for his guilt about betraying friends by throwing himself into projects.62 Although his habitus as an underground poet was crucial to working undercover, in the long term this left him in a precarious social and political position. Anderson eventually began to take matters into his own hands and published his first volume of poetry in the West without authorization.63 Notes in his file reveal that for his officer’s superiors, too, Anderson was a far from ideal informant; he was too independent and too anarchic for their liking. By 1986 he had begun to resent the Stasi,

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as one by one his friends left for the West. He had become, as he remarks in his self-titled autobiography Sascha Anderson, “merely the puppet of a scene I had hyped and which paid the rent and the alimony of independent journalists with its performances.”64 Eventually, the conflicting loyalties proved too great for him to reconcile, and in a letter on file he begged to be allowed to leave the GDR and join his friends in the West, in particular his artist friend Ralf Kerbach who had collaborated with him on three volumes of poetry: “i have tried to keep my literary work strictly separate from my work for the ministry to the point of schizophrenia, that was the only way of doing both well. for various reasons i am now living in berlin, have serious personality issues and am living apart from ralf kerbach . . . with whom i share an existential working relationship.”65 The persistent pressure exerted on him to cooperate during the early years (1976–80) was not replaced by a more sustainable basis for collaboration. Since no tangible career incentives to serving the Stasi were forthcoming, Anderson increasingly questioned the point of his continuing. There were no major carrots in the form of the travel perks that Paul Wiens received, nor was Anderson accepted into the Writers’ Union, and East German houses did not publish any of his works. Anderson’s file is an intriguing example of the social phenomenology of life under communism that Stasi files can provide, in particular through the window they open onto the activities, friendships, and rivalries at the heart of the Prenzlauer Berg group. Once the Stasi had ensnared Anderson and locked him into regular meetings, his file became a rich archive of information about the many literary gatherings and art exhibitions in private apartments, and other semilegal activities (such as embedding poetry in art books to bypass censorship laws) that Anderson became involved in. At one meeting with his Stasi handler in 1981, Anderson reported on as many as twelve different secret police operations.66 Like Paul Wiens’s, his file resembles a type of inventory and sometimes descends into a catalogue of names, dates, and places. In many ways, his reports also beg comparison to entries in a work diary, often with an additional layer of information aimed at clarifying the nature of his activities for the benefit of his officers. An example of this is his report on a newly formed punk group in Dresden. He patiently explains to the Stasi what punk means and how it stands in relation to the West German and East German rock music. Since Anderson was singing in the band himself, he plays down its public impact, stating that “according to the members [the band] is not looking to attract an audience in the sense of commercialization” and only wants to “play privately.”67 From around 1982 on, Anderson’s reports focus more on documenting the diversity of cultural activities he participated in and less on prying into the private lives of his companions. In his autobiography, Anderson is bemused by the fact that his officers naively expected him to write about

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what people thought: “But—apart from in literature—I have never gotten close enough to someone to be able to hear him think.”68 As long as the meetings were still occurring regularly, Anderson’s officers seemed happy, even though his reports were becoming briefer; this brevity was at least a reassuring sign of an established routine. However, now Anderson was starting to withhold information and was careful to hide, or play down the risks entailed in, his friends’ activities.69 In 1982, he was commissioned by his officers to write a type of strategy paper on the major players in the underground, offering an opinion on whether they could be allowed into the Writers’ Union. In his defense, Anderson maintains that this report was born out of a certain “sick naivety”70 that he could influence things in positive ways. Indeed, his assessments of the characters of his fellow poets are mostly not incriminating. He argues that they are harmless; the epithets he uses repeatedly for his closest associates such as Jochen Berg, Stefan Döring, Thomas Günther, Bert Papenfuß, and Detlef Opitz are “quiet,” “objective,” “constructive,” “direct and honest,” and even “phlegmatic.”71 Even his judgments of those older poets he liked far less such as Lutz Rathenow are restrained. He states that most should be accepted into the Writers’ Union and the others, who wanted to leave, ought to be allowed to go. In short, “they should all be allowed to do what they please,”72 which was hardly what the regime wanted to hear. While the tone of this report is placatory and neutralizing, however, Anderson’s hyperactivity ensured that there was scarcely a corner of subcultural activity that was not exposed to surveillance. His omnipresence ensured that the Stasi was always well apprised of everyone’s movements in the Prenzlauer Berg scene.73 Anderson still could not help passing on information about the group’s members, thus turning the niche of the underground into a highly policed panopticon. He exposed his colleagues to the all-seeing gaze of the security forces and made them vulnerable to persecution. Moreover, he fostered an apolitical stance among poets and contributed to the general stagnation in evidence by the mid-1980s in both the politics and aesthetics of the underground, producing what Leonhard Lorek decried as a type of “underground in aspic.”74 Anderson’s complex, apolitical, defiantly countercultural habitus was no secret to the Stasi, and at the height of his collaboration it was in evidence in numerous meeting reports. We find no proof on file that he was recruited on the basis of ideological conformism, and his relationship to the regime, and to the Stasi, remained deeply ambivalent and conflicted. His officers note in 1982 that they are aware “from extensive discussions of ideological questions” that his views on cultural politics are diametrically opposed to the Party’s.75 For Anderson’s part, his undercover work possibly fulfilled a narcissistic desire to always be at the center of things.76 His inflated sense of self-importance is apparent in Sascha Anderson,

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where he argues that he tried to help his friends by enlisting the assistance of the Stasi.77 It is also in evidence in his indignant comment that after 1991 he became a scapegoat for everyone’s failed “artistic career,”78 when in reality he saw himself as an enabler of careers. Such subtle distinctions only start to make sense if we think of Anderson as performing the doubly contradictory role of attempting to be some sort of cultural functionary, but one who was both underground and undercover. Hence, although Anderson’s actions in the underground were sanctioned by the Stasi, he remained, for all his efforts, a member of a subculture, living on the edge of legality in poor housing without any discernible benefits from his secret contacts. His file story thus appears to reach an impasse in 1986, when he begs to be allowed to join his friends in the West. His wish is granted, but only after he has agreed to continue to supply the Stasi sporadically with information from there.79 At plot’s end, when his file story peters out, both the Stasi’s plans for Anderson to destroy the literary underground from within and his own ambitions to be accepted into the Writers’ Union remain unrealized. The underground continued without Anderson and in the final years of the regime saw the emergence of new opposition groupings around different political issues such as the environment and peace.

Maja Wiens: From Loyal Stasi Agent to Critic of the Regime Maja Wiens’s Stasi biography is divided chronologically into an informer narrative and a victim narrative. She has an informer persona, “Marion,” and a victim persona, “Traum” (Dream). The first daughter of Paul Wiens and his first wife Erika Lautenschlager, Maja Wiens presumably was first approached by the Stasi because both her father and mother were informants for the ministry.80 Given her background, it is not surprising that the Stasi believed she had the appropriate positive attitude toward the ministry and hoped to be able to exploit her number of social contacts for its purposes.81 At the first contact meeting, however, Wiens seemed skeptical that she would be of much use to the Stasi.82 The collaboration accordingly got off to a bad start, with her officer noting that he first needed to win her over “through astutely conducted talks.”83 Needless to say, the Stasi still imagined she was a “stellar recruit,”84 and she proved useful in a couple of key operations. Her file is especially “thick” in relation to these. Volume 3 of Wiens’s file reads like a gripping spy novel, and the sections dealing with the dramatic final stages of an undercover operation— an “Operative Procedure” (Operativer Vorgang)—with the code name “Doctoral Candidate” (Aspirant) in 1978 make for especially suspenseful

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and disconcerting reading. Wiens played a key role in the draconian operation that targeted biologist Dr. Rudolf Kunze, who was suspected of having a “fundamentally hostile attitude” toward the Party85 and was being investigated for offenses against §106 of the criminal code (which outlawed “Staatsfeindliche Hetze”—agitation against the state). Among other things, Wiens’s Stasi file recounts the dreadful story of how Kunze, who was being treated for cancer, was arrested on his way to the hospital. Not only did Wiens provide evidence of Kunze’s plans to publish a manuscript, thought incriminating enough to warrant an arrest, but she also relayed crucial information about his chemotherapy treatment schedule, enabling the Stasi to intercept him on the first day of his new cycle of treatment. Kunze was taken to Stasi prison Hohenschönhausen, where he was interrogated and held awaiting trial while being forced to continue his chemotherapy under appalling prison conditions.86 It is fitting to call Wiens’s files on Kunze “arresting biographies,” following the lead of Vatulescu, since they formed the backbone of the evidence collected in advance of arresting Kunze. The account in Wiens’s file is the only one we have about Wiens’s involvement, since Wiens herself has not told her side of the story. Her Stasi files are particularly instructive. Unlike Anderson’s generally restrained and sparse report-writing, Wiens’s mode of reporting was uninhibited and gossipy. She delivered her reports verbally to her officer, who recorded them and had them transcribed verbatim. Their almost breathless quality and their chatty style are evidence of her keenness to please. For instance, Wiens’s file tells the story of how she set out under Stasi instructions to befriend Kunze. She reassured her officer that in her dealings with Kunze she always managed to behave normally and above suspicion: “I acted in my personal behavior just as I would normally, smoked as many Karo cigarettes as usual, drank my tea.”87 From the excessive detail of her first reports, it seems she did a sterling job of feigning a genuine interest in Kunze and hiding her real intentions. In this sense, Wiens represents a far more successful instance of infiltration than does Anderson, who had strong allegiances to his peers from the start. After each visit to “Rudi’s” apartment, she relayed precise information about Kunze’s comings and goings, his apartment, his large book collection, and his health problems, passing on what seems like a blow-byblow account of her often trivial conversations with him. In her reports, she cannot resist making derogatory remarks about his private life and scoffs at Kunze’s popularity among his friends. She claims, in an aside that reveals her patent lack of respect for him, that he is convinced “he is the greatest.”88 She observes that “he possibly tends to overestimate himself, not only on an intellectual level.”89 Amidst the wealth of detail she repeats to her officer are extensive passages of gossip about his private life that she considers might be useful to the Stasi: “In the evening he

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usually goes out and sometimes with the various women he has relationships with, at present there were four of them. As a general rule he sleeps with them in their apartments. One of these girl-friends lives in Grünau, I don’t know the others.”90 It would be wrong to say that fear played no role in ensuring that informants stuck to instructions, but in Wiens’s case, there is little evidence that she was driven by fear, and she appeared to go to great lengths to fulfil her Stasi brief. In the month in which Kunze was arrested (June 1978) she met with her officer eleven times. There are fifty pages in the third volume of her file devoted to her activities in this month alone. In the week of Kunze’s arrest, Wiens met with her officer no fewer than three times, providing information on the state of his health and his consumption of alcohol, and even speculating wildly on the effect of his illness on his sexual performance: “He made no reference to his sexual prowess in this period.”91 For Wiens, this was thrilling work—risky but rewarding, despite the levels of deception required. Reading between the lines, it seems that she felt flattered by the attention she received and may even have relished the subterfuge of having to act out a set script and report back on her successes to her handlers. In her readiness to participate in this operation, she certainly allowed herself to be influenced by the Stasi’s paranoid fantasies about imminent attacks on the state and the treachery of intellectuals like Kunze. She also seems instinctively to have understood that no detail was too banal for the Stasi, and that the most trivial piece of information could be used against her target and retrospectively invested with meaning. Maja Wiens proved so useful in this operation that her officer recommended that she be rewarded with a trip to Romania.92 Four years after this operation, she was still producing reasonably good-quality evidence on her targets—now the writer Klaus Schlesinger and singer and poet Bettina Wegner—which was sufficient for her officer Lieutenant Reise to recommend her for the Order of Merit in bronze and to upgrade her to a level of informing involving risky levels of exposure to enemy circles.93 Around 1982, however, there were clear signs that Wiens was growing dissatisfied with the ministry and tired of the demands of undercover work. Despite her good connections to the Writers’ Union through her father, she was having difficulties getting her first novel published. A note in her file reveals that the novel was considered defamatory of the Party and critical of travel restrictions.94 After Wiens was handed over to a new officer, we see further signs of disillusionment, due in part to the fact that even the new handler (Major Plaumann, whom she lambasts as blind and narrow in one filed report),95 seems no match for the increasingly outspoken Wiens. Her files from this time are testament to her growing impatience with the regime. Plaumann could not handle Wiens’s unrelenting diatribes about

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the inadequacies of the Party, the blindness of the Stasi, and the failings of the system. Wiens was instructed to infiltrate the peace movement and literary circles in order to gather intelligence but grew resentful at the blatant interference of the Stasi in these circles. For instance, she was critical of the Stasi’s attempts in November 1983 to prevent a demonstration of the West German Greens in front of the American and Soviet embassies.96 While her report-writing reveals precious little sympathy for Kunze, she does seem critical of the Stasi’s treatment of Wegner and rejects the Stasi’s rationalization that the Greens in the West were “controlled” by the CIA.97 By the end of 1983, Wiens had started to identify with Wegner and peace activists Ulrike Poppe and Bärbel Bohley, who were, she now told the Stasi, the “true champions of peace.”98 Eventually, in another thick section of her file, she complained bitterly about being at the beck and call of the secret police, saying she “wasn’t a computer for the Stasi.”99 In this conversation, Wiens complained to Plaumann about a host of issues such as lack of free expression, the manipulation of public opinion, discipline and cleanliness as mandatory lifestyles, the fact that regimentation started in kindergarten, the narrow-mindedness of the educational system, and the fact that the country was financially bankrupt.100 In a final showdown meeting with the Stasi in 1985, designed to rein her in, she subjected her officer to a torrent of politically subversive abuse, making no effort to disguise her hostility to him and saying, “[W]hat are [you] doing here, we’ve got nothing to say to each other.”101 Her defiance here was quite remarkable, especially since the Stasi showed no signs of turning a blind eye or of softening its approach to its recalcitrant agent. We read for instance how Major Plaumann meticulously prepared for his final, “high noon” meeting with Wiens, working through all the possibilities well in advance and even rehearsing potential topics of conversation. Despite the combined brain power of an officer and his superior, the meeting proved a disaster. This time, Wiens’s officer was no longer quite so restrained in his reporting back, making the snide remark that Wiens dressed like a bohemian and, with her arrogant behaviour, behaved like one as well.102 From 1985 onward, the Stasi placed Wiens under surveillance in an full-scale security operation OV “Traum” and opened a victim file on her to police her activities in the underground as well as her contacts to the Greens and to the unofficial peace movement in the East. She had now morphed into an enemy of the state, who caused considerable moral panic in the ranks of the Stasi—possibly because the Stasi was already only too familiar with Wiens’s strong views on the failings of state socialism. Wiens’s two antithetical file stories document in striking fashion a biography full of contradictions and shaped by political extremes. Without the insights from the files, Wiens’s life story presents itself as more

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linear in trajectory, moving from a position of basic support to radical opposition and open confrontation with the regime. The files serve to complicate this story of radicalization in two ways: On the one hand, they suggest that Wiens’s evolution as a political activist occurred much earlier than 1985 and show that her habitus in the peace movement was not simulated. On the other hand, the Stasi files reveal the surprising extent to which Wiens colluded with the Stasi, even to the point of becoming involved in risky undercover operations in 1978 with the arrest of Kunze. Wiens’s informer file reveals that there was no coercion involved in this operation and that Wiens allowed herself to be swayed by the state’s paranoid fantasies about threats to security, and to become complicit in them. Unlike Anderson, who did not have to pretend that he was keen to be associated with underground circles, Wiens did pretend and actively set out to deceive Kunze. Her informer file, moreover, reveals the remarkable level of dissembling and deceit required in her “first life” as a Stasi agent, especially during the espionage operation on Kunze. Ironically, it is this file story of her complicity that also tells the story of her loss of faith in the regime. Evidence of her transformation into a dissident begins to appear in her informant file soon after Kunze’s arrest and continues to evolve in her victim file. Wiens’s informer file does not tell the whole story of why she shifted her allegiances, but it does give us astounding insights into her evolving oppositional views as well as her self-confident, almost strident undercover persona. As we have seen, the files suggest possible reasons for her transformation: the dubious morality of spying on people who had become her friends; opportunism, as she saw that the peace movement was gaining the upper hand; and her loss of respect for the security forces as a credible instrument of power. In an interesting passage in her file from 1983, she attacks her officer for unprofessional behaviour when he visits her flat in the presence of her husband and son and fails to adhere to the basic principles of secrecy. She remarks that now her son could see the true face of the Stasi, since her officer was carrying a tape recorder under his arm.103 Certainly, Wiens’s dismissal of the Stasi’s heavy-handed response to growing opposition seems prescient. A more cynical view would be, however, that these are the disaffected opinions of someone with an intimate firsthand knowledge of the inside workings of the Stasi. It could also be argued that her critique does not necessarily amount to an outright rejection of the Stasi—possibly only of its clumsy methods of operating. Wiens’s case is an example of how the Stasi’s infiltration strategy could go horribly wrong. Maja Wiens was from a different generation than her father and identified too strongly with her own generation of frustrated writers, who, like Anderson, were afforded little legal opportunity to realize their ambitions. A crucial factor in her political development seems to

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have been the considerable difficulties in securing an East German publisher for her first novel.104 Hence, in the absence of sufficient rewards and benefits, she became cynical about the value of cooperating with the Stasi and started to disapprove of their excessive interference in her friends’ activities. Her remarks on file to her officers from 1983 onward, as outlined above, testify to a decided shift in values, as she ceased merely simulating her disaffection with the regime (as she had with Kunze) and started to actually identify with underground circles and to share their critical views. A note on file reveals that the Stasi was well aware of the fact that she had “succumbed more and more to the influences of the political underground”105 and that her officer had been unable to win her back or neutralize the negative impact of her milieu.

The Emplotment of Informers’ Careers in the Files A comparison of the stories of these three very different Stasi collaborators from literary circles reveals considerable variation in the way informers’ lives are emplotted in their files. In the case of the older generation of writers such as Paul Wiens, who were fully integrated into the rigid communist system of guilds, state publishing houses, and writing subsidies, the files detail how long-term relationships between cultural producers and the Stasi evolved and were sustained. Where the Stasi respected informers’ public standing in the literary world and took their ambitions seriously, even pandering to their vanity if necessary, writers were in turn more likely to respond by offering their support. The files demonstrate how sensitive handling and appropriate rewards contributed to the normalization of Paul Wiens’s complicitous identity as well as his personal habitus, ultimately serving to bind him firmly to the ministry. With the next generation of writers, who were attempting to establish their careers, the Stasi files tell a different story. In the cases of both Sascha Anderson and Maja Wiens, the files expose fundamental weaknesses in the regime’s handling of collaborators. In the case of informants recruited from nomenclature backgrounds like Maja Wiens, the files indicate that a loyalist habitus could be an initial basis for collaboration but by no means a sustainable one. With recruits from subcultural groups, such as Sascha Anderson, the key to establishing a stable working relationship with the Stasi was to foster individuals’ literary careers and assist them in realizing their ambitions. Where writers who were also informers were denied entry into the union or thwarted in their publishing plans, many became disaffected. This was particularly the case when candidates were required to infiltrate so-called enemy circles with whom they came to identify. As we can see from Maja Wiens’s new loyalties to the peace movement and Anderson’s close friendships to Prenzlauer Berg painters and poets, the Stasi failed to keep the children of cultural functionaries

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(Maja Wiens) and the more anarchic elements of the younger generation (Anderson) on their side. The (from the state’s perspective) less-than-ideal endings to these informers’ careers—the Stasi lost Anderson to the West and Wiens to the opposition—bear witness to this failure in the form of truncated informant files and informant files that morph into enemy files. The emplotment of Maja Wiens’s life in her Stasi file thus ends with the outcome that was least preferred by the Stasi—her transformation from detective to criminal, from loyal helper to enemy of the state. In conclusion, the files are able to tell rich and diverse stories about how collaborators negotiated the demands of the secret police and their own particular and varied sets of aspirations. As the files reveal, ideology was not a sufficient basis for sustaining collaboration unless it was backed up by financial and less tangible incentives such as career opportunities or even travel privileges, all of which played a role in structuring informers’ identity and habitus. Moreover, the secret files of collaborators are chilling testimony to the diverse forms of self-invention and self-justification that collaboration with the Stasi spawned. The identity of the informants as presented in their file stories was sometimes conceited, vain, and selfimportant, as with Paul Wiens; sometimes deeply conflicted and deluded, as with Anderson; and sometimes disarmingly honest and confrontational, as with Maja Wiens. The files are also able to track informers’ lives over the course of time. Most file stories display some character development in their emplotment of their informer’s identity and habitus, enabling us to trace the evolution of attitudes and behaviors in response to both positive and negative experiences with the Stasi. These stories of involvement with the Stasi do not follow ideal or typical trajectories in which informers learn and grow “on the job” and performatively reaffirm their allegiance to the state. In two of my three cases, the files testify to protracted identity struggles and conflicting loyalties. In particular, the stories of Sascha Anderson and Maja Wiens, who were set to work on underground circles during the last decade of the regime, demonstrate that toward the end, the Stasi was losing the battle to adequately control its own agents in the field. Anderson and Maja Wiens were recruited without ever fully identifying with the Stasi, and in the absence of sufficient incentives or personal rewards, they aligned themselves increasingly with their peers in the underground. The fact that the Stasi was forced to turn some of its own more successful agents into targets of surveillance, as with Maja Wiens, is testament both to the growing momentum of the forces of opposition in the country and to the Stasi’s loosening grip on power. To be sure, the files offer narratives of informers’ successful self-invention as loyal and compliant citizens, as with Paul Wiens, the cosmopolitan cultural functionary who travelled on secret state business. But they also offer plenty of illustrations of the informer’s life as a constant tightrope walk between conformity

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and defiance, as with Sascha Anderson and Maja Wiens. Above all, each of the three file stories discussed here are able to shed light on the deep ambivalence that characterized informants’ attitudes to the socialist state as well as on their complex and conflicted attitudes toward their peers and dissident forces of change. Sometimes this ambivalence translated into a willingness to betray their peers in the service of the ideal of socialism, but more often than not it made itself felt in a refusal to maintain the charade of believing in a stagnating system that was in such glaring need of reform.

Notes 1

Ricoeur, “Narrative Identity,” 188.

2

Ibid.

3

Fuchs, “Bericht eines Benutzers,” 80.

4

See Jürgen Fuchs, who fears that the nexus between the files and power might not be broken even after the files are secured in a democratic society: “Wir sind doch alle Anfänger,” 101–2. 5

In life writing studies the term “metaphors of the self” can be traced back to Olney, Metaphors of Self, 1981, and autobiography as “self-invention” to Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography, 27. 6

Bourdieu, Distinction, 171.

7

Ibid., 173.

8

Parker and Philpotts, “Sinn und Form,” 169.

9

Ibid., 169.

10

See Felski, Uses of Literature, 95.

11

Walther, Sicherungsbereich Literatur, 486.

12

According to Walther, the Stasi liked to record this as the reason for enlisting writers in 90 percent of cases. Ibid. 13

Ibid., 505.

14

Most of the “Aufbaugeneration” were born in 1929, although many were older. See Lindner, “Bau auf,” 201. 15

The term “Hineingeborene” stems from a poem by Uwe Kolbe and has been used as a common epithet for the generation born in the fifties and sixties who began writing in the eighties, see Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte, 35. 16

See Walther, Sicherungsbereich Literatur, 596.

17

Annegret von Wietersheim speaks of his “parallel existence in service of the Stasi” (Parallelexistenz im Dienst des MfS), which usurped his former existence as a poet and writer almost entirely. See Wietersheim, “Aber—ist mein liebster laut,” 105. 18

Anderson’s file was considered to have disappeared until 2000, when a copy of it was discovered. The file appears complete until the years 1986–89, which

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coincide with the time Anderson lived in West Germany. Anderson confesses in his autobiography that his officers assured him that they had destroyed his file, but this only holds true for his years working as an agent in the West: See Anderson, Sascha Anderson, 281. 19

See Walther, Sicherungsbereich Literatur, 677.

20

For an overview of the various contradictory accounts of these years see Wietersheim, “Aber—ist mein liebster laut,” 64–65. 21

Dennis and LaPorte, State and Minorities, 31.

22

“äußerst kluger und intelligenter Mensch [. . .]. Er ist in seinem Auftreten sehr korrekt und konsequent. Seine Meinungen und Auffassungen vertritt er hartnäckig. Er ist ein sehr geselliger Mensch, der die Vielzahl seiner Verbindungen laufend erweitert.” Der Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik [hereafter BStU, Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former GDR], Ministerium für Staatssicherheit [hereafter MfS, Ministry for State Security], Archivierter IM-Vorgang oder IM-Vorlauf [hereafter AIM, Archived Informant Recruitment Procedure], file 771/68/I, 13. 23

See also Wietersheim, “Aber—ist mein liebster laut,” 92.

24

See also ibid.

25

See also ibid., 92–93.

26

“eine ablehnende Haltung zur Kulturpolitik”; “vertritt teilweise eine feindliche Position”: BStU, MfS, AIM, file 771/68/I, 141. 27

“Bei der Erteilung von Aufträgen muß berücksichtigt werden die Form so zu wählen, daß das Persönlichkeitsgefühl nicht verletzt wird”: ibid., file 771/68/I, 15. 28

See Wietersheim, “Aber—ist mein liebster laut,” 235.

29

Wietersheim describes his political views at the time as “discriminating-critical” (differenziert-kritisch), including his views on the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab world. See ibid., 98. See also his defense of Kunze: BStU, MfS, AIM, file 771/68/II, 172–78. 30

“Er sei jedoch gegen jede feste Zusammenarbeit auf geheimdienstlicher Basis, da sich dies gegen seine Interessen richte”: ibid., file 771/68/II, 247. 31

“[E]r [. . .] möchte die Frage stellen, ob wir Johannes R. Becher auch nach zwei Paßbildern und nach einer zu vereinbarenden Losung gefragt hätten”: ibid., file 771/68/II, 248. 32

See Wietersheim, “Aber—ist mein liebster laut,” 100.

33

See Wietersheim, who cites financial reasons and the breakup of his second marriage as the main reasons: ibid., 100–101. Wiens’s new marriage to Morgner is no doubt also a factor since he contacted the Stasi barely a month after marrying her.

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34

BStU, MfS, AIM, file 771/68/II, 276.

35

Ibid.

36

See Wietersheim, “Aber—ist mein liebster laut,” 102.

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37

See Westgate, Strategies under Surveillance, 177, and Wietersheim, “Aber—ist mein liebster laut,” 103.

38

Wiens played a major role in the organized campaign against Hans Joachim Schädlich, which precipitated his leaving the GDR. See BStU, MfS, AIM, file 7781/83/II/3, 158ff. 39

“Verdienstmedaillen.”

40

See Walther, who discusses this under the common type of motivation, “striving for recognition,” Walther, Sicherungsbereich Literatur, 516. 41

The report was from an event at the Office of the West German Permanent Representative in East Berlin (Die Ständige Vertretung) where Anderson was present, selling his art books. Wiens correctly suspects Anderson was also an informant but reports that his art books do not seem to conform to cultural policy. See BStU, MfS, AIM, file 7781/83/II/5, 301, 307. 42

“daß er damit rechnet, daß diese persönliche Begegnung die letzte ist”: See ibid., file 7781/83/II/5, 354. 43

“gefaßt”: ibid.

44

“Neuer Auftrag und Verhaltenslinie”: ibid.

45

Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, 7.

46

Wiens’s last volume of poetry, Vier Linien aus meiner Hand, was published in 1972. In the 1970s he disappeared from public view as a poet as he spent more of his time working as a cultural functionary, and for the Stasi. See von Wietersheim, “Aber—ist mein liebster laut,” 238. 47

See ibid., 234.

48

Wietersheim also suggests Wiens received help from the Stasi in buying a large apartment in a new complex in the Leipziger Strasse. See ibid., 102. 49

BStU, Zentralarchiv [hereafter ZA, Central Archive], AIM, file 7423/91, 1st addendum, 31. 50

See ibid., file 7423/91, 1st addendum, 53.

51

“Der IM stellt sich im Gespräch nicht direkt gegen die Zusammenarbeit mit dem MfS, brachte aber zum Ausdruck, daß er genau wissen müsse, was die Mitarbeiter ‘konkret’ von ihm wollen”: ibid., file 7423/91, 1st addendum, 54. 52

“Der IM äußerte im Gespräch, daß er für die Mitarbeiter kein Informant sei, er sei aber bereit, bei konkreten Erscheinungen sich mit den Mitarbeitern zu unterhalten”: ibid., file 7423/91, 1st addendum, 59. 53

“er nicht viel von einer Zusammenarbeit mit dem MfS [halte]”: ibid., file 7423/91, 1st addendum, 61.

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54

Ibid., file 7423/91, 1st addendum, 70.

55

Ibid., file 7423/91, 1st addendum, 160.

56

“Vertrauensverhältnis”: ibid., file 7423/91, 1st addendum, 171.

57

Ibid.

58

See Böthig and Michael, “Der ‘Zweite Text,’” 13.

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59

The fear of being exposed as a contact was a risk for all informers, but especially for those in the underground. Because arrests and interrogations were common, there was a greater likelihood that these could be attributed to leaks from inside. 60

The main exponent of the theory that the Stasi revelations destroyed all notions of the underground as genuinely subversive was Frank Schirrmacher. See Schirrmacher, “Verdacht und Verrat.” 61

“haben zu der von innen langsam wachsenden Angstfreiheit viel—und zwar positiv—beigetragen”: See Faktor, “Zehn Punkte,” 94. 62

Ibid.

63

The volume was Jeder Satellit hat einen Killersatelliten, which appeared with the West German house Rotbuch Verlag in 1982. 64

“nur noch der Hampelmann einer von mir zusammengeredeten Szene [. . .], die mit ihren Inszenierungen den Mietzins und die Alimente Freier Journalisten garantierte”: Anderson, Sascha Anderson, 246. 65

“ich habe versucht meine literarische arbeit und meine arbeit für das MS konsequent bis zur schizophrenie zu trennen. das war für mich die einzige möglichkeit beides gut zu machen. aus verschiedenen gründen wohne ich jetzt in berlin, habe starke persönlichkeitsprobleme und lebe getrennt von ralf kerbach . . . mit dem mich eine existenzielle arbeitsgemeinschaft verbindet”: BStU, ZA, AIM, file 7423/91, 11th addendum, 3. 66

Ibid., file 7423/91, 4th addendum, 43–44.

67

“will laut Aussagen der Mitglieder keine Öffentlichkeit im Sinne von Kommerzialisierung gewinnen”; “privat spielen”: ibid., file 7423/91, 3rd addendum, 145. 68

“Aber ich bin—außer in der Literatur—nie einem Menschen so nahe gekommen, daß ich ihn hätte denken hören”: Anderson, Sascha Anderson, 254. 69

He also seems to have rationalized his Stasi connections by not writing incriminating reports on his closest friends, or by writing none at all in the case of Bert Papenfuß, but reporting more extensively on colleagues he disliked (such as Lutz Rathenow). See chapters 7 and 8 of Lewis, Kunst des Verrats. 70

“kranke Naivität”: Anderson, Sascha Anderson, 243.

71

See “Quelle: IMB ‘David Menzer,’” 250–62.

72

“jeder solle tun und lassen dürfen, was er wolle”: ibid.

73

Faktor, “Zehn Punkte,” 96, 106.

74

“Untergrund in Aspik”: BStU, ZA, AIM, file 1054/91/II/3, 139.

75

“[aus] der umfangreichen Diskussion zu ideologischen Fragen”: ibid., file 7423/91, 2nd addendum, 52. 76

See Faktor, “Zehn Punkte,” 95.

77

Anderson, Sascha Anderson, 192.

78

“Künstlerkarriere”: ibid., 294.

79

Most sections of this part of his file have been destroyed, but Anderson’s account in Sascha Anderson indicates that he did not play a particularly active

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role while in the West, meeting up with his officers only occasionally in Prague or Budapest. See Anderson, Sascha Anderson, 270. 80

Maja Wiens’s mother, Erika Lautenschlager, born on December 5, 1921, was initially recruited by the Stasi in 1974 for the purposes of using her apartment as a safe house for meetings with agents. However, she proved so loyal and obliging to the Stasi that she was deployed in foreign espionage operations to spy on suspected “people smugglers” (Menschenhändler) from the West (See BStU, Archivierter IM-Vorgang, file 9457/86, 6 vols.). After her mother’s death in 1989, Wiens was shocked to discover that her mother had not only worked for the Stasi for around fifteen years but also informed on her daughter and the family and tried to recruit West Berlin family friends on behalf of the Stasi (BStU, Bezirksverwaltung für Staatssicherheit [hereafter BVfs, District Office for State Security] Berlin, Archivierter Operativer Vorgang [hereafter AOP, Archived Operative Procedure], file 1224/91/8, 111). 81

Ibid., file 1224/91/I, 106.

82

Ibid., file 1224/91/I, 108.

83

“durch geschickte Gesprächsführung”: ibid., file 1224/91/I, 106.

84

“Senkrechtstarter”: ibid., file 1224/91/I, 112.

85

“feindliche Grundeinstellung”: Rudolf Kunze, OV “Aspirant,” had helped organize an art exhibition for a friend Manfred Kastner, who painted surrealist images, and publicize it in the West. See ibid., file 1224/91/3. 86

From 1960 on, more than three thousand sick prisoners were held in the secret hospital attached to the Stasi prison Hohenschönhausen. See Voigt and Erler, Medizin hinter Gittern, 4. 87

“Ich habe mich auch in meinem persönlichen Verhalten ganz so verhalten wie ich mich normaler Weise verhalten würde, also genauso viel Karo geraucht wie ansonsten, habe meinen Tee getrunken”: BStU, BVfs Berlin, AOP, file 1224/91/3, 47. 88

“er ist der Größte”: ibid., file 1224/91/3, 41.

89

“[e]r neigt unter Umständen auch zu Selbstüberschätzung, nicht nur auf intellektuellem Gebiet”: ibid., file 1224/91/3, 43. 90

“Abends war er ständig unterwegs und u.a. sehr viel bei den verschiedensten Frauen, mit denen er Verhältnisse hatte, es sind wohl vier, zur Zeit. Ja, er beschläft sie grundsätzlich in deren Wohnung. Eine dieser Freundinnen wohnt in Grünau, die anderen sind mir nicht bekannt”: ibid., file 1224/91/3, 84. 91

“Zu seiner Potenz in dieser Zeit hat er keine Stellung genommen”: ibid., file 1224/91/3, 86. 92

It is noted that this trip will set the department back by 485 M (ibid., file 1224/91/1, 123).

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93

Ibid., file 1224/91/1, 125.

94

Ibid., file 1224/91/1, 152.

95

Ibid., file 1224/91/1, 170.

96

See ibid., file 1224/91/1, 168–69.

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97

“gesteuert”: ibid., file 1224/91/1, 171–72.

98

“die wahren Friedenskämpfer”: ibid., file 1224/91/1, 166.

99

“wäre kein Computer für das MfS”: ibid., file 1224/91/1, 170.

100

Ibid., file 1224/91/1, 171–72.

101

“was soll ich denn hier, wir haben uns doch nichts zu sagen”: See ibid., file 1224/91/1, 165. 102

Ibid., file 1224/91/1, 165.

103

Ibid., file 1224/91/1, 170.

104

The novel Traumnovelle (Dream Novella) was initially rejected but was eventually allowed to be published by the Verlag Neues Leben in 1983. This was her last attempt at using a state-run publisher, and in the late 1980s she resorted to self-publishing.

105 “immer mehr den Einflüssen des politischen Untergrundes erlegen war”: BStU, BVfs Berlin, AOP, file 1224/91/2, 173.

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Parker, Stephen, and Matthew Philpotts. “Sinn und Form”: The Anatomy of a Literary Journal. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009. “Quelle: IMB ‘David Menzer.’” In Böthig and Michael, MachtSpiele, 250–73. Ricoeur, Paul. “Narrative Identity.” In On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, edited by David Wood, 188–200. New York: Routledge, 1991. Schirrmacher, Frank. “Verdacht und Verrat: Die Stasi-Vergangenheit verändert die literarische Szene.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 5, 1991. In Böthig and Michael, MachtSpiele, 304–8. Voigt, Tobias, and Peter Erler. Medizin hinter Gittern: Das Stasi-Haftkrankenhaus in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. Berlin: Jaron Verlag, 2012. Walther, Joachim. Sicherungsbereich Literatur: Schriftsteller und Staatssicherheit in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik. Berlin: Ch. Links, 1996. Westgate, Geoffrey. Strategies under Surveillance: Reading Irmtraud Morgner as a GDR Writer. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. Wietersheim, Annegret von. “Aber—ist mein liebster laut”: Ambivalenzen in Biographie und lyrischem Werk von Paul Wiens. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014.

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2: “You’ll Never Make a Spy Out of Me”: The File Story of “Fink Susanne” Valentina Glajar

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IKE SECRET POLICE FILES FROM OTHER EASTERN BLOC COUNTRIES, files of the Romanian secret police (or Securitate) present fragments of individual lives that consist of a collection of informers’ notes, officers’ reports and analyses, letters, photographs, and transcripts of interrogations and wiretapped private conversations. While these notes and reports resemble particular snapshots of a person’s life, often taken from different angles and through various lenses, confirmed and reconfirmed by numerous Securitate sources, they typically resist attempts to assemble them into a coherent plot. Yet they do offer relevant insights into the organization of the Securitate and its tactics. The selectively collected facts are astonishingly detailed and focus on many events in a person’s life, but the way the Securitate processed them, and to what end, as well as the numerous inherent lacunae in these files, make it difficult for postcommunist researchers to trace a story—a life story. Every file presents a life story, literary scholar Cristina Vatulescu contends in her award-winning book, Police Aesthetics, which deals with Romanian and Soviet secret police surveillance and its portrayal in film and in literature. As she explains, “[L]ike any biography, a personal file tells the story of a life; unlike most biographies, the secret police file also has enormous power to radically alter the course of that life, and even to put a full stop to it.”1 Coining the term “arresting biographies,” Vatulescu focuses mainly on victim surveillance files and how the secret police managed to translate lives into texts—texts assembled from a chorus of incriminating narrative voices that belonged to sources (informers), officers, interrogators, and to the victims themselves whose letters were intercepted and private conversations tapped. Vatulescu’s analysis of files also points to the difficulty of reading these files, as they challenge “both the potential and limits of literary studies” (12) while also underlining the “porosity between literary and non-literary writing” (7). The very basis of the analysis, the sheets collated between two covers that

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contain fragments of a person’s life, typically follows a structure that is deceptively orderly and redundant while also offering, albeit rarely, real gems: pieces of information that bring together the biographical narrative. However, missing or overlooked material, or various file pages that have been removed or misfiled, can significantly alter our understanding of these nuggets and their role in the larger collage that is the person’s truncated biography. If we turn our focus to network files2 and view informers through the lens of their own informative notes3 and social interactions with the victims, what life stories emerge? Do their notes allow us to get a glimpse of their motivation for agreeing to collaborate with the secret police? Do they reveal their emotions, their exasperations about everyday life under a communist regime, their frustrations about the very task they agreed to carry out in their capacity as informers, or their genuine relationship with the victims? Do we discover whether they even perceived the persons under surveillance as victims and themselves as pawns supporting and sustaining a treacherous system? And if we were to find answers to any of these questions, would they allow us to sketch or retrace a life story, or rather a file story? All these pieces of information, if available, would resemble a shattered mirror, whose scattered pieces reflect and refract life fragments, reestablishing an undesired symbiosis of informers, victims, and secret police officers. Putting back together the splinters of this mirror is arduous work that is not always rewarding, and in some respects it is not unlike that of any biographer who is faced with an oftentimes overwhelming amount of information on certain subjects while possessing scarcely anything on others. The intimate details exposed in informer files, and the insights gained into a person’s life, bring about a feeling of voyeurism. Complementing the file story with the subject’s memories proves even more challenging at times, as former informers often evade discussion about an uncomfortable past that they thought would never resurface. Other times, their versions of past events (mostly cast in a self-advantageous and morally acceptable light) seem to digress from the documented, state-sponsored ones. In their desire to exonerate themselves, many former informers fill the inherent lacunae of a file with selective information that may be at times as unreliable as the documented information in the file.4 However, not all informers are created equal, and their stories and their collaboration are as diverse as their files. In exceptional cases, such as that of German-Romanian source “Fink Susanne,”5 files move beyond the dull redundancies inherent in every file, and what emerges is a pageturner with elements of a narrative that would be worthy of a Hollywood script. Her file is at once a love story, a Briefroman (epistolary novel), a detective story, and a spy story. Against the backdrop of the brutal Stalinist regime of 1950s Romania, the “Fink Susanne” file speaks of betrayal

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and deception behind the Iron Curtain. And perhaps more importantly, it is a revealing document about the tactics and the limitations of the Securitate, as it exposes its elaborately planned yet failed scenarios for recruiting West German spies during the Cold War. “Fink Susanne” was the code name of a defiant German-Romanian Securitate source named Marianne Siegmund. Her file story spans seven years, from 1956 to 1962, and contains hundreds of pages sewn together in four volumes of surveillance (ACNSAS, FI, file 264512),6 which includes her correspondence with Heinz Hahn (1930–2005), originally her West German pen pal and later her husband, and three volumes of an informer or “network” file (R 367797).7 From Siegmund’s recruitment file (ACNSAS, FR, file 367797/1), we learn a few basic facts about her life that shed some light on her collaboration with the Romanian secret police: She was born in Braşov8 on December 14, 1931. After her parents’ divorce in 1937, she grew up with her mother in conditions of extreme hardship, and as a result she developed a chronic illness.9 In 1947, she had to interrupt her studies and lost her sight in one eye when her illness flared up due to malnutrition. That same year, at the age of sixteen, she began corresponding with West German student Heinz Hahn. In 1950, she enrolled in college to study psychology and education at the Victor Babeş University of Cluj (today, Babeş-Bolyai University). In Cluj, she became romantically involved with Eginald Schlattner, a student of hydrology and a promising young German-language writer, who fell helplessly in love with her. Their mostly lopsided relationship lasted several years, until Hahn informed her that he had received an entry visa to Romania and planned to visit her in November 1956. Hahn, an equally important protagonist in Siegmund’s file, was targeted by the Securitate from 1956 to 1962, studied psychology and had a successful career, was honored with the Bundesverdienstkreuz (Federal Cross of Merit) in 1982, and was instrumental in establishing tourism as an academic discipline in West Germany.10 In my attempt to piece together the fragments of “Fink Susanne’s” file story, I look for nodal points and clusters of topical and contextual information. In my pursuit of the Securitate’s strategies and Siegmund’s collaboration, I concentrate on four major constellations: the recruitment process, her arrest and agreement to collaborate, her activity as a Securitate source, and her efforts to join her husband in West Germany. Focusing on both her surveillance file (ACNSAS, FI, file 264512/1–4) and her network (informer) file (ACNSAS, FR, file 367797/1–3) allows me to identify and pull together the aforementioned clusters of information that also reflect all the different narrative voices: the Securitate officers, also called “ofiţeri operativi” (operative officers); their superiors, who oversaw the operations and approved the measures proposed; and “Fink Susanne” and the informative notes she provided. Moreover, the letters to and from

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her husband not only reveal a heartbreaking transnational love story but also contribute to the cultural memory of the Cold War divide and its not-so-impenetrable Iron Curtain.

The Recruitment Process As in most recruitment cases, Siegmund’s activities were closely monitored long before the Securitate arrested her on December 23, 1957. Her file story begins, however, on November 3, 1956, when the regional office of Ministerul Afacerilor Interne (MAI; Ministry of Internal Affairs) in Oraşul Stalin (Stalin City) requested information on her person from the MAI headquarters in Bucharest—a request which came back as “necunoscut” (unknown), meaning that she did not have a file and was as such unknown to either local or national Securitate departments.11 The reason for this inquiry was the arrival of the West German tourist Hahn, already Siegmund’s pen pal of several years, whose stay in the People’s Republic of Romania had to be closely and vigilantly monitored, along with his encounters with Romanian citizens in Bucharest and Oraşul Stalin. On high alert during the Hungarian uprising in October and November of 1956, and faced with student protests in Romania’s major university cities,12 the Securitate gathered sufficient and credible evidence against this West German tourist and against everybody with whom he came into contact—Siegmund, a group of young ethnic Germans from Oraşul Stalin later called the “Depner/Volkmer Group,”13 and two Romanian students from Bucharest who were part of a group called “Crinul Albastru” (The Blue Lily). Hahn came with a West German tourist group to Romania (mainly consisting of naturalized Germans) traveling via Yugoslavia to avoid Hungary and arriving in Bucharest at the end of October. Siegmund, whose relationship with Hahn had developed into an intimate friendship over the years of their correspondence, traveled there to meet him in person for the first time and fell in love. Pretending that she was his wife (or, according to other informers’ notes, his sister), they stayed together at the Hotel Ambasador with the rest of the group until November 5; once the hotel receptionists became suspicious, Siegmund moved to the Hotel Union.14 According to the Securitate surveillance, Hahn moved back and forth between the two hotels. The conversations between the two lovers were recorded in both of the bugged hotel rooms. The first transcripts in Siegmund’s file are from November 3, and they continue until November 10, including the period of Hahn’s brief clandestine visit to Oraşul Stalin, where he stayed at Siegmund’s house. The private conversations between Hahn and Siegmund in room 326 of the Hotel Ambasador attracted the attention of the Securitate, whose main suspicions first arose in connection with Hahn’s questions

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regarding the existence of nuclear plants in Romania. At the time, Romania was supplying the Soviet Union with uranium ore from the Băiţa Bihor mines in Northern Transylvania as part of a top-secret joint operation called “Savromcuart.” When this operation was closed after most of the fifteen thousand political prisoners working there died of radiation poisoning, the Soviets and Romanians developed a more advanced atomic energy program that included building a nuclear fission research reactor at Măgurele in 1957, and then a cyclotron in 1958.15 According to the transcripts of the recordings from the hotel rooms, for which no audio files are available, Hahn and Siegmund apparently also touched on the current events in Hungary. As Radio Free Europe and other Western and Hungarian radio stations were spreading the news about the revolt in Hungary, students in the main university cities in Romania began to organize protests and to take to the streets. Afraid that the Hungarian revolt might spread to Romania, the Securitate infiltrated agents into Hungary, while the Soviets amassed troops at the border between Hungary and Romania. Thousands of students were arrested in Bucharest, Timişoara, Cluj, and Iaşi.16 In the midst of the Securitate operations aimed at quelling all signs of a possible uprising, Siegmund and Hahn’s conversation became a second significant point of interest for the Securitate, especially as Siegmund volunteered information regarding the possible—and welcomed—spread of the Hungarian revolt to Romania. She apparently also informed Hahn that she knew of Romanian revolutionaries in the Western Carpathian Mountains, boasted about her superior shooting skills, and assured Hahn that she would not be afraid to pick up a rifle should the unrest spread. This alone was sufficient compromising information for the Securitate to arrest her.17 Furthermore, on November 6, 1956, naively unaware of the Securitate’s attention, the two decided to visit one of Siegmund’s (and her former boyfriend Eginald Schlattner’s) friends in Bucharest: Adrian Ionaşcu, a member of the Blue Lily Group, who, like Hahn, passionately believed in a united Europe.18 During one of his interrogations, Ionaşcu later declared that the visit lasted about twenty minutes, during which he spoke with Hahn in German about a pan-European organization of which Hahn was a member in West Germany, about the various political factions existing within that organization, and about a failed joint demonstration by West German and French students to remove the border barriers between France and West Germany. Ionaşcu also informed Hahn that the pan-European idea was of particular interest to him. Believing in and advocating a united Europe, without borders and transcending the Iron Curtain, was evidently a culpable offense in 1950s Romania.19 Siegmund’s file reveals that she never divulged to the Securitate what Hahn discussed with Ionaşcu, and that she protected Ionaşcu’s wife as well, as she insisted when interrogated that the two

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women had only chitchatted about mundane topics in Romanian, since Ionaşcu’s wife did not speak German.20 News about the arrival of a West German in Oraşul Stalin must have traveled fast among the Transylvanian Saxon community, because on November 9, Horst Depner, Siegmund’s neighbor, invited the esteemed guest to his house. To their surprise, when Hahn and Siegmund entered Depner’s house, they saw that fifteen to twenty young ethnic Germans had come to meet Hahn. According to various interrogations and later testimonies of the young men present, the discussions revolved around life in West Germany, the incidents of unrest in Hungary and what the Western press reported about them, and (most importantly for these young men, who as Transylvanian Saxons had been struggling with a lack of cultural unity and self-esteem since the end of the Second World War) around ways to organize themselves along ethnic lines and to participate fully in existing communist organizations. This one visit sealed the fate of these young people, who one year later were all arrested as the Depner/ Volkmer Group, charged with treason, found guilty, and convicted with sentences ranging from ten years of imprisonment to life in prison with hard labor.21 At first, Hahn’s visit to Romania and the resulting information that the Securitate gathered seemed to have had no repercussions for either Siegmund, the Depner/Volkmer Group, or Ionaşcu and his Blue Lily Group. In fact, it took the Securitate several months to connect the dots between Hahn, Siegmund, and the Depner/Volkmer Group. (On March 31, 1957, the source “Kloos Mihai” reported that he had learned from Heinz Taute, a friend of Depner’s, about a West German who had visited the group and advised them on how to organize.)22 Nor did it impact the ever-blooming love story and subsequent marriage between the Transylvanian Saxon woman from Oraşul Stalin and the West German from Bavaria. Interestingly enough, Marea Adunare Naţională (The Great National Assembly) approved their application for marriage in record time, which raised some eyebrows among German-Romanians, who were usually faced with long years of waiting and uncertainty when marrying Westerners.23 The happy event prompted Hahn’s second visit to Romania for their wedding, which took place in Bucharest on September 24, 1957. Months before Hahn’s second visit, though, the Securitate put together plans to recruit Siegmund as a Romanian spy for West German affairs and proceeded to do a serious vetting of the candidate. On May 8, 1957, for example, she was invited to a job interview but in reality conversed there with the undercover Securitate officer Lt. Costică Grigore, who subsequently wrote a very favorable characterization of the candidate, praising her as an educated person who spoke Romanian perfectly and was intellectually gifted, and portraying her as a personable, happy, and attractive woman.24 Consequently, on May 13, 1957, Lt. Maj. C.

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Schiferdecker and Lt. Maj. Octavian Iordănescu proposed the first plan to recruit Siegmund—but abandoned it a week later because they had insufficient compromising material for recruitment.25 On September 23, 1957, in preparation for Hahn’s arrival, the Securitate came up with a fictitious scenario that would allow them to bug and search Siegmund’s house in Oraşul Stalin. Because two families were sharing the same courtyard, it was necessary to simulate a situation that involved the removal of all the inhabitants for the period of time necessary to install the microphones and the amplifier, which they mounted across the street in another neighbor’s house. Thus they accused one of Siegmund’s neighbors, a shoemaker, of having stolen shoe soles and took Siegmund, her mother, the shoemaker, and his family to the police station for questioning.26 In a later informative note from April 22, 1958, she recalled how they were all loaded onto a large truck and paraded through Oraşul Stalin like common criminals to the police station. On the way, she fell and stained her only decent dress, the one she wore the following day to her wedding. After the questioning at the police station, a man was brought in who unconvincingly confessed that he had stolen the shoe soles, and so the fabricated case was solved and everyone was allowed to go back home. As the intelligent woman the Securitate described her to be, Siegmund saw through their ridiculous plan and realized that the whole fiasco was closely associated with the arrival of her fiancé the following day.27 However, she did not realize that this house search also involved microphone installations.28 After the wedding and Hahn’s return to Germany, the Securitate proceeded with planning the next steps toward Siegmund’s recruitment.29 According to a “Plan de Folosire a Sursei” (Plan to Use the Source) from November 21, 1957, Siegmund’s case officers, Lt. Maj. Octavian Iordănescu and his superior Maj. Ernest Deitel,30 directed the source “Dumitrescu Cristea,”—an attractive, athletic ethnic German who owned a hair salon in Oraşul Stalin and was known for having extramarital affairs—to charm the prospective source and to engage her in intimate relations in a room that had already been equipped with audiovisual surveillance equipment. The photographs that would have resulted would have served to blackmail the newlywed into agreeing to collaborate.31 Additionally, Officers Iordănescu and Deitel had plans to involve Siegmund’s parents (especially her father, who had a small watch repair shop in Oraşul Stalin)32 in financially compromising situations. According to the information in the file, none of these plans came to fruition, as the Securitate had misjudged Siegmund’s affection for her husband—a fact that they acknowledged in the report proposing the closing of her file on September 19, 1958. In this closing report, Officer Iordănescu concluded that the way they had gone about the recruitment was wrong from the very beginning, as they did not take into account her feelings for her husband.33

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The Arrest and the (Missing) Agreement On December 23, 1957, plans were ripe for the Securitate to arrest the woman who at the end of a four-day detention became the source “Fink Susanne.” The arrest, like most of the operations pertaining to this agent, was based on a series of scenarios and maneuvers that the case officers concocted and controlled behind the scenes. According to the officers’ records in volume 3 of her file, which justifies the abandonment of her as a source, she was arrested both in conjunction with the Depner/Volkmer Group and on the basis of the compromising material gathered mostly after Hahn’s first visit to Romania in 1956. On December 22, 1957, a day before Siegmund’s arrest, Heinz Taute (the aforementioned member of the Depner/Volkmer Group who had told the source “Kloos Mihai” about Hahn’s first visit to Romania) was arrested, and his depositions incriminated the group as well as Siegmund and her husband. Thus, the opportunity to arrest and blackmail her into agreeing to collaborate presented itself. A wave of arrests in Oraşul Stalin followed, lasting until July 1958 and spreading fear and rumors among the ethnic German population.34 During the first two days of Siegmund’s arrest (December 23 and 24) Officer Iordănescu interrogated her five times, according to the transcripts recorded in her file. These overlap once, most likely due to a clerical error: on December 23 from 7:30 p.m. to 9:50 p.m. and from 9:35 p.m. to 3:30 a.m.; and on December 24 from 7:30 a.m. to 10:50 a.m.,35 from 12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m., and from 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. During her first interrogation, she wrote down her personal story (“Autobiografie”) and submitted a list of her family members, close friends, and acquaintances. At the conclusion of this formality, Iordănescu began questioning her about Hahn’s visit to Depner’s house in November 1956. According to the transcript of this first interrogation, Siegmund revealed that the discussion had revolved around the economic situation in affluent West Germany; the beginning of rock and roll, which Hahn viewed as a result of industrialization and as a form of exercise; and around youth organizations in West Germany in the 1950s. The Securitate was particularly interested in the advice Hahn had given to these young ethnic Germans about organizing and sustaining a cultural unity in Transylvania. According to Siegmund’s deposition, her husband had suggested that they strengthen cultural ties with East Germany and form literary groups around the Protestant church in town, even within the official organization Uniunea Tineretului Muncitor (UTM; The Union of Working Youth). Confirmed by Schlattner during his interrogation on August 14, 1958, this advice given by Hahn was the most incriminating information the Securitate gathered on him. Schlattner attested to the fact that at Siegmund’s house in November 1956, Hahn had discussed with him various opportunities

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for young ethnic Germans. In Schlattner’s words: “On the occasion of the same discussion, Heinz Hahn showed that it is necessary for young Germans in the People’s Republic of Romania to enter UTM and other mass organizations in leading positions in order to hit them from within by changing the political direction of these organizations and even the socialist system.”36 It is important to note that Schlattner was not present at Depner’s house but showed up at Siegmund’s house later that night in order to confront Hahn about his feelings for Siegmund, hoping that Hahn would give her up or that he could win her back. The Securitate was following two leads and purposely sought to establish a connection between two “subversive” ethnic German groups in Oraşul Stalin: the Depner/Volkmer Group and the group that had formed around the pastor Konrad Möckel of the Black Church, who organized religious gatherings for young ethnic Germans.37 Thus, Siegmund’s third interrogation focused on Priest Möckel’s Jugendstunde (youth hour), a weekly religious gathering during which the priest and young ethnic Germans discussed the Bible and issues important to them, and on the young ethnic Germans who participated in these religious activities—especially Depner, who was a regular there. She gave elaborate but inefficient answers to most of these questions, not providing any significant or new information to the Securitate, as is evident from the absence of any of the colored underlining or side notes typically made by the case officer to mark important (incriminating) information for the investigation. Furthermore, rather than incriminating the targets (Möckel, Depner, and to some extent Schlattner), she referred to printed, and thus already censored and approved, articles by Depner and several German-Romanian writers that had appeared in national and regional German-language newspapers like Neuer Weg (New Way) and Volkszeitung (People’s Newspaper).38 The fourth interrogation focused entirely on the Securitate’s main target, Siegmund’s husband and his interests and inquiries expressed during his visits to Romania in November 1956 and September 1957. Some of the information she gave merited some blue underlining by the Securitate officer and came up later in several officer reports. One important aspect of the couple’s discussions, according to Siegmund, was her husband’s question about the wages of workers in Romania and his negative evaluation of them compared to wages in West Germany. Interestingly, Siegmund also related their conversation regarding the events in Hungary and Hahn’s question about the possibility that the unrest would spread to Romania. Her answer to him, which she related to her Securitate interrogator, seems to encapsulate the stereotypical image of Romanians in the eyes of ethnic Germans: “I told him that Romanians are not as capable as Hungarians because they have a different temperament and as such they are not capable of starting a counter-revolution.”39 Whether this answer

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was a slip on her side, given her previously guarded answers, or rather a tactic to convince the interrogator of her sincerity, remains unknown. To color her final answer in the most patriotic light, she spoke of her husband’s conviction that ethnic Germans in Romania should remain there—a position that the Protestant Church in Transylvania held as well, since in both of their opinions, emigration to Germany would involve assimilation and as such a loss of their Transylvanian Saxon traditions, language, and way of life.40 The fifth interrogation seems to have had little bearing on the Securitate’s investigation of Hahn, Möckel, and the Depner/Volkmer Group. The questions referred to Siegmund’s stepsister Gerhild and her boyfriend Heinz Babiac, who at the time was completing his military service. Captain Iordănescu asked Siegmund if she was aware of any (German) nationalist activity on the part of Babiac, to which she responded in the negative.41 After the five interrogations over the course of December 23 and 24, there appear to have been no interrogations (or at least records of them) on December 25 and 26. There is also no record of any collaboration agreement signed by Siegmund, although her Securitate officers refer to an agreement in their reports during various stages of her collaboration.42 In their version of events, Siegmund had been released conditionally—that is, because she had agreed to collaborate with them and to urge her husband to return to Romania so that he could clear his name. She never knew the real intentions of the Securitate, since their main goal, as documented in her file, was to blackmail her husband into becoming a Romanian spy.43 In a letter Siegmund wrote to her officers after a meeting that took place on June 24, 1958, we learn about her version of events. In no uncertain terms, she refers to the fact that she was released because she was sincere and reflected critically on her actions. Regarding a collaboration agreement, she explains that she agreed to inform the Securitate should she ever learn about any armed operation against Romania, upon which she shook hands with “Mr. Iorgu”—most likely a code name or nickname for Officer Iordănescu, her main interrogator during her arrest and operative officer for the length of her collaboration. In this note, Siegmund also emphasizes the seemingly significant detail that she was not under arrest on December 26, 1957, when she verbally consented to this agreement, as she was in Mr. Iorgu’s office rather than in a cell or interrogation room.

“Fink Susanne’s” Informative Notes and Failed Collaboration: December 26, 1957, to October 13, 1958 According to Siegmund, there are two types of informers. First are those who are loyal to their country and feel it is their duty to report on harmful and hostile activities. They do not expect anything in exchange other

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than respect. Then there are those who are not loyal citizens but rather hypocrites, who denounce others for personal reasons, maybe even out of revenge, and who expect monetary reimbursement, a better life, and other advantages in return. And, as Siegmund continues to lecture her officers in the previously mentioned letter from June 25, 1958, this second category of citizens would readily change sides if offered more advantages and money. Unfortunately, as she audaciously concludes, the Securitate had mistaken her for a hypocrite, a citizen of the second type. Furthermore, she explains that she finds it immoral to inform on friends and acquaintances and would not be able to live with herself should the Securitate officers force her to do so. According to their verbal agreement, between December 26, 1957, and June 25, 1958, Siegmund delivered on demand several informative notes. Her file contains three notes on December 28 of 1957; and in 1958, one on January 24, one on January 31, one on February 5, two on March 5, one on April 2, one on April 22, one on May 7, one on June 5, one on June 25, and finally one on July 25.44 June 25’s note stands out, because on this day she brought along with her the aforementioned seven-page, single-spaced typed letter in which she had delineated her reasons for refusing to continue any collaboration and for not being able to respect the officers’ demands. This letter, to which I will return, is conclusive evidence of her inefficient collaboration; it provides Siegmund’s version of some of the events in her own voice, which reflects emotion, indignation, resolution, and above all, courage in the face of potentially disastrous consequences and the threat of a second arrest. Her initial tasks as the newly minted Securitate source “Fink Susanne” were threefold, and she addressed them in three separate notes that she delivered two days after her release. First, she had to provide an account of how she had related the rehearsed explanations for her four-day absence to her family and friends. The Securitate seemed to have carefully planned Siegmund’s secret arrest and her absence between December 23 and December 26. According to their plan, she was supposed to attend a meeting for librarians in Bucharest, although there must have been some questions that arose given the fact that it took place over Christmas.45 The emotional turmoil and shame she experienced because of the lies she had to tell her mother give us a glimpse of her character and her close relationship to her mother. Pressed by her mother for more details regarding the fictitious librarians’ conference in Bucharest, she realized that the answers she was instructed to give only prompted additional questions. At one point, she felt her face turning red when her mother looked inquisitively at her, clearly not believing what her daughter was telling her. Finally, unable to look into her mother’s eyes, she excused herself and went to bed to escape the pointed questioning, to which she evidently was not allowed to give any honest answers.46

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Siegmund’s second and third notes (both dated December 28) focused, in accordance with her instructions, on the reaction of ethnic Germans from Oraşul Stalin to the December 26 arrest of members of the Depner/Volkmer Group, especially the reaction of Konrad Möckel and other participants in the weekly Jugendstunde. The second note describes her visit to the Depner family, her neighbors and friends, where she learned that Horst Depner and Emil Popescu had been arrested, and that after Depner’s arrest, three Securitate officers came to search his house looking for arms. In the midst of the unsettling news, the reaction of the Depner family to the ridiculous arms story was pure laughter, as Depner’s sister Hedwig described the event. It turned out to be no laughing matter, however, as rampant and farfetched rumors began circulating among the ethnic German population. Some were blaming Depner himself for denouncing the group, while others were pointing fingers at Hahn, whose visit in 1956 had attracted the attention of the Securitate and as a result must have triggered the series of arrests. At the first Jugendstunde after the arrests, Möckel’s reaction seems to have been cautious but resolute, as he reminded the young people in his congregation that in Romania there was freedom of religion, and state officials were always welcome to attend any of his Jugendstunden. Siegmund’s note reproduces Möckel’s words as follows: It is impossible not to address the sad event that took place last week, about which all of you must have learned. It is about a few young people who attended our religious circle many times. . . . I just want to tell you that our country’s constitution guarantees us complete freedom of religion. We priests have been told and assured of this fact many, many times. . . . We all have a clean conscience. . . . So please don’t be afraid that a few young people, who participated in our midst, have been arrested.47

Saddened by the recent arrests but with unflinching determination, Möckel defended the young people, expressing his hope that they had not committed anything grave. His words may have been too loud a provocation for the state officials or for their undercover representatives, as two weeks after this Jugendstunde, on February 7, 1958, he was also arrested and charged with treason, for which he received a life sentence in prison.48 The remaining notes that Siegmund presented to her officers are mostly letters that she received from her husband during this time, which she also summarized for them in Romanian. After most letters, the officers noted, “Already intercepted” (Deja interceptată).49 On a Romanian translation of one of the intercepted letters (April 5, 1958), one of the officers wrote, “Let’s put it back into the mail circuit to see if she

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[Siegmund] will present it to us.”50 The letters that Siegmund wrote to her husband after her arrest were evidently also intercepted. During her meeting with her officer on March 5, 1958, she admitted to the fact that in one of her letters to her husband, there were indeed veiled allusions to her secret arrest. Iordănescu apparently believed it was a letter she wrote to Hahn on December 29, 1957, three days after her release. The two sentences from this letter that Iordănescu singled out do not at first sight seem to have any bearing on her arrest.51 The happy tone of Siegmund’s letter is deceptive, as her voice seems genuine and untroubled, although she mentions Christmas only briefly and never mentions the fictitious librarians’ meeting in Bucharest. The following sentence earned colored underlining though: “Over Christmas I thought of you a lot and wept a little because I couldn’t be with you . . .”52 One other thing the Securitate officer underlined, and that could have been meant as a clue to Hahn that something was amiss, was her mention of her Christmas meal, “a simple vegetable soup and potatoes without meat.”53 This “simple soup,” possibly the meal that she received during the arrest, might have attracted Hahn’s attention; it certainly did that of the Securitate. Furthermore, if these apparent clues were inconclusive for her husband, two weeks after her arrest (in a letter from January 4, 1958, which exists only in a very bad Romanian translation) the tone of her voice changed dramatically, revealing a devastated and depressed Siegmund who was probably realizing the unpredictable and potentially dangerous nature of her liaison with the Securitate. The irreconcilable tension between Siegmund’s desire to be with her husband and her duties as an unwilling spy threw her into a state of desperation that she freely expressed in this letter: “There are many complications and unanswered questions.”54 The officers’ summarizing reports repeatedly state that Siegmund was willing to do anything they asked of her as long as they allowed her to join her husband in West Germany. In the event that the Securitate proceeded with her arrest, an officer noted, she had threatened to commit suicide. In hindsight, this letter seems like a cry for help as she reaches out to her husband for understanding, in a way preparing him for the secret she undoubtedly planned to divulge to him once they were reunited. Her picture of the heavy snowflakes that were falling incessantly on that day sets the tone of the letter marked by somber thoughts and an overwhelming feeling of loneliness. She urges him to be gentle with her should she cry again when they are together, and to forgive her. In addition, she addresses the desperate situation of Schlattner, whose recent arrest must have amplified her negative emotions. She recalls Schlattner’s expression when she left him, in particular his eyes that looked at her with “torturing despair and an infinite sadness”; these eyes follow her everywhere and stare at her in the darkness.55

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In the following months, she was faced with a barrage of insults and threats from the Securitate as they tried to persuade her to believe that her husband was an “imperialist agent” who had no feelings for her and would get rid of her once he had reached his goals, although it never becomes clear from the file what kind of information or assistance she could have offered any Western spy. In a desperate attempt to prove her own and her husband’s innocence, as well as their genuine love for each other, on March 5, 1958, Siegmund decided to hand over to the Securitate her most prized possession: sixty letters from Hahn, from the very first letter he wrote to her as a sixteen-year-old on May 11, 1947, to the most recent one from March 1958. The Securitate was using Siegmund for their own purposes, demanding the impossible from her: to deliver her husband to them. Her mission was to write to him urging him to return to Romania for a third visit, such that the state could find out which “imperialist agency” he was working for and eventually blackmail him into spying for Romania. On March 6, 1958, Siegmund was forced to write to him, asking him to come back to visit her as soon as April.56 According to Hahn’s letter to Siegmund from April 5, 1958, news about the arrest of Schlattner and of the Depner/Volkmer Group had finally reached him, along with the Securitate’s conviction that he was a German spy.57 Incriminating Siegmund and Hahn for the arrests of the Depner/Volkmer Group members was also part of the Securitate’s plan all along, as is plain from Officers Deitel and Iordănescu’s proposal to recruit Siegmund on December 26, 1957: “We will attribute this action [the arrest of the Depner/Volkmer Group] to her in order to assure the necessary guarantees.”58 The information that had reached Hahn in Munich was not up-to-date, as he expressed his fear that Siegmund herself might be under arrest as well. However, the rumors about his being a German “agent” who came to Romania on a spy mission seemed ominous enough and prompted the West German to write a detailed letter on April 5, 1958, that was primarily intended for the censoring eyes of the Securitate officers. In this letter, he attempts to logically refute point by point the accusations they had brought against him, while also accusing the Securitate of spreading false information.59 Judging not only from its presence in the file but from the abundant underlinings and analyses added by the officers, the letter undoubtedly reached its intended audience, although in fact it did not include any information that they did not already possess. On March 3, 1958, the MAI Oraşul Stalin had sent an urgent request for information on Heinz Hahn to MAI Directorate I Bucharest—a department that was also responsible for external data and counterespionage—and on March 12 the result came back “necunoscut” (unknown).60 As Siegmund’s psychological harassment continued, her officers insisted on pursuing a strategy contrary to their initial assessment of her

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character and level of intelligence. On June 24, 1958, she reached breaking point and categorically refused to continue any kind of collaboration, thereby risking being rearrested. The following day, she wrote a letter to her Securitate officers, which she handed to them personally, in which she set the record straight, exposing their questionable character and methods and at the same time unknowingly reaching out to a post-Securitate audience: “You don’t treat me like a human being who has her own opinions, but like a machine, a receptor, or at best, like a woman with very limited intellectual capacity, who is forced to believe everything you say and must respect in you an unbelievable authority, even though your friendly smile is as false as possible and the words you’ve used are as hypocritical as possible.”61 As early as the second paragraph of this memorable letter, Siegmund speaks out against the way the Securitate had treated her both as a woman and as an educated person. She bluntly questions their authority and the fact that their modus operandi was based on lies. For example, they had demanded that she lure Hahn back to Romania, knowing full well that she would deliver him straight into their hands. Thus, she categorically refused to do so: “It is clear that, from now on, I will not call him any longer because, on the one hand, you don’t allow me to write him the truth, and, on the other hand, you don’t want to prove to me what you say you know about my husband.”62 Apparently, the officers had told her that they had eavesdropped on her conversations with her husband and knew everything that had happened at the Depner meeting, and that they had recorded their wedding day. In the way she talks about their activities, she shows contempt for their tactics and displays laudable courage in pointing out their pettiness in listening to people behind closed doors. Her strongest point in her unbridled tirade against the Securitate is the fact that Marea Adunare Naţională had approved her marriage to the West German Heinz Hahn. As she explains, the presidium approved this marriage undoubtedly with the help of the Securitate from Oraşul Stalin. The Securitate must have taken care of the groundwork that led to the marriage approval, and after careful consideration the presidium members must have based their decisions on the findings of the Securitate pertaining to this West German citizen. Moreover, as she emphasizes, Marea Adunare Naţională gave their approval a year after the Depner meeting, and as such she could not understand why the Securitate was harassing her for having married Hahn. Pointing to what should have been the correct hierarchy in the Romanian political system, and questioning the Securitate’s logic, she states, “The Securitate is not above the presidium of the Great National Assembly and cannot tell them what to do like you’d tell a kindergartener.”63 Urging them not to insult her intelligence, Siegmund audaciously finishes her note with a double threat: “I ask of you to think carefully about all these problems and to stop all these threats. I am determined to write to the

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presidium of the Great National Assembly about all of these problems, and others that I have not mentioned here, in order to find out if justice still exists in this world, and I’m convinced justice does exist.”64 Siegmund’s call for justice prompted a lengthy explanatory note from Captain Iordănescu. In it, he adds his dry version of the encounter with this hostile agent. He confirms that Siegmund demanded explanations regarding the Securitate’s insistence on Hahn’s return to Romania, stating that otherwise she would categorically refuse to invite him back. Iordănescu also points out logical contradictions in her statement: “At every meeting lately, she expressed fear of arrest but in spite of this she stated that she finds it ‘immoral’ to inform on friends and acquaintances and even more so to lure her husband into a trap. Since we reminded her that her attitude is contrary to her given agreement and reproached her hostility toward us, she stated that she and her husband are innocent and so is the Depner group who had been arrested, and that we should do what we see fit; then she showed that no matter what measures we will take, she doesn’t care anymore.”65 Iordănescu’s matterof-fact note confirms in essence Siegmund’s hostile attitude toward the Securitate and her reluctance to collaborate. As a result, he proposed to further analyze her attitude and arrest her on the basis of the material they possessed. As Siegmund had correctly and insightfully analyzed her relationship with the Securitate, her intelligence was of secondary importance to them; her worth lay solely in her relationship with Hahn, which the Securitate could exploit for its own ends. Once she refused to play their game and lure Hahn back to Romania, they would discard her, as they implied “the imperialist agent Hahn” would do once he had accomplished his spying mission. The Securitate, in fact, never rearrested Siegmund, although Iordănescu proposed arresting her several times in the course of 1958 and even as late as November 21, 1959.66 Her out-of-jail card was her husband; so long as the Securitate kept an interest in Hahn, she was relatively safe. Yet Siegmund was determined to keep her husband out of danger, although that meant not seeing him again. In fact, in 1959, when the Securitate arranged for Hahn to receive an entry visa to Romania and then to have his visa extended for another three months, in the hopes that he would finally fall into their trap,67 Siegmund warned her husband by asking him not to visit her. In the course of one day, April 6, 1959, she wrote him a letter and a postcard urging him not to come, and in case either of those was intercepted or reached him too late, she also sent him a telegram and placed a telephone call to him. The content of her letter is striking, especially when compared to the evidence of ardent love and desire to see each other again that filled countless pages before and after April 6: “I don’t know what you’ll think of me, hopefully nothing bad: I love you very much but this will not be enough to allow us to

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be together for 6 weeks.”68 Hahn clearly understood the message, as he never returned to Romania. On October 13, 1958, the Securitate abandoned the agent “Fink Susanne” on grounds of ineffective collaboration and her disclosure to her husband of her arrest and collaboration. Iordănescu prepared a proposal for her abandonment in which he included the seven-page letter she had written to her officer on June 25, 1958, along with his characterization of her as a Securitate source, which stood in stark contrast to the one at the beginning of her recruitment process, when the prospect of recruiting her seemed advantageous. The Securitate’s initial evaluation of her as an intelligent woman who spoke Romanian perfectly and could converse on various sophisticated topics turned into one of a (German) nationalist, hostile to the state and attached to the Western (German) mode of life. Exhibiting a cowardly temperament and petite bourgeois and religious beliefs, she only delivered “information without any value.”69 Iordănescu also presented a review of the events that had led to her recruitment based on compromising material his agency had gathered on her and confirmed that three months into her collaboration she had exhibited a hostile attitude toward them and retracted her agreement: “She cannot ‘betray’ her friends and would rather get arrested than do so because she feels she is not guilty and neither is HEINZ HAHN who in her opinion has nothing to do with the subversive activity of the DEPPNER HORST group.”70 While the “Fink Susanne” network file was closed in October 1958, Siegmund’s surveillance continued until June 1961. We find out how she and her husband desperately and persistently tried, on either side of the Iron Curtain, to obtain an exit visa for her so she could join him in Munich. Hahn visited the Romanian embassy in Vienna and wrote letters to the Red Cross organization, to Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, and to other high officials who he hoped could influence a positive decision on her exit visa application. Siegmund took numerous trips to Bucharest and spoke with various high officials, including the leader of the women’s organization there. In an ironic twist of fate, her visa application was in fact approved in November 1959 but never reached her, as we find out from Col. Pavel Aranici’s reply to a telegram from MAI Directorate I Bucharest on November 12, 1959.71 When asked whether the Securitate of the Region Stalin had any objections to their approval of her exit visa, Aranici sealed Siegmund’s fate and altered the course of her life dramatically: “We have compromising materials on her and her husband. She participated together with him in activities hostile to the People’s Republic of Romania [. . .] and on these grounds we do not agree with her receiving an exit visa for the Federal Republic of Germany.”72 Shortly after that, on December 3, 1959, MAI Bucharest announced in a telegram to MAI Region Stalin that they had arranged for Siegmund’s exit visa to be annulled.73

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Although the Securitate closed her surveillance file on June 6, 1961, Siegmund’s file story continues until February 1962 in volume 4 (in which materials pertaining to Hahn are archived). From two letters that Siegmund wrote to her husband on January 4 and February 1, 1962, we learn that they were to be divorced in Romania on February 8, 1962. A week before their divorce, Siegmund wrote her last letter as his wife, describing their extraordinary relationship: “Now you will be my friend and a little my lover too, against whose face I will nuzzle up and who will gently kiss my tears away sometimes when I am sad. When I am inwardly lonely.”74 Unfortunately for this couple, it took the Securitate a long time to give up their far-fetched scenario about an imperialist agent coming to Romania, inciting young ethnic Germans to protest and hostile activity against the Romanian communist state, and getting married to a prospective spy who was planning to divulge Romanian secrets to West Germany. Yet at the close of Siegmund’s surveillance file, Maj. Gh. Vilceleanu wrote, “The correspondence between HANN MARIANE and her husband does not present any suspicious problems.”75 The wasted resources used to fabricate compromising material on this couple and the lives damaged in the process get lost between the lines and are of no concern to Vilceleanu, Iordănescu, Deitel, and their cohort before them. This is how the file story of “Fink Susanne” ends. Twenty years later, in 1982, the file story of “Silvia” begins when the Securitate of the 1980s proposed the reactivation of the agent, which Siegmund shockingly accepted in spite of her life-altering experiences with the Securitate of the 1950s.76 Compared to “Fink Susanne,” “Silvia” proved less reluctant or hostile yet seemingly equally inefficient, writing mostly favorable characterizations of various “targets.”77 From the “Silvia” network file, we learn that Siegmund repeatedly applied for a visa to visit her brother Harald Siegmund, who had emigrated to Germany after his release from prison. In spite of various Securitate sources that vouched for her return to Romania after a potential trip, her applications were rejected every year until the summer of 1989, when she was finally allowed to visit Germany, only several months before the fall of the communist regime in Romania. The file does not mention any reunion with her former husband during this visit, and the reader is left with many questions.78 In fact, Hahn is never mentioned again in the “Silvia” file, but we do find out that Siegmund never remarried and continued to live with and care for her mother in Braşov until the end of the file in 1989. Beyond the stigma and moral dilemma associated with any informer activity, a careful close reading of the “Fink Susanne” file sheds a corrective light on the story of this woman’s intricate life and love story behind the Iron Curtain. The pieces of information strewn over many volumes and hundreds of pages can be strung together into a file story that has important consequences for the person behind the code name

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“Fink Susanne” and at the same time provides important answers for the Depner/Volkmer Group, victims of the Black Church Trial, with whom both her life and her file were intertwined in Oraşul Stalin in the 1950s. Her file story offers compelling evidence of Siegmund’s desperate situation that the Securitate officers cunningly exploited, of their ingenious yet failed strategies to turn her and her husband into spies, and also of the courage she summoned to stand up to them under psychological duress and the constant threat of being rearrested. However, surviving participants of the Black Church Trial, especially her former boyfriend Eginald Schlattner, who collaborated closely with the Securitate during his two years of arrest, are still accusing Siegmund of having betrayed her friends and of being a coward for not speaking out about her collaboration. The fact that Siegmund, who introduced Hahn to the Depner/ Volkmer Group, had not been convicted with them gave rise to many speculations to which she never properly responded, but to which her file provides many answers that are worth pursuing—as are the hundreds of pages of handwritten letters that portray a love story profoundly altered and eventually cut short by the Securitate. Siegmund’s complex file story challenges readers and researchers alike to adopt a differentiated approach when reading network files, taking into account the quality and the degree of incrimination found in them, the reasons for collaboration, and the specific historical context of the collaboration.

Notes The chapter title appeared originally as “Nu veţi reuşi niciodată să faceţi din mine o spioană,” Arhiva Consiliului Naţional pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securităţii [hereafter ACNSAS, The Archive of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives], Fond Reţea [hereafter FR, Network Fond], file 367797/1, 27). All translations from Securitate files are mine. I would like to thank the CNSAS (Consiliul Naţional pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securităţii; The National Council for the Research of the Archives of the Securitate) for allowing me access to the files discussed in this chapter. Special thanks go to Silviu Moldovan for patiently guiding me through the many files pertaining to German-Romanians, and in particular for drawing my attention to Marianne Siegmund’s file. I am also thankful to Bettina Brandt and Corneliu Pintilescu for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. Furthermore, I am grateful to Marianne Siegmund for graciously agreeing to talk with me openly about this difficult period in her life and for allowing me to use her real name. The information I received from her I have included in endnotes; the “file story” is in the main text. 1

Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics, 13.

2

Securitate informer files are called “dosare de reţea” (network files).

3

These so-called informative notes are brief written or oral reports provided by informers to their Securitate officers.

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4

For a discussion of postcommunist narratives of guilt and compliance, and of creating a “usable past” in the process of coming to terms with one’s past, see Cristian Tileaga’s article “(Re)Writing Biography.” 5

As explained in the introduction, note 10, I will use the more neutral term “source” when referring to “Fink Susanne,” as the CNSAS has never made a pronouncement about her involvement with the secret police forces. 6

ACNSAS, Fond Informativ [hereafter FI, Informative Fond], file 264512, volume 1, “Acţiune informativă individuală Siegmund-Hann Mariane [sic]” (Individual Informative Action) consisted initially of 527 sheets, now 522; volume 2 includes most of Heinz Hahn’s letters to her and entails 857 sheets in complete disorder; volume 3 simply titled “Marianne Hahn” has just 7 sheets, including the decision to close her file on June 6, 1961, but to continue to follow her. Volume 4, “Dosar Arhivă: Fond Informativ privind pe Siegmund Hans şi alţii” (Archive Dossier: Informative Fond Pertaining to Siegmund Hans and Others), contains mostly materials pertaining to Heinz Hahn and consists of 422 sheets. 7

ACNSAS, FR, file 367797/1, “Dosar Personal al agentului Numele conspirativ ‘Fink Susanne’” (Personal Dossier of the Agent Code Name “Fink Susanne”), consists of 27 sheets with regards to her recruitment and abandonment and a handwritten personal story; volume 2, “Dosar Personal Nume Conspirativ ‘Silvia’” (Personal Dossier Code Name “Silvia”), of 77 sheets; and volume 3, “Mapa Anexă cuprinzînd materiale informative furnizate de ‘Silvia’” (Annexed Folder Containing Informative Material Provided by “Silvia”) contains 96 sheets. Braşov (Romanian) is the official name of a multiethnic Transylvanian city, which is also referred to as Kronstadt (German) and Brassó (Hungarian). From 1950 to 1960 it was renamed Oraşul Stalin (Stalin Town) in honor of the Soviet leader. 8

9

While CNSAS researchers do have access to sensitive information regarding medical problems and sexual orientation, for example, they are not permitted to disseminate it due to considerations of privacy. 10

See for example Wolgang Meyer and Gudrun Meyer’s chapter, especially the part dedicated to Heinz Hahn, “Die Pionierarbeit von Heinz Hahn und des Studienkreises für Tourismus für eine qualitative Tourismusforschung: Eine forschungshistorische Skizze,” in Tourismusforschung in Bayern, 39–50. 11

In addition to the headquarters in Bucharest, the Securitate had regional and local offices. For more information on the structure of the Securitate and its various Directorates, see the CNSAS website (http://www.cnsas.ro). 12

Cristl Depner, Siegmund’s neighbor and friend, who was at the time a college student in Bucharest, was arrested because she “instigated” other students to protest. She spent six months in the infamous Jilava jail (ACNSAS, Fond Documentar [Documentary Fond], file 8851/1, 24–25). 13

The Depner/Volkmer Group was a group of young ethnic Germans from Oraşul Stalin who were arrested during 1957 and 1958 and convicted of treason as part of the Black Church Trial in 1958. Horst Depner, Siegmund’s neighbor, Günther Volkmer, and their friends had weekly meetings on Thursday night at Depner’s house where they discussed political events and other topics of interest.

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The Securitate referred to them as the Depner/Volkmer Group but also as the Depner Group or the group around Depner, especially in Siegmund’s file. 14

In one of the documents, the hotel Athenee Palace is mentioned, probably mistakenly. 15

See the highly interesting working paper by R. Eliza Gheorghe as part of the Romanian Nuclear History Project, “Romania’s Nuclear Negotiations,” 8–12. 16

For the reaction to the Hungarian Revolution in Romania, see, for example, Johanna Granville’s “‘If Hope Is Sin,’” and Dennis Deletant’s discussion of the impact of the Hungarian uprising in “Romania 1948–1989.” 17

During my second interview with Marianne Siegmund on July 20, 2014, she adamantly denied ever having had such conversations with Hahn. 18 Information on this group is scarce; see Stănescu, “O posibilă Uniune Europeană,” 62–73.

While under arrest, Schlattner described Ionaşcu as “an element hostile to the regime of the People’s Republic of Romania” (un element duşmănos faţă de regimul RPR) who envisioned a united Europe outside of the American and Soviet spheres of influence, based on its own cultural values, and having its center in Germany. Schlattner further declared that Ionaşcu was redacting a constitution for a united states of Europe (ACNSAS, FI, file 264512/4, 39). 19

Ibid., file 264512/4, 39. Ionaşcu, along with two other members, Florin Stănescu and Vintilă Săvulescu, was arrested in June 1958 and received a sentence of twenty years with hard labor. He was released in 1964, as Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, Romania’s first communist leader, decreed several pardons between 1962 and 1964 that were extended to political prisoners as well (Deletant and Ionescu, “Romania,” 19). 20

21

The Depner/Volkmer Group members were also released as a result of Gheorghiu-Dej’s mass amnesty. See note 20. 22

ACNSAS, FI, file 264512/4, 211.

23

Romanian citizens needed approval from the Great National Assembly to marry foreigners and then a second approval to be allowed to leave Romania in order to join their spouses. 24

ACNSAS, FI, file 264512/1, 19.

25

Ibid., file 264512/4, 4–9.

26

The plan is enclosed in ibid., file 264512/2, 462–69.

27

This is included in her informative note dated April 22, 1958, in ibid., file 264512/1, 158–61. 28

Siegmund’s file does not include any transcripts of recorded conversations during Hahn’s second visit. 29

Although Siegmund took her husband’s name, I will refer to her as Siegmund in the remainder of this article for reasons of clarity and consistency. In her file she was rarely referred to by her real name; she also signed her informative notes, as was mandatory, as “Fink Susanne.”

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30

According to the documents in the file and his approving signature on many documents, former Securitate officer Ernest Deitel, who on February 29, 1960, was dismissed from the Securitate, seems to have been involved with Siegmund’s case as well as with the Black Church Trial. I have contacted him in New York, where he has been residing for decades, but he claimed he had not been involved with these two trials concerning ethnic Germans in Oraşul Stalin (the Black Church Trial and the German Writers’ Trial). According to Deitel, a Soviet council prescribed the action plan for the trials and other incriminating actions. Deitel also explained that as a superior officer he signed many documents without necessarily having been directly involved in the various operations. In Deitel’s own “cadre” (officer) file, there is a report in which he was criticized for being disrespectful to the Soviet council Col. Alexandru Mihailov, who left Romania on June 5, 1958 (ACNSAS, Cadre Fond, file D-102, 2, 210). Like Heinz Hahn (Enzo Puter), Marianne Siegmund (Annemarie Schönmund), and others involved in the trials, Deitel also appears in Schlattner’s autobiographical novel Rote Handschuhe (Red Gloves, 2001) as Major Blau. Interestingly enough, neither Siegmund nor Schlattner (whom I interviewed in July 2014) knew Deitel’s name. The controversial depiction of the victims in Schlattner’s novel, as well as that of his former girlfriend and her husband, Marianne Siegmund and Heinz Hahn, attracted criticism, most notably from Harald Siegmund, Marianne’s brother, who was arrested as part of the German Writers’ Trial of 1959. For Schlattner’s role in the German Writers’ Trial, see Corina L. Petrescu’s chapter in this volume. For Harald Siegmund’s review of Schlattner’s book, see “Zwischen Dichtung und Wahrheit.” 31

See ACNSAS, FI, file 264512/1, 37–38; the ill-fated plan was approved by Col. Gheorghe Crăciun. Compromising her father was point number four in their “Plan de Măsuri” [Action Plan] dated October 14, 1957, signed by Iordănescu, the officer in charge of this plan, and approved by Deitel (ibid., file 264512/1, 41). 32

33

The Securitate either tried to convince Siegmund that Hahn was just using her to obtain information on his secret mission, or accused her of using Hahn in order to leave Romania. ACNSAS, FR, file 367797/1, 20. 34

For more information on the Depner/Volkmer Group and the Black Church Trial, see Corneliu Pintilescu’s Procesul Biserica Neagră 1958. For accounts by some members of the Depner/Volkmer Group, see Brenndörfer and Sindilariu, Der Schwarze-Kirche-Prozess, and Depner’s memoir Auch ohne Zukunft. 35

ACNSAS, FI, file 264512/1, 105–9.

“Tot cu ocazia acestor discuţii HEINZ HAHN a arătat că în R.P.R. tinerii germani este necesar să intre în UTM şi în alte organizaţii de masă în forurile conducătoare, pentru a lovi pe dinăuntru cu scopul de a schimba linia politică a acestor organizaţii şi chiar sistemul socialist” (ibid., file 264512/1, 59).

36

37

During Heinz Taute’s interrogation on December 23, 1957, from 4:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., he was asked about a female group (Kränzchen) that he then described as carrying on similar activities as the male Depner/Volkmer Group (ibid., file 264512/4, 232–33). In her informative note from March 5, 1958, Siegmund was also asked to write about the activities of this Kränzchen, of which she was a member; she enumerated topics of discussions ranging from cake recipes to advice

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on raising children (ibid., file 264512/1, 164–65). Judging from the files, the Securitate never seemed to have pursued the matter of the Kränzchen any further. 38

Ibid., file 264512/1, 94–95. Unfortunately and not surprisingly, the Securitate compared Siegmund’s responses to those of Heinz Taute of the Depner/ Volkmer Group, who was arrested on December 22, 1957 (a day before Siegmund’s arrest), and whose account of the discussion around the Hungarian Revolution diverged entirely from hers. He testified, “We all expressed our joy that the communist regime will be abolished, but some of us opined that it will take some time until the counterrevolutionaries will win, while others believed the counterrevolutionaries had already won” (Toţi ne manifestam bucuria că va fi lichidat regimul comunist, însă unii din noi eram de părere, că pînă ce va cîştiga [sic] contrarevoluţionarii va mai dura, iar alţii erau de părere, că de acum contrarevoluţionarii ar fi reuşit; ibid., file 264512/1, 100). “I-am răspuns că românii nu s nt aşa capabili ca ungurii, fiindcă ei au alt temperament şi deci românii nu s nt capabili să pornească o contra-revoluţie” (ibid., file 264512/1, 124). 39

40

Ibid.

41

Ibid., file 264512/1, 110–11.

For example, in Captain Iordănescu’s characterization of Siegmund, included in her network file, the officer explained, “From the secret control of correspondence [mail interception] resulted that immediately after her recruitment she [‘Fink Susanne’] tried to communicate to Hahn Heinz from the Federal Republic of Germany in a conventional way that she had been arrested with the Depner H. group and that she agreed to collaborate/gave her agreement of collaboration” (Din controlul secret al corespondenţ ei a rezultat imediat după recrutare ca a ncercat sa-i comunice lui Hahn Heinz din R.F.G. sub o forma convenţionala faptul că ea a fost arestată cu grupul Depner H. si că ar fi dat angajament de colaborare; ACNSAS, FR, file 367797/1, 20). 42

43

Volume 4 of Siegmund’s file 264512/4 entails Hahn’s surveillance in Bucharest and Oraşul Stalin, copies of some of his and Siegmund’s letters, transcripts from the wiretapped conversations between him and Siegmund at the hotel, and daily accounts of the Securitate’s observations of his every move. And yet, ironically, they missed the fact that he and Siegmund went to the fateful Depner meeting on November 9, 1957. According to their surveillance account of November 9, Hahn returned to the Siegmund residence at 1:35 p.m. and remained there for the rest of the day; their surveillance ended at 10:00 p.m. The volume also includes a detailed report and “legendă” (legend; code name for a covert scenario for arresting or approaching targets or prospective informers) for the recruitment of Heinz Hahn (10–18). It is dated March 24, 1959, about five months after Siegmund had been abandoned as an inefficient agent. 44

The notes dated May 7, June 5, and July 25 are included in volume 4 of Siegmund’s file, the one mostly dedicated to the surveillance on Heinz Hahn. The note on July 25 is important, as Siegmund recounts her visit to the Ionaşcu family in Bucharest on November 6, 1956. Confronted with Schlattner’s testimony that Hahn and Ionaşcu discussed “important issues,” as she herself allegedly had told Schlattner, Siegmund categorically rejected that, explaining that she had never

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told Schlattner anything about her discussions with Ionaşcu. Consequently, Officer Iordănescu proposed to bring Siegmund in for questioning, and that if she lied, they should arrest her and probably contact Heinz Hahn to come and “help” her. He also proposed to again ask Schlattner (under arrest) under what circumstances Siegmund had told him about these “important issues” that Hahn and Ionaşcu supposedly discussed (ACNSAS, FI, file 264512/4, 319–21). 45

In my phone interview with Siegmund from March 23, 2014, she explained that she was arrested at the train station in Oraşul Stalin on December 23, 1957, as she was evidently never supposed to board the train to Bucharest. On July 20, 2014, she also added that she found the seams of her coat ripped when she returned to her cell after the first interrogation; she assumes the Securitate officers were expecting to find documents or other compromising materials they thought she wanted to take to Bucharest. 46

See Siegmund’s informative note from December 28, 1957 (ACNSAS, FI, file 264512/1, 195–97). In the same note, Siegmund relates that her mother asked about two gentlemen who had come for her on the night she was supposedly going to the librarians’ meeting in Bucharest. They claimed they had agreed to drive together by car to Bucharest, and acted very surprised at the news that she had already left. They were most likely Securitate officers who came to arrest her in case she decided not to go to the train station, where they eventually picked her up and took her to the Securitate regional headquarters in Oraşul Stalin for interrogations. “Mi-e imposibil ca în seara aceasta să nu amintesc de evenimentul trist care s-a nt mplat săptăm na trecută şi despre care desigur cu toţii aţi aflat. Este vorba de nişte tineri care de multe ori au participat la cercul nostru religios. . . . Eu vreau să vă spun doar at ta că constituţia ţării noastre ne asigură şi ne permite libertate deplină, n credinţa noastră. Acest lucru, ne-a fost nouă preoţilor, de multe şi multe ori comunicat şi asigurat. . . . Noi avem cu toţii o conştiinţă curată. . . . Nu trebuie deci să vă speriaţi pentrucă [sic] au fost arestaţi nişte tineri care au participat şi în mijlocul nostru” (ibid., file 264512/1, 185). 47

48

Möckel was released in the early 1960s as Gheorghiu-Dej declared general amnesty, and later emigrated to Germany. 49

See for example, Siegmund’s informative note from April 22, 1958, where she summarized Hahn’s latest letter (dated April 19, 1957) from Vienna (ACNSAS, FI, file 264512/1, 161). 50 “Să fie lăsată n circuit să vedem dacă va fi prezentată.” The letter from Hahn is dated April 5, 1958, and the note of the officer with an illegible signature is dated April 16, 1958. The officer also noted the following on the margin of this translated letter: “[N]ot likely that he will come again to Romania; he is obviously informed about everything” (puţin probabil că el va mai veni la noi în ţară, se vede că el e la curent cu totul; ibid., file 264512/1, 463). 51

Ibid., file 264512/1, 170.

52

“Ich habe Weihnachten über so viel an Dich gedacht und ein bißchen geweint, weil ich nicht mit Dir sein konnte . . .” (ibid., file 264512/1, 515).

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53

In the original: “‘ne einfache Gemüsesuppe und Kartoffeln ohne Fleisch” (ibid., file 264512/1, 516). 54

Ibid., file 264512/1, 489.

55

Ibid., file 264512/1, 489–91.

56

Ibid., file 264512/1, 389. Page 168 is a special cover for the letter in which Siegmund asked her husband to come to visit her in April 1958, but the original letter is not attached. The Romanian translation of this letter is included as page 389. 57

In veritable spy style, as Siegmund related to me during our phone interview in March 2013, she and her father plotted a way to let Hahn know about the events in Oraşul Stalin and to warn him not to come back no matter how much she wrote to him, at the behest of the Securitate, begging him to visit her again. She explained that she wrote him a note in minuscule writing that they stuck into a very small vial her father used for storing rubies for watches. They introduced the vial with the message into a toothpaste tube and entrusted some friends who were about to leave for Germany to take it to Hahn. 58 “Vom atribui această acţiune ei pentru asigurarea garanţiilor necesare” (ACNSAS, FI, file 264512/2, 437–41). 59

Ibid., file 264512/1, 467.

60

Ibid., file 264512/2, 450. The fact that Directorate I in Bucharest did not have any information on Hahn confirms the fact that the secret police had no record of any spy by the name of Hahn. The Securitate also requested information on Hahn from their Soviet counterpart, as Hahn was scheduled to attend a festival in Moscow; the Soviet secret service confirmed his attendance as a member of the West German delegation. There is no information on the nature of the festival Hahn attended (ibid., file 264512/1, 46). “[N]u mă trataţi ca pe un om viu cu g nduri şi păreri proprii, cu [sic] ca o simplă maşină, un receptor sau n cel mai bun caz o femeie foarte limitată la minte, care este obligată să creadă absolut tot ce spuneţi şi care trebuie să respecte n dumneavoastră o autoritate nemaipomenită, chiar dacă z mbetul prietenos al dumneavoastră este c t se poate de fals şi cuvintele de care v-aţi folosit c t se poate de ipocrite” (ibid., file 264512/1, 73). 61

62 “Este clar că de acuma nu-l voi mai chema şi aceasta pentru faptul că pe de o parte nu vreţi să-mi permiteţi să-i scriu adevărul, iar pe de altă parte nu vreţi să-mi dovediţi ce spuneţi că cunoaşteţi despre soţul meu” (ibid., file 264512/1, 69). 63 “[S]ecuritatea nu stă deasupra prezidiului Marii Adunări Naţionale şi nu-i poate face presctieri [sic] se poate da [sic] unui copil din grădiniţă” (ibid., file 264512/1, 71).

“Eu vă rog să vă g ndiţ i bine asupra tuturor acestor probleme ş i s ă ncetaţ i ncetul cu ncetul cu aceste ameninţă ri. Eu s nt ferm hot ă rit ă de a m ă adresa n cur nd cu toate aceste probleme / şi cu o serie de alte, pe care nu le-am amintit aici/ prezidiului Marii Adunări Naţionale să aflu dacă mai există dreptate pe această lume, şi s nt convinsă că dreptate există” (ibid., file 264512/1, 72). 64

“La fiecare nt lnire, n ultimul timp manifesta teamă de arestare cu toate acestea a făcut afirmaţia că ea consideră ‘imoral’ să dea informaţii despre prieteni şi

65

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cunoştinţe ei [sic] şi mai mult să-l atragă pe soţul ei n cursă. Reproşindui-se [sic] că atitudinea ei este contrară angajamentului dat şi duşmănoasă faţă de noi, a făcut afirmaţia că ea şi soţul ei nu s nt de vină şi atăt [sic] grupul Depner care a fost arestat şi noi să facem ce credem de cuviinţă, apoi a arătat că orice măsuri am lua, ei nu-i pasă” (ibid., file 264512/1, 72). 66 On November 13, 1959, Col. Pavel Aranici proposed to arrest her and defer her case to the justice system if Hahn did not return to Romania (ibid., file 264512/4, 390). 67 In March 1959, the Securitate was still hoping to recruit Hahn according to an elaborate recruitment plan from March 24, 1959. Their plan, in which they envisioned a spy couple that would deliver West German secrets to them, entailed a detailed scenario: the Securitate would carefully monitor Hahn’s travel arrangements to Romania down to his exact train seat number. They would also make sure that no other tickets were sold in his particular train compartment so they could keep him isolated in preparation for the officers who would board the train in Sibiu and work on him until the train reached Oraşul Stalin. In case he refused to collaborate, they would proceed with his arrest. Then, depending on the international relations between Romania and West Germany, they would eventually release him in exchange for “a similar service from the West Germans” (ibid., file 264512/4, 10–18). 68

“Ich weiß nicht, was Du jetzt von mir denken wirst, vielleicht aber denkst Du nicht falsch von mir: ich hab Dich sehr lieb, aber das genügt nicht, um 6 Wochen zusammen sein zu können” (ibid., file 264512/1, 283). 69

“informaţii lipsite de valoare” (ibid., file 264512/2, 452).

“[E]a nu poate să-şi ‘trădeze’ semenii săi şi mai bine preferă să fie arestată pentrucă [sic] ea nu se simte vinovată aşa cum nici HEINZ HAHN—după părerea ei nu are nici o legătură cu activitatea subversivă a grupului DEPPNER [sic] HORST” (ibid., file 264512/2, 453). 70

71 Ibid., file 264512/1, 11–14. Pavel Aranici made Doina Jela’s list of infamous Securitate officers and collaborators (Lexiconul negru, 33). 72 “Asupra acesteia şi a soţului [added by hand] posedăm materiale compromiţătoare că a participat împreună cu soţul ei la activitate duşmănoasa R.P.R. [. . .] fapt pentru care noi nu s ntem de acord ca susnumita să primească viză de plecare n RFG” (ibid., file 264512/1, 11). 73

Ibid., file 264512/4, 389.

74

“Jetzt wirst Du mein Freund sein und ein wenig auch mein Geliebter, an dessen Gesicht ich manchmal mein Gesicht schmiegen werde und der mir ganz leicht die Tränen wegküssen wird, wenn ich manchmal traurig bin. Wenn ich manchmal innerlich einsam bin” (ibid., file 264512/4, 417). 75 “Din urmărirea corespondenţei dintre HANN [sic] MARIANE [sic] şi soţul ei nu rezultă probleme suspecte” (ibid., file 264512/3, 3). 76

On July 20, 2014, I asked her whether she believes she could have said no to a new collaboration; she pondered and answered: “I don’t know.” She also explained that she was asked her opinion about people who applied for trips to the West and their plans to return to Romania. She said she had never hurt anyone;

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if she knew they would not return, she would not provide any information— statements, which the notes in the “Silvia” file corroborate. However, as Sabina Kienlechner claims, it is difficult to determine how harmful reported information really was (“Kann ein Spitzel,” 56). This chapter focuses mainly on the “Fink Susanne” file story and the consequential impact this failed collaboration had on Siegmund’s life. Although less captivating, the “Silvia” file reveals various aspects of Siegmund’s collaboration and the Securitate’s strategies in the 1980s, and as such also deserves a close reading—which, unfortunately, would extend beyond the limits of this chapter. 77

For example, in her last note, this is what she has to say about a “target”: “Personally I know him to be level-headed, serious, devoted to his work” (Personal îl cunosc ca fiind o persoană echilibrată, serioasă, devotată muncii pe care o depune; ACNSAS, FR, file 367797/3, 1). She then proceeded to assure the Securitate that this person would certainly return to Romania should he be allowed to visit West Germany. 78

I am grateful to Marianne Siegmund for revealing to me that she and Hahn did meet during her visit to Germany in 1989. She fondly remembers having spent several days together, as he showed her all the places that he had talked about and described in his letters to her from 1947 to 1962. Their friendship continued after Siegmund emigrated with her mother to West Germany in 1990 and lasted until his death in June 2005.

Bibliography Brenndörfer, Karl-Heinz, and Thomas Sindilariu, eds. Der Schwarze-Kirche-Prozess 1957/58: Erlebnisberichte und Dokumentation. Braşov: Aldus, 2011. Deletant, Dennis. “Romania, 1948–1989: A Historical Overview.” Accessed December 9, 2013. http://www.php.isn.ethz.ch/collections/coll_romania/ introduction.cfm. Deletant, Dennis, and Mihail Ionescu. “Romania and the Warsaw Pact: 1955– 1989.” Cold War International History Project, 2004. Accessed December 9, 2013. http://wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/ACF368.pdf. Depner, Horst-Peter. Auch ohne Zukunft ging es weiter: Erinnerungen. Munich: Südostdeutsches Kulturwerk, 1998. Gheorghe, R. Eliza. “Romania’s Nuclear Negotiation Postures in the 1960s: Client, Maverick, and International Peace Mediator.” Romania Energy Center, 2012. Accessed December 9, 2013. http://www.roec.ro/wp-content/ uploads/2012/08/Gheorghe_Nuclear-Negotiations-Postures_EN.pdf. Granville, Johanna. “‘If Hope Is Sin, Then We Are All Guilty’: Romanian Students’ Reactions to the Hungarian Revolution and Soviet Intervention, 1956–1958.” Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies 1905 (April 2008). Accessed April 29, 2016. http://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/ index.php/cbp/article/view/142/143. Jela, Doina. Lexiconul negru: Unelte ale represiunii comuniste. Bucharest: Humanitas, 2001.

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Kienlechner, Sabina. “Kann ein Spitzel eine moralische Orientierungshilfe sein?” In Versuchte Rekonstruktion: Die Securitate und Oskar Pastior, edited by Ernest Wichner. Text + Kritik 12, no. 12 (2012): 55–64. Meyer, Wolfgang, and Gudrun Mayer. “Die Pionierarbeit von Heinz Hahn und des Studienkreises für Tourismus für eine qualitative Tourismusforschung. Eine forschungshistorische Skizze.” In Tourismusforschung in Bayern, edited by Armin Günther, Hans Hopfinger, H. Jürgen Kagelmann, and Walter Kiefl, 39–50. Munich: Profil, 2006. Pintilescu, Corneliu. Procesul Biserica Neagră 1958. Braşov: Aldus, 2008. Schlattner, Eginald. Rote Handschuhe. Vienna: Zsolnay, 2000. Siegmund, Harald. “Zwischen Dichtung und Wahrheit: Flucht nach vorn.” Neue Kronstädter Zeitung, June 20, 2001, 6. Stan, Lavinia. “Inside the Securitate Archives.” Wilson Center: Cold War International History Project. (March 2, 2005). Accessed December 9, 2013. http://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/inside-the-securitate-archives. Stănescu, Florin Alexandru. “O posibilă Uniune Europeană—delict politic în 1958.” In Memoria 2 (2003): 62–73. Tileaga, Cristian. “(Re)Writing Biography: Memory, Identity, and Textually Mediated Reality in Coming to Terms with the Past.” Culture Psychology 17, no. 2 (2011): 197–215. Vatulescu, Cristina. Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.

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3: Witness for the Prosecution: Eginald Schlattner in the Files of the Securitate Corina L. Petrescu

I

N HIS INTRODUCTION TO DORIN TUDORAN’S published Securitate file, historian Radu Ioanid pertinently observes that “the Securitate file is not a postcommunist title of nobility, but the deformed mirror of the persecution set up by a communist regime through its political police,” and that thus “it reflects first and foremost suffering and tragedies lived by the victims during the time of their persecution.”1 As such, as Mădălin Hodor shows, “the documentary value of [a Securitate] file must be constantly seen in relation to [the file’s] origin. One must not forget that it is the creation of a political police and of a regime that mixed lies in with the truth, and reality in with illusion.”2 Truth in relation to political regimes, Michel Foucault has theorized, “is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extends it,” and therefore political truth is “to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, destruction, circulation and operation of statements.”3 This article documents the statements through which, between 1957 and 1959, the Romanian secret police transformed one aspiring Transylvanian Saxon writer, Eginald Schlattner (b. 1930), into its witness for the prosecution, pitting him against five other Transylvanian Saxon writers—Andreas Birkner, Wolf von Aichelburg, Georg Scherg, Hans Bergel, and Harald Siegmund—in the so-called German Writers’ Trial (1959). Andreas Birkner (1911–98) studied Lutheran theology in Romania and worked first as a priest. In 1934, he began his literary career with a publication in Klingsor, the most important German-language literary magazine in pre–Second World War Romania. On June 23, 1958, he was arrested and received a sentence of twenty-five years of hard labor. Wolf von Aichelburg (1912–94) studied Romance and German studies in Romania and France prior to the Second World War. He was arrested on May 19, 1959, and likewise was sentenced to twenty-five years of hard labor. Georg Scherg (1917–2002) studied philology in Germany and

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France prior to and after the Second World War. He returned to Romania in 1947, where at first he worked as a high school teacher of German and in 1957 became professor for German studies at the Victor Babeş University in Cluj. He was arrested on September 30, 1958, and sentenced to twenty years of hard labor.4 Hans Bergel (b. 1925) drew attention to himself as a writer in 1956 when his novella Fürst und Lautenschläger (Prince and Bard) was published. He became the cultural editor of the Volkszeitung (People’s Newspaper) in 1957. He was arrested on May 22, 1959, and sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor. Harald Siegmund (1930–2012) studied Lutheran theology in Romania but like Birkner had a keen interest in literature. On October 1, 1958, he was arrested and sentenced to ten years of hard labor. All of these men were released from prison between 1962 and 1964 due to a general amnesty for political prisoners, and all emigrated to what was then West Germany.5 While the five writers had knowledge of one another and all were acquainted with Schlattner, they were not organized in a group, nor did they act in unison, as the Securitate implied during the trial. Yet these facts are not relevant to my present study, as I trace Schlattner’s story as depicted by the Securitate in the file it compiled for the German Writers’ Trial (ACNSAS, FP, file 331) as well as in three others it amassed against a group of Transylvanian Saxons attempting to organize themselves in the wake of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. These were prosecuted in the so-called Black Church Trial (1958) (ACNSAS, FD, file 8851; FI, file 153639; and FP, file 742). To recreate what the Securitate crafted as the reality of this or any of its files requires us to look in many different places. Telling the stories from the files is like building a jigsaw puzzle, yet one for which not all the pieces are provided but must instead be gathered from other more or less obvious sources. Furthermore, even when found, the pieces do not fit together perfectly but are at times larger or smaller than their designated spaces. The larger pieces create overlaps and deform the puzzle’s image—or in terms of the files, the information therein often elevates the described events to absurd scenarios of espionage and treason. The smaller ones leave empty spaces between the pieces, thus revealing the informational gaps inherent in each file. In either case, the image that the puzzle presents is fractured, the fragments composing the whole have visible edges, and the overall picture is distorted. Such is also the story that emerges from the files. My sources include one “informational/surveillance file” (ACNSAS, FI, file 153639), one “case file” (ACNSAS, FD, file 8851), and two “criminal investigation files” (ACNASA, FP, file 331 and FP, file 742).6 An informational file includes documents produced by the Securitate over the course of a target’s surveillance and registers the use of complex operative measures for his or her background check and shadowing. A

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case file consists of materials pertaining to the surveillance of institutions or groups of people through large-scale operative actions arranged thematically around topics such as “art and culture,” “education,” “studious youth,” and “cults and sects.” A criminal investigation file contains depositions by the accused and the witnesses brought forth during a trial; it documents the trial and its aftermath—that is, the places where the condemned served their sentences.7 From Schlattner’s file8 one learns that he was arrested because he was well acquainted with Horst Depner, a young Transylvanian Saxon worker from Oraşul Stalin9 who hosted evening gatherings for his friends.10 At one of these soirees in July 1956, Schlattner read from his novella “Gediegenes Erz” (Pure Ore), which had received an award from the statesponsored German-language publication Neuer Weg (New Way).11 The reading led to discussions about the future of Transylvanian Saxons as part of the new Romanian state, which convinced the participants that they needed to continue their discussions in the future. The Securitate deemed this and subsequent gatherings subversive because they strengthened ethnic unity and promoted nationalistic values among these young people, and for these reasons it prosecuted them in the Black Church Trial as the Depner/Volkmer Group.12 Schlattner was sentenced for having failed to report on this group but was also used as a witness for the prosecution in the trial involving the five German-language writers. Hence, in keeping with what Cristina Vatulescu has identified as the ultimate goal of any file produced by a secret police, the critical role of Schlattner’s file was “to erase all incongruities in a synthetic characterization”13 of both Schlattner—as an accused and as a witness—and the people against whom he testified. A close reading of Schlattner’s file with attention to the rhetoric, tone, grammar, and lexical choices in the interrogation transcripts raises questions about the course of an interrogation per se. A transcript documents the date and the place of the interrogation, the times when it began and ended, the interrogator’s questions, the interrogatee’s answers, and both of their signatures. It does not register the treatment that the interrogatee received or the methods used to obtain his answers. Was he threatened or coerced into his statements? Was he lured into them by promises? Did he volunteer his answers? A comparison of the length of each interrogation session and the number of pages in the transcript leads to more surprising results: for four to six hours of questioning, four to eight pages are recorded, which means that in an hour, only one or one and a half handwritten pages were produced. Historian Corneliu Pintilescu goes so far as to claim that when Securitate officers checked the transcripts of interrogations that pertained to cases that were their immediate responsibility, they would edit these transcripts in accordance with the Securitate’s view on the case.14

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The language of the transcripts appears standardized, as it replicates structures of the bureaucracy’s parlance present in the reports written by Securitate officers to their superiors. These reports abound in abbreviations such as “M.V.” (mapă de verificare; background check folder) or “T.O.” (tehnică operativă; operational technology). They display neologisms, such as “marşrutizare,” a term derived from Russian and adopted into military jargon as the noun “marşrut,” meaning marching route or itinerary. The Securitate modified it through a new substantivization to “marşrutizare,” which denoted that an informant was directed toward a particular environment to fulfill specific tasks set by his or her Securitate officer. Other more commonly used words also have changed meanings— for instance, “abandonare” (abandonment), designating the exclusion of an informant from an information network, or “legendă” (legend), identifying a fictitious scenario created by the Securitate to disguise undercover actions by its officers or informants. Military terminology— “inamic” (enemy), “duşman” (foe), and “trădător de patrie” (traitor to the country)—and catchphrases—“conspirativ” (conspiratorial), “operativ” (operational), and “informativ” (informative)—or the equivocal phrase “în atenţie” (in attention), denoting that a particular person was of interest to the Securitate either as a suspect, informant, or potential recruit, infuse these reports. The use of code names makes the language rigid and obscure to the uninitiated. Moreover, the coherent, summarizing narratives devoid of any markers of orality in the transcripts suggest that the voice therein is not that of an interrogatee and proves the manipulated nature of the text of a transcript, which did not record statements verbatim but summarized them according to a general, predetermined formula. For example, it is hard to believe that during questioning an interrogator would take the time to formulate such elaborate and wordy queries as “What other actions took place at the initiative of the participants at Wiesenmayer’s gathering for the boycott and removal of authors who in their works followed the ideological socialist line?”15 It is also implausible that an accused or a witness would answer in perfect Securitate jargon: “Particularly Birkner and Krasser, through their cold and distant attitude, looked to deepen the undermining of the position of the writers who in their works followed a just ideological line.”16 In Romania’s authoritarian society of the 1950s, it did not matter whether someone was guilty or not. The state had a stock of enemy types—the intellectual with ties to the prewar regimes, the religious leader, the member of the former democratic political parties or fascist Iron Guard, the landowning peasant (kulak), the nationalist German, the irredentist Hungarian. These stock types acted as templates onto which the Securitate mapped political guilt, since, as Pintilescu has shown “the regime wanted to have political repression legally sanctioned by judicial

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verdicts (mostly from military courts).”17 To do so, Securitate officers often carried out illegal arrests based on verbal (mostly telephoned) instructions from their superiors and without an arrest warrant18 and then manipulated articles of the penal code to suit their institutional purposes.19 People’s deeds were strictly considered from the perspective of the regime, and if they were deemed crimes in the context of those times, they were judged accordingly. For instance, while the constitution recognized freedom of faith for all religious denominations, in order to minimize the role of the churches, the Securitate interpreted various religious practices as “counterrevolutionary offenses” and prosecuted religious leaders for subversive activities, as in the Black Church Trial.20 Sometimes the regime changed its point of view altogether with respect to a certain issue regarding its ethnic minorities, such that what was punishable at one time was no longer condemnable at another. For example, the emigration of ethnic Germans to West Germany was officially denounced in the 1950s but embraced after the Romanian state established diplomatic relations with the Federal Republic of Germany in 1967.21 The German Writers’ Trial was undoubtedly a political trial. It was not a show trial of the Soviet type, because it took place behind closed doors; according to Pintilescu, only a prescreened group of young Transylvanian Saxons working for the German-language newspaper Volkszeitung were in attendance. They were not expected to report about the trial in their journal but to spread among the members of their community the Securitate’s warning: unless they were willing to renounce ethnic unity and isolation and to integrate into the structures of the Romanian state, they could all be prosecuted for one deed or another.22 Moreover, again unlike a show trial, none of the accused were forced to incriminate themselves or produce mea culpae to the regime. Like a show trial, though, it was set in motion not by a search for justice but by the will of a state to establish its uncontested dominance and to spread fear among its inhabitants, so that it can also be called an intimidation trial. The Securitate interpreted a literary soiree that had taken place at the residence of the poet Astrid Wiesenmayer in July or August 1956 as a conspiracy against the Romanian state.23 It charged that Andreas Birkner had organized an unofficial meeting at Wiesenmayer’s residence in the summer of 1956 on the occasion of Wolf von Aichelburg’s return to the city of Sibiu. According to the Securitate, Birkner had done so in order to formulate a common strategy for German-Romanian writers to ideologically and culturally subvert Romania’s new social order. At the meeting, he had called for a resolution according to which the authors in attendance24 would “flood” the German-language literary scene with apolitical, mystical, and nationalist writings and would thus compromise the people’s democracy in Romania.25 For this, Birkner, Aichelburg, and three other writers— Scherg, Bergel, and Siegmund—were put on trial and found guilty of

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“the crime of conspiring against the social order through agitation” and sentenced to many years of hard labor,26 even though the latter two had not even attended the soiree. The German Writers’ Trial must be considered together with the Black Church Trial because information obtained during the questioning of witnesses in the latter led to the opening of a criminal investigation file for the former. After all, the Transylvanian Saxon community was still tightly knit; people knew one another and could be linked together in any way the Securitate saw fit. Any information about anyone could be construed to incriminate that person or not, depending on the Securitate’s interests, and events or actions with unclear outcomes could be forced into a pattern of interpretation that suited the secret police’s purposes.27 In the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution, which lasted from October 23 until November 4, 1956, the Romanian authorities feared the protest potential of the young, and particularly of the students already organized, as it reminded them of the discussion group called Petöfi-Circle,28 which had spearheaded the protests in Budapest, and the protests initiated in Bucharest and Timişoara by students who showed solidarity with the Hungarian Revolution.29 Between February and June 1957,30 Schlattner led a literary circle for ethnic German students at the Victor Babeş University in Cluj, where he was completing his degree in Hydrology. German-Romanian students as well as German studies students and professors participated in this circle that operated within the parameters of official university regulations yet drew the Securitate’s attention. The circle enlisted its 154 members on March 7, 1957, which is regarded as the official founding date although the circle’s first meeting had taken place already on February 28.31 The German-language press and public showed great interest in the circle, as did German-language literary scholars and writers, who supported it by engaging with its members during the circle’s meetings—among the writers accused during the German Writers’ Trial both Scherg and Bergel had readings from their works for the students.32 This support stemmed, according to literary scholar Michaela Nowotnick, from the “quite serious intentions of the students to be constructive within the socialist system and the possibilities available to them.”33 The students were not combatting socialism but rather were trying to find their own place inside it and to shape its ideas to the benefit of their ethnic group.34 They wanted to preserve their national identity within the boundaries laid out by the Romanian state. In this sense, one of its members, Gernot Nussbächer, wrote, “The literary circle in Cluj was by no means harmless; it was an attempt to bring the German students together and give them an understanding of the values of the newest German and local literature, so that Romania’s future German intellectuals would not only be specialists in their field but also have a specifically German general education, in order to preserve their national

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identity in a state that was at that time a people’s democracy and later a socialist one.”35 How important the literary circle was for the case against the five writers cannot be clearly established.36 The files only attest to the fact that Schlattner’s first interrogation on December 30, 1957, began with questions about the circle and moved on to questions about the Depner/Volkmer Group.37 Indubitably, through both the Black Church and the German Writers’ Trials, the Securitate wanted to send a message to both the literary world and the German-Romanian community as a whole. It used several strategies to do so: First, it did not call as witnesses for the prosecution German-language writers who had already expressed their loyalty to the regime, such as Paul Schuster or Alfred Margul-Sperber, but those who themselves belonged to the former bourgeois milieu just like the accused writers, and who in addition were acquaintances and friends of the writers. If the authors did not admit themselves to being harmful to the state, their fellow writers would do so. Second, the youngest of the witnesses, Schlattner, had already been imprisoned and interrogated for twenty-one months by the time of the trial in September 1959. Evidence shows that the Securitate had already infiltrated both the Depner/Volkmer Group in Oraşul Stalin and the various literary groups in Sibiu,38 so the question becomes why it chose Schlattner as a witness. Possible answers are that during Schlattner’s interrogations about his involvement with the Depner/Volkmer Group, the Securitate had learned enough about him to be able to extort his collaboration by using his feelings of resentment toward his former girlfriend Marianne Siegmund to make him talk. Siegmund was herself being questioned about her then husband, the West German citizen Heinz Hahn, whom the Securitate pursued tirelessly in order to recruit him as an informant.39 Another reason why Schlattner might have been chosen as the Securitate’s tool was that he knew all the authors personally and was himself an aspiring writer whose fate could serve as an example to other young writers should they drift from the established path of socialist realist writing. Furthermore, judging by the work he had most recently published (the novella “Gediegenes Erz”),40 Schlattner was not insensitive to the tenets of socialism, which he perceived as a chance for his ethnic group to continue its existence in Transylvania. In his interrogation on December 30, 1957, Schlattner said that he had created the literary circle in Cluj in order to draw young ethnic Germans toward the socialist regime.41 Like many others in the Depner/Volkmer Group, he naively assumed that the Securitate would carry out proper investigations;42 and since he had never dealt with the Securitate before, he did not know about its methods and tricks to extract confessions and information about others.43 Schlattner was also psychologically labile, a fact not only that he invoked repeatedly during his early interrogations to convince his interrogators that he could

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not have plotted against the state, but that was attested to by the medical certificates issued by the Securitate’s doctors.44 Moreover, Schlattner continued to interact with his acquaintances (such as Carl Göllner, agent45 “Florescu,”46 and Teodor MoldovanSponer, agent “Ioan Vasilescu”) even after he had learned that they collaborated with the Securitate.47 Aside from them, according to an undated “Action Plan” that specifies that the informative action against the writers began on October 1, 1958, information was gathered by the agent “Uyvari Olga,” who operated on Aichelburg, Wiesenmayer, Gisela Székely, and Harald Krasser; while agent “Otto Kraus” operated on Erwin Wittstock and Bergel.48 They were tasked with finding out why these writers suddenly came on the literary scene in 1956, the nature of their writings and details about their publications, and about their meetings. Agent “Otto Kraus” was himself kept under surveillance by agent “Radu Constantin,” and both had to establish “the nature of the relationships” between their targets (Wittstock and Bergel) and the writers in Sibiu. Agent “Uyvari Olga” was also expected to clarify the types of relationships Krasser, Birkner, Scherg, Aichelburg, Wiesenmayer, Gundisch, Wittstock, and Bergel had to one another, to other German-Romanian writers, and to Heinrich Zillich and Karl Kurt Klein, the leaders of the Transylvanian Saxon diaspora in the Federal Republic of Germany. Twenty-one transcripts of Schlattner’s interrogations scattered over three files (ACNSAS, FD, file 8851/3; FP, file 742/11; and FP, file 331/1) served the Securitate in constructing him into the witness for the prosecution. All of these records address the activities of the literary circle in Cluj, those of the Depner/Volkmer Group, and Schlattner’s relations to the five writers.49 A “Synthesis with the Results of the Current Investigations Pertaining to the Problem of German Nationalists” indicates that after Schlattner was arrested for “tangency” with “the subversive group” led by Depner and Volkmer, the Securitate searched his house and found letters indicating that Bergel intended to read from his work Fürst und Lautenschläger at the literary circle in Cluj.50 This seems to have been the connection that the Securitate established between Schlattner and Bergel such that on April 25, 1958, it questioned Schlattner about Bergel—and the first time it questioned Schlattner about any of the writers. According to the transcript of that interrogation, when asked about whom else he knew in Oraşul Stalin besides Depner, Schlattner mentioned Bergel’s name.51 The transcript documents Schlattner’s attempt—during an interrogation that lasted from 9:20 a.m. until 2:45 p.m.—to present Bergel as a dependable subject of the Romanian state, one who was in favor of the Transylvanian Saxons’ integration into the new political order as a means for the ethnic group to survive and simultaneously solve the nationality question in Romania—that is, to erase the differences between the different ethnic groups in the country and integrate them all into one socialist

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people. Schlattner emphasized Bergel’s loyalty and backed his claims with quotes about Bergel from Neuer Weg, which had characterized Bergel as “a man who [made] the Republic proud.”52 While Schlattner’s strategy seems thought out, his interrogator often asked him why he was lying or why he was not telling the full truth about Bergel. Although Schlattner insisted that he was telling the truth, while reading the file one gets the distinct feeling that the interrogator did not believe him. The transcript from April 26, 1958, still presents a picture of Bergel as loyal to the regime.53 It is only in the transcript from June 21 of that year that that image changes. While already addressing Bergel’s “counter-revolutionary activities,”54 Schlattner was asked to evaluate Bergel’s political attitude in the past and at that moment. He talked about Bergel’s National Socialist past as presented to Schlattner by his acquaintance Ingo Schun, and about their encounter on July 1, 1956, in Bucharest, when Bergel had explained to Schlattner the subtext of his short story Fürst und Lautenschläger. Schlattner then interpreted specific passages of that work to illustrate its two layers of meaning. He called Bergel an anti-Semite because he had warned him about the editor-in-chief of the ESPLA publishing house, Herbert Lamm, who was Jewish. He pointed out that Bergel was in favor of the Transylvanian Saxons’ rapprochement with the Hungarians “for tactical reasons”—to obtain national rights—and also of their distancing from the Romanians, who were their enemies. Bergel emerged from Schlattner’s account in the transcript as a racist who rejected Thomas Mann as degenerate and embraced the ideas of Oswald Spengler and Alfred Rosenberg. He also appeared as the spokesperson of National Socialism among Transylvanian Saxons in Oraşul Stalin, proclaiming that there was no future for Transylvanian Saxons in Romania.55 His actions were in line with the resolutions of the meeting at Wiesenmayer’s in 1956, which had aimed at undermining the current regime at the literary level and trying to fill all positions of authority pertaining to Germanlanguage culture in Romania with people of his own kind—that is, German nationalists with bourgeois views. To this end, Schlattner contended, Bergel had grouped such writers around him at the Volkszeitung, whose cultural editor he was and which he hoped to transform into the mouthpiece of nationalist bourgeois ideas among the Transylvanian Saxons. What had caused this dramatic change in Schlattner’s attitude? There is no transcript to document the situation, as there are also no further transcripts until May 29, 1958.56 That and all the subsequent ones testify to Schlattner’s willingness to cooperate with his interrogators.57 On May 29 he was asked again about Konrad Möckel, the priest considered to be the gray eminence behind the supposed conspiracy led by Depner and Volkmer and unfolding inside the walls of the Black Church in Oraşul Stalin.58 On June 19, he testified against Birkner, whom he presented as a writer with nationalist and bourgeois views.59 He admitted that Birkner

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and Krasser had warned him against Schuster, an ethnic German writer but one who supported the political regime in Romania. The tone of his statements appears forthcoming as shown by expressions such as “It is important to remark that” (Este important de reţinut faptul că), which add emphasis to the information that follows them. Given the aforementioned standardized language of interrogation transcripts, it is impossible to establish whether these expressions indicate Schlattner’s emotional involvement in his statements during his imprisonment and questioning, or whether they were simply linguistic patterns employed to better write Schlattner into his role as witness for the prosecution. In any case, these expressions do not appear in statements by other prisoners up to that point in the investigation. Schlattner also indicated that Birkner had tested his knowledge of literature during a meeting in September 1956 and had been surprised that he (Schlattner) had not read some “decadent writers.” He also talked about Birkner telling him that he wanted to send the novella “Feuer im Weinberg” (Fire in the Vineyard, 1956), which had received a prize from the German Ethnic Group in 1943,60 to the literary competition at Neuer Weg in 1956, wondering if it would receive an award on this occasion as well; yet in the end, Birkner just submitted it to Neuer Weg for publication, and it was published. About the novella Aurikeln (Auriculae, 1957), Schlattner said that Birkner had told him that it had a double meaning and that he was proud to have himself been a Nazi soldier. Birkner was arrested on July 23, 1958, very likely due to these revelations, as he was the second writer to be arrested and at that time Schlattner was the only one to have been interrogated. It is clear that Schlattner volunteered information, from the fact that he pointed out how Birkner’s acquaintance Alfred Kittner smuggled literature from West Germany out of the unofficial collection of the Dacia Library in Bucharest, copied it, and distributed it among his friends.61 In the context of the investigation leading to the German Writers’ Trial, this information served no purpose but to demonstrate to the Securitate Schlattner’s reliability. Schlattner also drew conclusions for the interrogators when he admitted that he did not know Birkner’s personal opinion about the future of Transylvanian Saxons in Romania, but because Birkner was Krasser’s close friend, Birkner could not think differently from Krasser, who did not see a future for Transylvanian Saxons in Romania. He also called Birkner hostile to the state because he had celebrated the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and was in favor of moving the ESPLA publishing house from Bucharest to Sibiu, away from the control of the central authorities and the Jews—here also accusing Birkner of covert anti-Semitism. Obviously, the most damaging statement is the one about Birkner’s presence at the “conspiratorial meeting” at Wiesenmayer’s. Since Schlattner himself had not attended the gathering, all

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of his statements about it were hearsay or speculation, as for example when he said that he did not absolutely know firsthand whether Birkner had attended the meeting but that based on Birkner’s general attitude and prominent place among the German-Romanian writers in Sibiu, he “could affirm that he [had] attended the meeting.”62 On July 2, Schlattner incriminated Scherg by pointing out his apolitical views on literature but also by decoding a fable Scherg had narrated to him in which a red crab derogatorily represented the communist regime.63 He also said that Scherg had told Harald Siegmund and him about the meeting at Wiesenmayer’s and the decisions reached there. In addition to accusing Scherg of plotting against the Romanian state, this statement implicated Harald Siegmund. Schlattner claimed that Siegmund had come to Oraşul Stalin “to inform himself about the attitude that he should adopt regarding his official literary activity,”64 as up to that point there had been an agreement among Transylvanian Saxon writers to boycott official publications, but in the course of 1956 many had begun to publish. Furthermore, Schlattner admitted to not possessing information about Scherg’s political orientation vis-à-vis the state but inferred it from Scherg’s writings and his participation in the meeting at Wiesenmayer’s. In the last available interrogation transcript, Schlattner referred to Wolf von Aichelburg and presented him as an enemy of the regime who had warned Schlattner not to sell his soul as a writer and to remain free of ideological compromises.65 In Schlattner’s words, Aichelburg also favored writing apolitical literature and supported a Transylvanian Saxon identity, both dangerous stances at that time. Volume 3 of file D 8851 includes interpretations by Schlattner of Bergel’s novel Die Abenteuer des Japps (Japps’s Adventures)66 and of Birkner’s short story “Die Sau mit den sieben Ferkeln” (The Sow with Seven Piglets),67 and another statement about how Bergel had revealed to him the true meaning behind his work Fürst und Lautenschläger, as well as Schlattner’s interpretation of the work in “Bergel’s key.”68 In his witness deposition from September 15, 1959, Schlattner summarized all his previous statements and reiterated that Scherg, Birkner, Aichelburg, and Siegmund held apolitical views on literature, while Bergel hid the true meaning of his short story Fürst und Lautenschläger behind the veil of supposedly historical fiction.69 He also claimed that Birkner, a promoter of counterrevolutionary ideas among German-language writers, deplored the current quality of German-Romanian literature, in which ideology was more important than artistic quality. In fairness, it must be said that Schlattner was not the only one to bear witness against others. For example, in her statement from March 18, 1959, Wiesenmayer testified that Birkner’s concept of culture was wrong, as it was rooted in an outdated bourgeois ideology, and that he saw literature as a weapon to be used against the regime.70 However, in

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her description of the 1956 soiree, Wiesenmayer did not mention any precise discussions that had taken place; she simply said that both Scherg and Aichelburg had read apolitical and aesthetic poems and had not engaged with any of the tenets of Marxism-Leninism. Her accounts fulfilled the expectations of the Securitate—such as that Birkner had no ties to the new ideology of the state, that he rejected class hatred, and that he was not driven by a love of the working class. Yet in a paragraph that appears to be self-critical, she inserted a witty twist that pointed a finger at the Securitate: “My mistake lies therein that, due to my lack of confidence in my own critical power, I did not have the courage to take a clear stand vis-à-vis literati with bourgeois and adversarial opinions. I took too long to see through their bourgeois manner of thinking. This is in a way explainable, as they always proceeded subtly.”71 Obliquely, she signaled to the Securitate that it could not expect her to do its dirty work and be suspicious of anyone to the point of spying on her acquaintances and friends; that was, after all, a task the Securitate had taken upon itself. During the trial of September 15, 1959, other witnesses went back on their original statements. Fritz Jickeli, for example, claimed in his witness testimony that it was a writer’s duty to fight for a contemporary approach to literature and that Scherg was doing just this.72 Gyorg Klöess portrayed Birkner as a pedagogue whose works had not yet reached the ideological level required at that time.73 Asked if Birkner had stated that he would never sell out to the new regime by writing literature promoting it, Günther Müller replied that he was only aware of the fact that in 1950 Birkner had said that he would only write about topics that mattered to him. Hence, if Birkner had not addressed particular issues in his works, Müller contended, he was still finding himself within the sociopolitical context of the time.74 Hans Schuschnig also played his testimony down by denying that at the soiree there had been a call for apolitical literature, but rather affirming that writing with political content had to convey its ideological message in a stylistically masterful manner.75 Gisela Székely denied that Birkner had encouraged young writers to produce works that would undermine the regime, and reformulated Birkner’s complaint about the lack of quality in ideological works to mean that writers should depict the reality of the time but in a manner that also emphasized artistic finesse, as writers were not journalists and thus had more duties than just to inform about events.76 When confronted with her statement from the interrogation about Birkner’s call for apolitical works, Székely invoked a lapse of memory. When pushed for a clarification as to why she had made a different statement during her interrogation, she claimed to probably have misunderstood the question. Other writers also made incriminating statements about one another and even about some authors who were not involved in the trial at all. When rebuked for republishing “Feuer im Weinberg” in Neuer Weg,

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Birkner tried to exculpate himself by pointing out that Wittstock had republished some of his earlier writings as well.77 Birkner also admitted that at Wiesenmayer’s, people had read poetry that was apolitical. When asked specifically whether Wiesenmayer had made references to Jews blocking German-Romanian writers from publishing, he denied that she had made such comments that particular evening but admitted that she had made them at other times. On May 26, 1959, Aichelburg was interrogated twice (8:25 a.m.–11:15 a.m. and then again 11:15 a.m.–4:00 p.m.). During the second interrogation, he was asked about his relations to Scherg, whom he described as “an element with mystical-religious views” rooted in “bourgeois ideology.”78 He also had to explain a fragment from a letter to Birkner in which he had divided German-Romanian writers into two categories: those on the Left (that is, dilettantes and opportunists writing to please the current regime) and those on the Right (that is, writers with convictions). Asked to name some in the latter category, he implicated Birkner, Scherg, Bergel, and Siegmund, all of whose works were nationalistic, mystical-religious, or apolitical. On May 27, 1959, Aichelburg was questioned four times (nonstop between 9:00 a.m. and 4:20 p.m.). During the third interrogation, from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m., he said he was “hostile” toward the new literature in Romania because he judged the works produced to be inferior due to their ideological tint.79 In his interrogation from June 5, 1959, Aichelburg stated that Birkner had led most of the discussion at Wiesenmayer’s gathering.80 In his first interrogation, when Scherg was asked what he had done against the Romanian state, he admitted outright that he had participated in the meeting at Wiesenmayer’s, which had had an unofficial character and reunited nationalistic and bourgeois elements.81 Scherg also acknowledged that Bergel had a hostile ideological position, particularly in his works,82 and that Birkner was the leader of the writers’ circle.83 He also affirmed that the group had come together after Birkner had moved to Sibiu in 1956, and that before 1944 some of the group’s members had already worked together for Zillich’s Klingsor. Members of the group also had connections abroad through Krasser and Roth. In his first interrogation, from May 22, 1959, Bergel denied that his published works (particularly Fürst und Lautenschläger) had a double meaning and argued against this accusation.84 Just three days later, he accepted the interpretation presented to him by the interrogator—that Fürst und Lautenschläger was a pamphlet directed against the regime85— but specified that only when certain passages were taken out of context could this interpretation be made. Siegmund’s first interrogation documented his visit with Schlattner at Scherg’s, where they had been told about the meeting at Wiesenmayer’s and the—supposed—decisions made there.86 While it may appear surprising that he was so forthcoming with this information, a closer look at the

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language of his transcripts shows that Siegmund had already been fed the proper terminology to use in his statements. For example, he stated that Scherg had told him that at the gathering the participants had debated the “tactic of bombarding” German-language publications with their writings, which eventually would be accepted despite their ideologically unsound content. He named Birkner and Scherg as the promoters of these ideas. Furthermore, in their own statements during the trial, the authors incriminated themselves for example when Aichelburg admitted to not coming across as a friend of the regime in some of his letters to Scherg and Birkner and to proclaiming his l’art pour l’art position in some of his writings.87 They incriminated one another, as when Scherg divulged that Birkner’s short story “Die Sau mit den sieben Ferkeln” had scared him when he first read it.88 But they also denied the accusations against themselves and their friends, when Birkner denied having called for literature with a subversive character at the Wiesenmayer soiree.89 Some even defended their points of view courageously: Bergel interpreted his own novella Fürst und Lautenschläger by focusing on the artist as a fighter for the freedom of the masses and not as an instigator against the state;90 Siegmund claimed that Scherg’s demand for more and better Germanlanguage literature was a means to create healthy competition between the Transylvanian Saxons, the Banat Swabians, and the ethnic Germans living in Bucharest rather than a form of ethnocentrism.91 Ultimately, though, the writers were indicted for “engaging in a counter-revolutionary action so as to undermine the regime of the People’s Republic of Romania ideologically.”92 Yet the verdict only references statements that incriminate the authors and makes no reference to the retractions by some of the witnesses or the authors’ daring self-defenses discussed above. According to Sentence No. 1416 from November 14, 1959, in the Black Church Trial, several reasons led to Schlattner’s reduced sentence. He is said to have displayed at all times an honest attitude during his interrogation and during the trial, which had helped uncover the truth not only in his case but also in others—that is, the German Writers’ Trial. His activities in organizing the ethnic German student body in Cluj were deemed positive93—which is very surprising, considering that his interrogation in December 1957 started with questions about this group and how its ethnic composition was detrimental to the tenets of the new Romanian state. Because of his youth, the document stated, his reeducation in the spirit of the regime could take place during a short time of imprisonment.94 Schlattner was sentenced to two years of correctional prison, and all of his possessions were confiscated.95 However, his preventive detention was counted toward his sentence, so that he went free on December 28, 1959.96 The fact that the five authors were arrested at different times, that all witnesses other than Schlattner were also brought in for questioning

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at various moments of the interrogation process, and that their questioning lasted for months on end suggests that the Securitate was slowly but surely mounting its case against them. The “evidence” did not exist readily but had to be stitched together so as to render the preset claims of the trial credible.97 Alongside its formulation that the punishment given to these authors would follow the common practice of the country’s legal system, which punished anyone who carried out counterrevolutionary actions, irrespective of the methods used, the indictment also listed the real reasons for the trial: to justify the Securitate’s crackdown on GermanRomanian writers and to admonish other writers and the ethnic German community as a whole. Yet Schlattner’s file does not offer clarification with respect to his importance for the prosecution prior to May 195898 and thus the choice of him as a main witness in the German Writers’ Trial. It also does not elucidate what made Schlattner change his original attitude toward either the Depner/Volkmer Group or the writers. That coercion and harassment played a role seems more than plausible considering the textual analysis of the transcripts and what researchers know today about the methods used by the Securitate in general during the 1950–60s.99 Given that the first interrogation from December 30, 1957, focused on Schlattner’s literary circle in Cluj and the legality of its actions, and that twelve out of the twenty-one available transcripts centered on the Depner/Volkmer Group while occasionally going back to the circle in Cluj, it does not seem far-fetched to speculate that the investigation of these two groups was the Securitate’s main objective. After only a short while, the Depner/Volkmer Group gained in importance for the interrogators. Also, questions about any of the writers did not appear until April 25, 1958, after which only two transcripts touch on Depner and Volkmer and their activities; those remaining focus on the writers. In a public discussion between the five authors moderated by Peter Motzan in Freiburg im Breisgau on January 19, 1992, Harald Siegmund said: “As of April he [Schlattner] told [the Securitate] everything he knew. He also told [it] about things he did not need to have said because they had been discussed in private, so that no third person knew about them. He admitted to everything without omitting or adding anything; just like a record player.”100 At this discussion, the five authors asked one more time the question that they had been asking themselves since 1959 and that every researcher into the matter has asked as well: Why did Schlattner testify against them? Siegmund suggested two different answers: a nervous breakdown or a conscious decision to sacrifice the five authors and save the 150 members of the literary circle in Cluj. While he would not judge Schlattner for the former, the latter would make him, at least in Siegmund’s eyes, guilty of collaboration.101 In contrast to Siegmund’s position, Aichelburg stated during the same discussion: “He would have had the opportunity to send me to the gallows, so to speak. With respect

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to me, he did not divulge truly dangerous things. He mentioned some things, which were in no way really incriminatory. In my case, he behaved as might have been expected.”102 He did not blame Schlattner or bear a grudge against him for his behavior. Romanian Law No. 293 from 2008 explains that witnesses used in political trials are not to be considered collaborators of the Securitate, given that physical and psychological torture were always part of the manner in which the Securitate obtained its information.103 Yet this official stipulation does not put an end to the accusations of betrayal and deceit brought against Schlattner, whose role in the trial has been revisited periodically in the German-language and Romanian press, especially since the publication of his autobiographical novel Rote Handschuhe (Red Gloves) in 2001.104 Although the work was meant as a mea culpa, its crass portrayal of the victims insulted them anew and made reconciliation between them and Schlattner impossible, despite the many years that had passed since the trial. A critical reading of Schlattner’s file reveals a paradox: while he eagerly collaborated with the Securitate and testified against the five writers between May 1958 and December 1959, he categorically refused to become an informant for the secret police after his release from prison.105 Approached empathically, the file offers insight into Schlattner’s evolution from a promising young writer, who tried to combine the ethics of his Transylvanian Saxon community with his growing political interest in communism, to the Securitate’s main witness for the prosecution in a political trial that never ceased to preoccupy its participants and continues to fascinate researchers to this day.

Notes “[d]osarul de Securitate nu este un titlu de nobleţe postcommunist, ci oglinda deformată a persecuţiei întreprinse de un regim comunist prin poliţia sa politică. [. . .] El reflectă în primul rînd suferinţe şi tragedii trăite de victime în timpul reprimării lor.” Ioanid, “O punere in context,” 12. 1

2 “valoarea documentară a dosarului trebuie pusă mereu în raport cu provenienţa sa. Nu trebuie uitat faptul că el este creaţia unei poliţii politice şi a unui regim care a amestecat minciuna cu adevărul şi realitatea cu iluzia.” Hodor, “Ce nu cuprinde,” 197. 3

Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 133.

4

German studies scholar Laura Gabriela Laza has shown—based on Georg Scherg’s network file, Arhiva Consiliului Naţional pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securităţii [hereafter ACNSAS, The Archive of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives], Fond Reţea [hereafter FR, Network Fond], file 136 040—that he was an informant for the Securitate between May 15, 1957, and September 22, 1958, under the code name “Mihail Petrescu” (Laza, “Relaţii cu Securitatea”). However, the exact implications of this collaboration

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for the German Writers’ Trial cannot be elucidated at this time. For further citations of sources from ACNSAS, Fond Documentar (Documentary Fond) is cited as FD, Fond Informativ (Informative Fond) as FI, and Fond Penal (Penal Fond) is as FP. 5

In 1968 the five writers were rehabilitated in Romania. Birkner had already emigrated to West Germany in 1966, where he worked as a minister in Freiburg im Breisgau. He died there in 1998. Aichelburg, who had not emigrated to West Germany by 1968, was allowed to publish again in German in Romania, which he did consistently until his emigration in 1980. He settled in Freiburg im Breisgau where he died in 1994. After his release from prison, Scherg continued to live in Romania and was a prolific writer during the 1970s and 1980s. In 1990 he emigrated to West Germany where he died in Bodelshausen in 2002. Bergel emigrated to West Germany in 1968, where he continued to write and also engaged in activities that undermined Romania’s communist regime. For his literary work he has received several prizes, most recently the Andreas-Gryphius-Preis in 2013. Siegmund lived in Romania after his release; in 1972 he traveled to West Germany and defected. He died in Munich in 2012. In the original the files are called “dosar de urmărire informativă/DUI” (informational/surveillance file), “dosar de obiectiv/dosar de problemă” (case file), and “dosar de anchetă” (criminal investigation files). 6

Consiliului Naţional pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securităţii [National Council for the Study of the Securitate], Index de Termeni şi Abrevieri cu Utilizare Frecventă în Documentele Securităţii, accessed September 15, 2013, http://www.cnsas.ro/ documente/arhiva/Dictionar termeni.pdf. 7

8

I use the term “Schlattner’s file” generically to include all the information I could gather about Schlattner from any of the files that I consulted. In these files, the documents have sheets that have been numbered first by the Securitate— sometimes several times over, depending on how they were used at the time of their filling and thereafter—and second by the CNSAS when this institution took over the files and archived them. Numerous times, the sheets are written on on both sides. In my article, I indicate whether the information comes from the front or back of a given sheet by using f for front and b for back following the page number assigned to the document in the file by the CNSAS. 9

In Transylvania, some cities have a Romanian, a German, and a Hungarian name but only the Romanian one has counted as official since the end of the First World War—the exceptions are Braşov, renamed Oraşul Stalin between 1950 and 1960, and Cluj, called Cluj-Napoca since 1974. In this article I use the official name of a city at the time of the events described, i.e., Orașul Stalin for Brașov. Also in the German-language quotes, the cities Sibiu, Braşov and Cluj appear with their German names—Hermannstadt, Kronstadt, and Klausenburg—as that is how German-Romanians refer to them orally and in print media. 10

Concluzie de învinuire (Indictment) from September 16, 1959, in ACNSAS, FD, file 8851/3, 11–3f. 11

The ESPLA publishing house wanted to print the same piece as “Und um alle deine Söhne” in its series Kleine ESPLA-Bücherei (Small ESPLA Library) in 1958. Due to Schlattner’s arrest, the work was not published until 2012, when it

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appeared in a collection of Schlattner’s early literary works (Nowotnick, “Einführungen,” 178–81). 12

Concluzii de învinuire (Indictment) from October 16, 1958, in ACNSAS, FP, file 742/4, 186–246f. 13

Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics, 192.

14

Pintilescu, “Konstruktion,” 130.

“Ce alte acţiuni s-au mai desfăşurat din iniţiativa participanţilor la întrunirea dela Wiesenmayer pentru boicotarea şi înlăturarea scriitorilor care urmau în lucrări linia ideologică socialistă?” Georg Scherg, transcript from March 18, 1959, in ACNSAS, FP, file 331/1, 225–27fb here 226b. Here and henceforth, in rendering quotes from the files, I have preserved the spelling in the original document even when that spelling was wrong according to the orthographic norms of the time. 15

“In special Birkner şi Krasser prin atitudinea lor rece şi de distanţiere au căutat să adincească subminarea poziţiei scriitorilor care în lucrările lor urmau o linie ideologică justă.” Georg Scherg, transcript from March 18, 1959, in ibid., file 331/1, 225–27fb here 226b. 16

17

“da das Regime, es wünschte, dass die politische Repression durch gerichtliche Urteile (meist von Militärgerichten) gesetzlich sanktioniert wurde.” Pintilescu, “Umdeutung,” 254. 18

Deletant, “Romania,” 316.

19

Pintilescu, “Umdeutung,” 256.

20

For a detailed analysis of how this played out in the case of Konrad Möckel as part of the Black Church Trial, see Pintilescu, “Umdeutung.” 21

CNSAS, Acţiunea Recuperarea.

22

Pintilescu, “Procese politice,” 118.

23

Birkner indicates these months (Andreas Birkner, transcript from July 24, 1958, at 5:00 p.m., ACNSAS, FP, file 331/1, 98–100fb, here 98f). It is however unclear at this point in time how the Securitate learned about this meeting at all, but an undated document, “Sinteza cu rezultatul cercetărilor efectuate pînă în prezent în problema naţionaliştilor germane” (Synthesis with the Result of the Current Investigations into the Problem of German Nationalists), mentions it for the first time in relation to a statement by Schlattner about Scherg (in ibid., file 742/12, 375–80f, here 377–78f). 24

According to different sources, the following people attended the soiree: Astrid Wiesenmayer and her husband Ioan, Harald Krasser, Bernard Kapesius and his wife Hilda, Ernst Jekelius, Gisela Székely, Ernest Irtl, Wolf von Aichelburg, Andreas Birkner and his wife Irene, Georg Scherg (“Sinteza cu rezultatul cercetărilor efectuate pînă în prezent în problema naţionaliştilor germani” [Synthesis with the Results of the Current Investigations Pertaining to the Problem of German Nationalists]; undated in ibid., file 742/12, 375–80f); Irene Scherg, Ursula Bedners, Klaus and Martha Kessler, Hans Schuschnig, Oskar Pastior and his wife Roswith Capesius (Scherg, transcript from October 1, 1958, in ibid., file 331/1, 191–96f, here 192f); Herman Roth, and Trude Kast (Astrid Wiesenmayer,

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“Declaraţie” [Statement] from March 18, 1959, in ibid., file 331/1, 327–33f, here 329f). Looking at this list, one has to wonder why writers such as Harald Krasser, Herman Roth, or Oskar Pastior were not themselves drawn into this trial against German-Romanian writers. Both Krasser and Roth counted as leading figures of the literary scene in Sibiu and both appeared in statements made during the trial. Did the Securitate have other plans for them? Or does their absence testify to the randomness of the Securitate’s selection in staging its case? In Krasser’s case, literary scholar Stefan Sienerth has shown that at the time when it was constructing its case against the five authors in 1957, the Securitate was working toward recruiting Krasser as an informant anew, so it had no interest in involving him in this case. Krasser had been an informant from January 1952 until approximately February 1955 under the code name “804,” but his lackluster collaboration had lead the Securitate to abandon him as a source (Sienerth, “Interkulturelle Vermittlungstätigkeit,” 91 and 103–4). “Sentinţa” (Verdict) No. 342 from September 19, 1959, in ACNSAS, FP, file 331/3, 137–53f. According to Scherg’s recollection from 1991, in the summer of 1956 Wiesenmayer invited a number of friends and literati to her house for a gettogether to celebrate the return of Aichelburg to Sibiu after he had spent several years in forced residence in the village of Măicăneşti in the eastern part of Romania for attempting to flee the country. During the discussions, the focus turned to a newsletter published by Andreas A. Lillins in the state-sponsored magazine Neue Literatur (New Literature) in which he asked for contributions from his readership. According to Scherg, Wiesenmayer raised the question—which later became the foundation of the Securitate’s accusations—whether each of them would participate in the official literary production. While everyone was in agreement to do so, Birkner summarized the conditions under which they would do it: “Sie [die Publikationen in deutscher Sprache, die alle linientreu waren] werden es nicht wollen, aber sie werden uns zur Kenntnis nehmen müssen, wir schreiben sie an die Wand” (They [the publications in German, which were all true to the official literary principles] will not want to but they will have to acknowledge us, we will knock them off; Scherg, “Das literarische Hermannstadt,” 43). 25

26 In the original it reads “crimă de uneltire contra ordinei sociale prin agitaţie.” “Sentinţa” (Verdict) No. 342 from September 19, 1959, in ACNSAS, FP, file 331/3, 137–53f, here 152–53f. 27

For a detailed explanation of how this was done in the case of the Black Church Trial, see Pintilescu, “Justiz und politische Repression.” 28

For detailed information on the Petöfi-Circle, see Schön, “Der Petőfi-Kreis.”

29

Tismaneanu, Stalinism, 154–55; Dávid, “Revolution in Ungarn”; and Florea, “Temeswarer Studentenaufstand.” 30

The length of the Winter Semester 1957 is indicated in the academic calendar of the Victor Babeş University in Cluj in Universitatea Cluj, Registers, File 371/1957. I thank Alina Pavelescu for her help in procuring this information.

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31

Nowotnick, “Es ging uns nicht,” 277 and 279.

32

Ibid., 286.

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33

“[Die Unterstützung basierte auf die] durchaus ernsthaften Absichten der Studenten innerhalb des sozialistischen Systems und den ihnen zur Verfügung stehenden Möglichkeiten, konstruktiv zu sein” (ibid., 284). 34

Schlattner’s email from March 30, 2010, to Nowotnick in ibid., 285.

35

“Der Klausenburger Literaturkreis war beileibe nicht harmlos, er war ein Versuch, die deutschen Studenten zusammenzubringen und ihnen die Werte der neuesten deutschen Literatur und der heimischen Literatur näher zu bringen, damit die künftigen deutschen Intellektuellen Rumäniens nicht nur Fachleute auf ihrem Gebiet sein sollen, sondern auch eine speziell deutsche Allgemeinbildung haben sollten, um ihre nationale Identität im damals volksdemokratischen—später dann sozialistischen—Staat zu bewahren” (Nussbächer quoted in ibid., 285). 36

Schlattner claims that he testified against the writers in order to save the group of students involved in the literary circle in Cluj, which the Securitate threatened to incriminate for conspiracy by drawing parallels between them and the Hungarian Petöfi-Circle. He wanted to gain the Securitate’s trust—by providing them information about the writers—so as to be able to plead convincingly in favor of the students (Schlattner’s email from September 2, 2013, to this author). 37

Schlattner, transcript from December 30, 1957, in ACNSAS, FP, file 742/11, 56–59fb. 38

The first informative note about the Depner/Volkmer Group is dated December 24, 1956, and it stems from the pen of informant “Kloos Mihai.” He describes the group as a literary circle preoccupied with the preservation of the Transylvanian Saxon identity (in ACNSAS, FI, file 153639/1, 81f). For other informants see “Plan de măsuri” (Action Plan; undated but referencing dates between October 1958 and March 1959) in ibid., file 153639/14, 1–8f. 39

For how they failed to do so, see Valentina Glajar’s article in this volume.

40

In this work, the author pleaded for an end to the isolation of Transylvanian Saxons and for their integration into Romania’s social and cultural life, while still preserving their national identity (Schlattner, “Gediegenes Erz”). 41

Schlattner, transcript from December 30, 1957, in ACNSAS, FP, file 742/11, 56–59fb, here 57f. 42 “Some of us had already met one another at the Securitate in Braşov and so they knew that they were not happy with one another or their own statements about each other” (Einige von uns waren bereits bei der Securitate in Kronstadt mit dem einen oder andern zusammengetroffen, und so wußten wir, daß sie miteinander und mit ihren Aussagen übereinander gar nicht glücklich waren; Depner, Auch ohne Zukunft, 100–101). 43

Depner wrote in his memoirs, “Gradually, I realized that, through my diligent writing I had been playing into the hands of the authorities even though I had intended the opposite and had even felt very clever about it” (Schrittweise wurde mir klar, daß ich mit meinem Schreibfleiß der Behörde in die Hand gearbeitet hatte, ohwohl ich das Gegenteil beabsichtigt hatte und mir noch dazu sehr schlau vorgekommen war; ibid., 108). 44

Medical certificate from January 21, 1958, in ACNSAS, FP, file 742/11, 16f. For considerations of privacy, the exact diagnosis cannot be revealed.

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45

The term “agent” was typical during the first two decades of the Securitate (1948–68); later the person was called “informant/informer.” See Anisescu, “Glosar de termini,” 681. 46

In March or April 1957, Birkner told Schlattner that Göllner worked for the Securitate (Schlattner, transcript from July 15, 1958, in ACNSAS, FD, file 8851/3, 36fb, here 36f). See also Sienerth, “In den Fängen.” 47

In December 1957, Moldovan-Sponer himself warned Schlattner that he had been questioned by the Securitate about Schlattner, Marianne Siegmund, and Heinz Hahn (Schlattner, transcript from January 5, 1958, in ACNSAS, FD, file 8851/3, 20–21fb, here 21f, and transcript from April 4, 1958, in ACNSAS, FP, file 742/11, 63fb–4f, here 63b). Furthermore, according to Schlattner, already in the summer of 1955, Moldovan-Sponer had told him that because of an attempt to send letters critical of the Romanian regime to French radio in 1949, the Securitate had followed him and recruited him as an agent. Consequently he had been forced to give information regularly. Schlattner claims not to have believed him as he had caught Moldovan-Sponer lying before and knew him to suffer from anxiety (transcript from January 5, 1958, in ACNSAS, FD, file 8851/3, 20–21fb, here 20b). A document from the section of the Ministry for Internal Affairs in Oraşul Stalin from July 30, 1958, states that Moldovan-Sponer had been reinstated as an agent—without mentioning when he had been deactivated—and had confirmed that the Depner/Volkmer Group was meeting to organize German youth. He named Schlattner as the liaison to Cluj and admitted that Hahn had attended a meeting at Depner’s during the Hungarian Revolution (“Nota—Sinteză privind activitatea grupului naţionalist, condus de Depner Horst, din Oraşul Stalin” [Synthesis Note Pertaining to the Nationalist Group Led by Depner Horst from Oraşul Stalin] from July 30, 1958, in ACNSAS, FI, file 153639/1, 86–105f, here 88f). For Moldovan-Sponer’s identification as “Ioan Vasilescu,” see also Țârău, “Die deutsche Minderheit,” 180. “Plan de măsuri” (Action Plan; undated but referencing dates between October 1958 and March 1959) in ACNSAS, FI, file 153639/14, 1–8f. 48

49

The transcripts are from December 30 and 31, 1957; January 3, 5, and 13; March 29; April 2, 3, 4, 11, 23, 25, and 26; May 29; June 19 and 21; July 2, 15, and 17, 1958; August 8; and November 14, 1959. A transcript from an interrogation on April 10, 1958, is referenced in the transcript from April 11 (Schlattner, transcript from April 11, 1958, in ACNSAS, FD, file 8851/3, 34fb, here 34f), but I did not find it among the files I have seen. The transcript from August 8, 1959, is the one in which Schlattner is officially presented with the accusation for which he would stand trial: omission to denounce the Depner/Volkmer Group for conspiring against the Romanian state. Schlattner acknowledges and accepts the accusation (Schlattner, transcript from August 8, 1959, in ACNSAS, FP, file 742/11, 65fb, here 65b). Furthermore there is Schlattner’s “Depoziţie de martor” (Deposition of Witness) from September 15, 1959 (in ibid., file 331/3, 75–80fb). “Sinteza cu rezultatul cercetărilor efectuate pînă în prezent în problema naţionaliştilor germani” (Synthesis with the Results of the Current Investigations Pertaining to the Problem of German Nationalists; undated) in ACNSAS, FP, file 742/12, 375–80f, here 377f. 50

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105

Schlattner, transcript from April 25, 1958, in ibid., file 331/1, 303–6fb.

52

In the original it reads “un om cu care se poate mîndri Republica.” Schlattner, transcript from April 25, 1958, in ibid., file 331/1, 303–6, here 304f. 53

Schlattner, transcript from April 26, 1958, in ACNSAS, FD, file 8851/3, 37fb.

54

Schlattner, transcript from June 12, 1958, in ACNSAS, FP, file 331/1, 314–25fb. 55

Sienerth has shown that in the aftermath of the Second World War Bergel believed that ethnic Germans no longer had a future in Romania because they were losing their ethnic distinctiveness by being forced to integrate with the other ethnic groups in the country, particularly the ethnic Romanians, which ironically is exactly what the Romanian authorities accused him of propounding (Sienerth, “Ein unbequemer Autor,” 152). 56

While researching Krasser’s surveillance file (ACNSAS, Microfilm Sibiu, file 8999, vol. 2), Sienerth has found a copy of an excerpt from a statement dated May 4, 1958, which documents Schlattner’s change of heart and which Sienerth explains as follows: “The officers who had psychological training could have disclosed to him that if he did not only distance himself from the ideological positions of his fellow writers but also condemned these as wrong and socially dangerous, one would forgive him everything and he could—henceforth cleansed—find his place in the socialist state as a useful element. This fatal mistake, which the young, twenty-fiveyear old student made and which would have grave consequences for his future life, allowed him to incriminate Krasser [and others] almost without restraint.” (Die phychologisch geschulten Offiziere dürften ihm die Perspektive eröffnet haben, wenn er von den ideologischen Positionen seiner Schriftstellergenossen sich nicht nur distanziere, sondern diese auch als falsch und sozial gefährlich verurteile, werde ihm alles verziehen, und er könne—hinfort geläutert—als nützliches Element im sozialistischen Staat seinen Platz finden. Dieser fatale Irrtum, dem der junge, damals 25jährige Student unterlag und der gravieren Folgen für sein weiteres Leben haben soll, ermöglichte ihm geradezu ungehemmt Krasser [und Andere] zu belasten. Sienerth, “Interkulturelle Vermittlungstätigkeit,” 98–99.) 57

According to Schlattner’s own statement from 2013, the fateful date of his imprisonment was May 5. This was the day when “at the end of [his] mental and physical powers” (am Ende [der] seelischen und physischen Kräfte)—due to the general conditions in prison, the daily and nightly interrogations, and the isolation—he volunteered to be interrogated and offered to answer all questions “wahrheitsgemäß” (truthfully; Schlattner’s email from September 2, 2013, to this author). He refuses, however, to see that day as a breakdown (Zusammenbruch) and insists that it was only “a radical break in my behavior” (ein radikaler Umbruch in meinem Verhalten) because he felt responsible for the students in Cluj and, upon weighing his options, realized that he could not save both the students and the writers and decided in favor of the students (Schlattner’s email from July 7, 2014, to this author). As mentioned above, Sienerth has found a copy of an excerpt of a statement dated May 4, 1958, which corroborates Schlattner’s statement about a radical break with his past: “Those who until today were my friends and were close to me and who are still dear to me, have become today the enemies to whom I must be inexpiable” (Cei care pina azi imi erau prieteni si

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apropiati si care imi sint inca dragi, astazi au devenit pentru mine dusmanii fata de care trebuie sa fie [sic] necrutator, Schlattner quoted in Sienerth, “Interkulturelle Vermittlungstätigkeit,” footnote 108 on page 98–99). Yet the literary circle in Cluj is not mentioned in any way in this document. 58

Schlattner, transcript from May 29, 1958, in ACNSAS, FD, file 8851/3, 14–16fb. 59

Schlattner, transcript from June 19, 1958, in ACNSAS, FP, file 331/1, 286–91fb. 60

Birkner had written the short story in 1937 and not published it for fear of being seen as a communist writer. In 1943 it won the first prize of the German Ethnic Group and was published in the periodical Volk im Osten (People in the East). The editors used the text as propaganda in favor of National Socialist Germany by erroneously claiming that its author was a volunteer for the German army on the Eastern front (Birkner, transcript from July 24, 1958, at 5 p.m. in ibid., file 331/1, 98–100fb here 100f). 61

Alfred Kittner’s story offers one more example of how complex the relationship between ethnic Germans and the Securitate was: In December 1958, Kittner was himself recruited and supplied information to the Securitate under the code name “Leopold Ludwig.” His collaboration under several other code names— “Lalu,” “Karol,” “Karol Andrei”—lasted until January 1979, when the Securitate abandoned him as a source. In 1980, Kittner immigrated to West Germany. He died in 1991 without having ever spoken publicly about his involvement with the Romanian secret police (Totok, “Drama”; and Wichner, “Dichtung und Verrat”). 62 In the original it reads “pot afirma că a luat parte la această şedinţa.” Schlattner, transcript from June 19, 1958, in ACNSAS, FP, file 331/1, 286–91fb, here 290b. 63

Schlattner, transcript from July 2, 1958, in ibid., file 331/1, 297–300fb, here 297b. In the original it reads “să se informeze asupra atitudinii pe care să o adopte in problema activitaţii literare oficiale.” Schlattner, transcript from July 2, 1958, in ibid., file 331/1, 297–300fb, 298f. 64

65

Schlattner, transcript from July 17, 1958, in ibid., 331/1, 294–96fb, here 295fb. 66

“Hans Bergel: Die Abenteuer des Japps” (Hans Bergel: The Adventures of Japps) in ACNSAS, FD, file 8851/3, 90–93f. 67

“Declaraţie” (Statement) undated in ibid., file 8851/3, 94–99f.

In the original it reads “cheia dată de Berger [sic].” “Notă asupra cărţii Fürst und Lautenschleger (Prinţul si bardul) de Hans Berger [sic]” (Note about the Book Prince and Bard by Hans Berger [sic]”) in ibid., file 8851/3, 81–85f, here 82f.

68

Schlattner, “Depoziţie de martor” (Witness Deposition) from September 15, 1959, in ACNSAS, FP, file 331/3, 75–80f. 69

Wiesenmayer, “Declaraţie” (Statement) from March 18, 1959, in ibid., file 331/1, 327–33f. Since Wiesenmayer was not under arrest when she was brought in for questioning, she gave a statement to the Securitate about Birkner and the events that occurred at her soiree; she was not interrogated.

70

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“Greşeala mea constă prin faptul, neavînd destulă încredere în spiritual meu critic, n’am avut îndrăzneala să iau dela început o poziţie clară împotriva literaţii cu concepţii burgheze şi duşmănoase. Am avut nevoie de prea mult timp pentru a fi în stare să văd în mod clar concepţiile lor burgheze. Aceasta este întrun fel şi explicabil, fiindcă au procedat întotdeauna subtil” (my emphasis). Wiesenmayer, “Declaraţie” (Statement) from March 18, 1959, in ibid., file 331/1, 327–33f, here 332. 71

Fritz Jickeli, “Depoziţie de martor” (Witness Deposition) from September 15, 1959, in ibid., file 331/3, 93–94f.

72

Gyorg Klöess, “Depoziţie de martor” (Witness Deposition) from September 15, 1959, in ibid., file 331/3, 89–90f. 73

Günther Müller, “Depoziţie de martor” (Witness Deposition) from September 15, 1959, in ibid., file 331/3, 91–92f.

74

75 Hans Schuschnig, “Depoziţie de martor” (Witness Deposition) from September 15, 1959, in ibid., file 331/3, 87–88f.

Gisela Székely, “Depoziţie de martor” (Witness Deposition) from September 15, 1959, in ibid., file 331/3, 84–86f.

76

77

Birkner, transcript from July 24, 1958, at 5 p.m., in ibid., file 331/1, 98–100fb, here 100b. In the original it reads “un element cu manifestări mistice religioase [. . .] inclinind spre ideologia burgheză.” Aichelburg, transcript from May 26, 1959, at 11:15 a.m., in ibid., file 331/1, 156–58fb, here 156f. 78

79

Aichelburg, transcript from May 27, 1959, at 12:30, in ibid., file 331/1, 177fb, here 177f.

80 Aichelburg, transcript from June 5, 1959, in ibid., file 331/1, 183fb, here 183b. 81

Scherg, transcript from October 1, 1958, in ibid., file 331/1, 191–96f, here 191f. 82

Scherg, transcript from March 3, 1959, in ibid., file 331/1, 215–18fb, here 217f. 83 Scherg, transcript from October 18, 1959, in ibid., file 331/1, 202–3fb, here 203f. On March 18, 1959, he portrayed Birkner even more negatively as the leader of the bourgeois writers’ group (ibid., file 331/1, 225–27fb). 84 Bergel, transcript from May 22, 1959, in ibid., file 331/1, 233–35fb, here 234b–35f. 85 Bergel, transcript from May 25, 1959, in ibid., file 331/1, 236–38fb, here 236fb. 86

Siegmund, transcript from in October 1, 1958, in ibid., file 331/1, 275–77fb.

87

Aichelburg, “Interogator de inculpat” (Interrogation of the Accused) from September 15, 1959, in ibid., file 331/3, 49–57f, here 54f. 88

Scherg, “Interogator de inculpat” (Interrogation of the Accused) from September 15, 1959, in ibid., file 331/3, 58–59fb, here 59f.

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89

Birkner, “Interogator de inculpat” (Interrogation of the Accused) from September 15, 1959, in ibid., file 331/3, 40–46f, but pages are missing from the statement. 90

Bergel, “Interogator de inculpat” (Interrogation of the Accused) from September 15, 1959, in ibid., file 331/3, 66–70f, here 68f. 91

Siegmund, “Interogator de inculpat” (Interrogation of the Accused) from September 15, 1959, in ibid., file 331/3, 72–74f, here 74f. In the original it reads “desfăşurarea unei activităţi contra revoluţionare în vederea subminării pe tărîm ideologic a regimului de stat din R.P.R.” “Concluzii de învinuire” (Indictment) from August 15, 1959, in ibid., file 331/1, 438–50f. 92

93

Whether this means that the Securitate did not perceive Schlattner’s literary circle as a threat at any time or simply that it presented Schlattner’s activities as positive in order to justify his release remains an open question at this time. “Sentinţa” (Verdict) No. 1416 from November 14, 1959, in ibid., file 742/11, 105–10f, here 109f.

94

95 Both Eginald and Kurt-Felix Schlattner were convicted as part of the Black Church Trial for failing to denounce the Depner/Volkmer Group, yet they received very different sentences: Eginald two and Kurt-Felix six years; this raises the obvious question: Why the discrepancy? Schlattner’s file does not provide the answer. 96

“Mandat de executarea pedepsei” (Mandate for the Execution of the Sentence) from December 14, 1959, in ibid., file 742/11, 122fb, here 122f. 97

See also Motzan, “Risikofaktor,” 63–64.

98

The medical certificates for each arrested person show that the Securitate knew exactly what each person suffered from and could use that information to break anyone, so that Schlattner does not stand out medically as a particularly suited candidate for the role of witness for the prosecution. 99

Deletant, Communist Terror, 114–45.

100

“Ab April hat er dann aber alles, was er wußte, gesagt. Er hat auch Sachen gesagt, die er nicht hätte sagen müssen, weil sie unter vier Augen beredet worden waren, wo also kein Dritter als Zeuge noch etwas davon wußte. Er hat alles gesagt, ohne etwas wegzulassen und ohne etwas dazuzutun, wie eine Grammophonplatte” (Motzan, “Podiumsdiskussion,” 108–9). 101

Ibid., 109.

102

“Er hätte also die Möglichkeit gehabt, mich an den Galgen zu bringen, sozusagen. Bei mir hat er alle wirklich gefährlichen Sachen nicht verraten. Er hat einiges vorgebracht, was in keiner Weise wirklich belastend war. In meinem Fall hat er sich so benommen, wie man es von ihm hätte erwarten können” (Ibid., 115). 103

CNSAS, Lege Nr. 293 din 14 noiembrie 2008 [Romanian Law No. 293 from November 14, 2008], accessed April 16, 2016, http://www.cnsas.ro/documente/cadru_legal/LEGE%20293_2008.pdf. Accessed April 16, 2014. 104

See for example Hossu Longin, “Dreptatea”; Bauer, “Albtraum”; and most recently Kremm, “Rufmord.” 105

See failed attempts to recruit him as an informant after his release from prison in 1959 in files ACNSAS, FR, file 7381 Sibiu, roll 139, and FI, file 124376.

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Bibliography Anisescu, Cristina. “Glosar de termini utilizați de Securitate” [Glossary of Terms Used by the Securitate]. In Partiturile Securităţii [The Scores of the Securitate], edited by Silviu B. Moldovan, Mirela Matiu, and Cristina Anisescu, 681–94. Bucharest: Nemira, 2007. Bauer, Markus. “Eine zum Albtraum gewordene Schwäche.” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, January 15, 2011. Accessed May 8, 2014. http://www.nzz. ch/nachrichten/kultur/aktuell/eine_zum_albtraum_g_ewordene_ schwaeche_1.4512583.html. Bergel, Hans. Die Abenteuer von Japps: Ein heiteres Jungenbuch. Bucharest: Jugendverlag 1958. ———. Fürst und Lautenschläger. Bucharest: Jugendverlag, 1957. Birkner, Andreas. Aurikeln. Bucharest: Kleine ESPLA Bücherei, 1957. ———. “Feuer im Weinberg.” Neuer Weg, November 16, 1956, 4. Consiliului Naţional pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securităţii. Acţiunea Recuperarea: Securitatea şi emigrarea germanilor din România (1962–1989) [Operation Recuperation: The Securitate and the Emigration of Germans from Romania (1962–1989)]. Bucharest: Editura enciclopedică, 2011. ———. Index de Termeni şi Abrevieri cu Utilizare Frecventă în Documentele Securităţii [Index of Terms and Abbreviations Used Most Frequently in the Securitate Documents]. Accessed April 28, 2016. http://www.cnsas.ro/ documente/arhiva/Dictionar termeni.pdf. ———. Lege Nr. 293 din 14 noiembrie 2008 [Romanian Law No. 293 from November 14, 2008]. Accessed April 28, 2016. http://www.cnsas.ro/documente/cadru_legal/LEGE%20293_2008.pdf. Dávid, Gyula. “Die Revolution in Ungarn 1956: Reaktionen und Konsequenzen in Rumänien.” In Gräf and Volkmer, Zwischen Tauwettersozialismus und Neostalinismus, 83–95. Deletant, Dennis. Communist Terror in Romania: Gheorghiu-Dej and the Police State, 1948–1965. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. ———. “Romania.” In A Handbook of the Communist Securitate Apparatus in East Central Europe 1944–1989, edited by Krzysztop Persak and Łukasz Kamiński, 285–328. Warsaw: Institut of National Remembrance, 2005. Depner, Horst-Peter. Auch ohne Zukunft ging es weiter: Erinnerungen. Munich: Südostdeutsches Kulturwerk, 1998. Florea, Ioana. “Der Temeswarer Studentenaufstand im internationalen Kontext des Jahres 1956.” In Gräf and Volkmer, Zwischen Tauwettersozialismus und Neostalinismus, 97–105. Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power.” In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 by Michel Foucault, edited by Colin Gordon, 109–33. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Gräf, Rudolf und Gerald Volkmer, eds. Zwischen Tauwettersozialismus und Neostalinismus: Deutsche und andere Minderheiten in Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa 1953–1964. Munich: IKGS, 2011. Hodor, Mădălin. “Ce nu cuprinde un dosar de Securitate” [What a Securitate File Does Not Include]. In Totalitarism şi rezistenţă, teroare şi represiune în România comunistă [Totalitarianism and Resistance, Terror and Repression

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in Communist Romania], edited by Consiliului Naţional pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securităţii, 187–97. Bucharest: CNSAS, 2001. Hossu Longin, Lucia. “‘Dreptatea nu are putere’—Un caz de trădare: Un caz de alienare a responsabilităţii” [Justice Has No Power”—A Case of Treason: A Case of Estrangement of Responsibility]. Dilema veche [Old Dilemma] 315 (2010). Accessed May 8, 2014. http://www.romaniaculturala.ro/articol. php?cod=14303. Ioanid, Radu. “O punere in context” [A Contextualization]. In Eu, fiul lor: Dosar de Securitate [I, Their Son: Securitate File], by Dorin Tudoran, 12–29. Jassy: Polirom, 2010. Kremm, Werner. “Rufmord.” Allgemeine Deutsche Zeitung für Rumänien, April 29, 2015. Accessed May 18, 2015. http://www.adz.ro/artikel/artikel/ rufmord/. Laza, Laura Gabriela. “Relaţiile cu Securitatea a doi dintre acuzaţii din Procesul Scriitorilor Germani de la Braşov: Dosarele de reţea ale lui Wolf von Aichelburg şi Georg Scherg” [The Relations with the Securitate of Two Accused in the German Writers’ Trial from Braşov: The Network Files of Wolf von Aichelburg and Georg Scherg]. Caietele CNSAS (The Notebooks of the CNSAS) 7–8 (2011): 221–37. Lewis, Alison. “Reading and Writing the Stasi File: On the Uses and Abuses of the File as (Auto)Biography.” German Life & Letters 56, no. 4 (October 2003): 377–97. Motzan, Peter. “Podiumsdiskussion zum Schriftstellerprozeß.” In Motzan and Sienerth, Worte als Gefahr, 95–119. ———. “Risikofaktor Schriftsteller: Ein Beispielsfall von Repression und Rechtswillkür.” In Motzan and Sienerth, Worte als Gefahr, 51–81. Motzan, Peter, and Stefan Sienerth, eds. Worte als Gefahr und Gefährdung: Fünf Schriftsteller vor Gericht, Kronstadt 1959. Munich: Südostdeutsches Kulturwerk, 1993. Nowotnick, Michaela. “Einführungen zu den Erzählungen: Gediegenes Erz.” In Eginald Schlattner, Mein Nachbar, der König: Verlassene Geschichten, edited by Michaela Nowotnick, 178–85. Sibiu: Schiller, 2012. ———. “Es ging uns nicht um die Zukunft des Regimes, sondern um unsere Zukunft im Regime: Eine Untersuchung zum Literaturkreis der deutschen Studenten in Klausenburg / Literaturkreis Josef Marlin (1957–1959).” Spiegelungen 6 (60), vol. 3 (2011): 277–89. Pintilescu, Corneliu. “Justiz und politische Repression im kommunistischen Rumänien: der Schwarze-Kirche-Prozess in Kronstadt/Braşov 1958.” In Gräf and Volkmer, Zwischen Tauwettersozialismus und Neostalinismus, 133–45. ———. “Procesele politice ca instrument de represiune politică în România comunistă: cazul Procesului Scriitorilor Germani, Braşov 1959” [The Political Trials as an Instrument of Political Repression in Communist Romania: the Case of the German Writers’ Trial, Braşov 1959]. In Abbrüche und Aufbrüche: Die Rumäniendeutschen nach zwei Weltkriegen, edited by Hannelore Baier, 99–120. Sibiu: Honterus, 2014. This is an abridged and revised version of the article “Die Konstruktion politischer Vergehen im Diskurs.”

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———. Procesul Biserica Neagră 1958 [The Black Church Trial 1958]. Braşov: Aldus, 2008. ———. “Umdeutung religiöser Praktiken in politische Schuld durch das Militärgericht Klausenburg/Cluj 1948–1958.” In Puttkamer, Sienerth, and Wien, Die Securitate, 253–76. Puttkamer, Joachim von, Stefan Sienerth, and Ulrich A. Wien, eds. Die Securitate in Siebenbürgen. Cologne: Böhlau, 2014. Scherg, Georg. “Das literarische Hermannstadt.” In 800 Jahre Hermannstadt 1191–1991, edited by Wilhelm Bruckner, Konrad Gündisch, and Georg Scherg, 29–47. Heilbronn: Heimatgemeinde der Deutschen aus Hermannstadt e.V., 1991. Schlattner, Eginald. “Gediegenes Erz.” In Mein Nachbar, der König: Verlassene Geschichten, edited by Michaela Nowotnick, 23–91. Sibiu: Schiller, 2012. Schön, Sabine. “Der Petőfi-Kreis: Das intellektuelle Zentrum der ungarischen Revolution.” Accessed September 15, 2013. http://www.ungarn1956.de/ site/40208629/default.aspx. Sienerth, Stefan. “Ein unbequemer Autor: Zum schriftstellerischen und publizistischen Werk von Hans Bergel.” In Motzan and Sienerth, Worte als Gefahr, 149–63. ———. “In den Fängen der Geheimdienste: Ein Beitrag zur Biografie des Historikers Carl Göllner.” In Gräf and Volkmer, Zwischen Tauwettersozialismus und Neostalinismus, 157–207. ———. “Interkulturelle Vermittlungstätigkeit im Zeichen zweier Diktaturen: Neue Erkenntnisse zur Biografie und zum Werk von Harald Krasser.” In Wechselwirkungen im deutsch-rumänischen Kulturfeld: Beiträge zu Sprachund Literaturkontakten aus interkultureller Sicht, edited by Maria Sass, Sunhild Galter and Ellen Tichy, 73–112. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2015. Țârău, Virgiliu. “Die deutsche Minderheit und die Securitate: Schuldzuschreibung durch Gesetz und Ideologie bis 1970.” In Puttkamer, Sienerth, and Wien, Die Securitate, 170–86. Tismaneanu, Vladimir. Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Totok, William. “Drama scriitorului Alfred Kittner” [The Drama of Writer Alfred Kittner]. Deutsche Welle, December 16, 2010. Accessed August 17, 2015. http://www.dw.com/ro/drama-scriitorului-alfred-kittner/a-6326385. ———. “Empathie für alle Opfer: Eginald Schlattner, ein Leben in Zeiten diktatorischer Herrschaft.” Halbjahresschrift für Südosteuropäische Geschichte, Literatur und Politik, vol. 1 and 2 (2012): 181–98. Vatulescu, Cristina. Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Wichner, Ernest. “Dichtung und Verrat: Das Gleiche ist nicht Dasselbe.” Der Tagesspiegel, March 7, 2011. Accessed August 17, 2015. http://www. tagesspiegel.de/kultur/dichtung-und-verrat-das-gleiche-ist-nicht-dasselbe/3917738.html.

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Part II Files, Memory, and Biography

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

W

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.1 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 für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen HEN THE

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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. The latter recruits, the IMs, have been described by Helmut Müller-Enbergs as “eine Schattenarmee” (a shadow-army) that extended and reinforced the Stasi’s official work.2 The group was crucial because it was situated at the border between the Stasi and the rest of society. The insecurity of that border, and the instability of the state that the Stasi was created to protect, meant that special procedural attention was paid to selecting collaborators, and to training their case officers as models of self-control and efficiency who in turn could guide the unofficial spies in the execution of a diverse range of surveillance tasks. The success of the Stasi’s control and efficiency procedures is challenged by the literary life writing of Monika Maron (b. Monika Iglarz, Berlin, 1941), which the second part of this chapter places in dialogue with the files that document her collaboration with the Stasi’s Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (Foreign Intelligence Service, or HVA) from October 1976 to May 1978. The information contained in these files provided the basis for high-profile press scandals about Maron in the postunification press. In contrast to the Stasi’s efforts for ensuring that their ranks were as operationally resilient as possible, and indeed in contrast to the black-and-white moral categories through which the press reported Maron’s IM case, the writing that Maron herself has released about her collaboration frames her encounter with the Stasi as a personal and ethical collapse, and as such offers evidence of a total lack of resilience in the collaborating subject. Evaluating this contrast, I argue that the accounts that Maron gives of her Stasi case, in both autobiographical and autofictional writing, could appear to shirk responsibility if they did not also radically call into question the possibility for full “responsibility” in a subject who seems guided by an unconscious phenomenon of “response.” A collaboration case that captured even more attention in the postunification press was that of Christa Wolf (b. Christa Ihlenfeld, Landsberg an der Warthe, 1929), the best-known East German author both at home and abroad, who was also, briefly and reluctantly, an unofficial collaborator with the Stasi before being victimized by it for three decades. Though their histories and indeed literary oeuvres display important differences, there is an affinity between the life writing that Maron and Wolf have produced around their Stasi cases. I explore this affinity below, through readings of the last work of Wolf to be published in her lifetime, Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud, 2010), and through her short prose work Was bleibt (What Remains, 1990). The images of collapse that dominate the literary texts examined here stand in opposition both to the rigid moral categories of the

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unification era and also to the forms of resilience that are named in the Stasi’s files as the goals of its security programs—in particular the program of training Führungsoffiziere (case officers) to recruit unofficial operatives. As the Stasi worked to maintain control of its collaborating subject through procedures of selection, preparation, and documentation, in Maron’s and Wolf ’s literary renditions that subject faints, falls ill, is admitted to hospital, or begins to lose trust in her ability to make decisions and remember the events of her past. These stories of collapse, the symptom par excellence of a subject that does not hold together in a secure or reliable manner, raise a host of ambivalences when read alongside the files that shadow them. It seems that even the Stasi, with its exhaustive archiving apparatus, could not overcome the uncertainty attaching to subjects who—at least in these cases—repeatedly resisted fixing or categorization. As a result, and troubling though the literary accounts of collapse among former collaborators may be, they also make clear the limits of the operations of the East German secret police— limits to the control it could keep over the population, and limits even within its internal structures, among the very spies who were recruited to make its surveillance possible.

Selecting the Stasi’s Unofficial Collaborators An order issued by Erich Mielke on May 19, 1967, describes the role of the East German secret police as follows: “The achievement of the developed societal system of socialism in the sovereign German Democratic Republic obliges the organs of the Ministry for State Security, through even more targeted political-operative work, to protect the socialist people’s collective from all attacks by the enemy and at the same time to contribute to the further strengthening and securing of the collective as well as to the development of socialist democracy.”3 A human resource equivalent to the physical security of the Berlin Wall, the Ministry for State Security was charged with protecting the stability of the GDR as its Schild und Schwert (shield and sword). Such stability is figured in the order above through a lexicon of “Stärkung” (strengthening), and “Festigung” (fastening), qualities that reveal the aim of guaranteeing sovereign resilience in the constitution of the country. The central role of IMs in this sovereignty project is testified to by the ramping up of Stasi recruitment of new civilian informants during times of unrest,4 such as the uprising of 1953; the time preceding the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, when Christa Wolf was an operative; and the era of German–German Entspannungspolitik (politics of détente) in the mid-1970s, when Monika Maron was recruited. As shadow-members of the Stasi’s official ranks, IMs were set to tasks targeted to support the East German state’s strategy for national resilience whenever it was threatened.

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The first guidelines for the recruitment of unofficial collaborators were published in November 1952 under the title “Richtlinie 21” and were circulated to those Stasi officers who were destined to work directly with informants. The document outlines the techniques necessary to the ideological surveillance of the civilians who were due to be recruited as unofficial spies, as well as those who were to be asked to make their homes available as “konspirative Wohnungen” (safe houses), the properties that were used by Stasi officers to meet with their informants. The guidelines also set out the techniques for garnering a “klares und umfassendes Bild” (clear and comprehensive image) of the civilian helpers. It includes the gathering of information on “eigene Personalien, [. . .] Verwandtschaft, [. . .] Gewohnheiten, Leidenschaften” (personal details, [. . .] relations, [. . .] habits, passions), and the identification of nuggets of information about the individual which could be used to persuade them to pledge their allegiance to the organization.5 With the revision of the Stasi’s internal guidelines in 1968, the term “IM” entered official usage in procedural documentation; and throughout the 1970s, after Mielke complained that the process of “Prüfung” (checking) the suitability of candidate IMs was too superficial,6 the guidelines were further refined. While the basic aim of the resulting guidelines of December 8, 1979, remained the same—to ensure that reliable knowledge was gathered about the individuals with whom the Stasi was working—the focus on the personality of the IM was clarified. The document, signed by Mielke himself, emphasized “Eignung, Zuverlässigkeit und Gewinnungsmöglichkeit” (suitability, reliability, and the possibility of being won over) as the central criteria to check before deciding whether an unofficial operative would be suited to the tasks intended for her or him.7 The quality of “Eignung” (suitability) was to be assessed according to the case officer’s knowledge of the candidate IM’s personal and working life to date, as well as observations from her or his current life situation, together with information that could be gathered from interviewing her or his closest family members. The second quality, “Zuverlässigkeit” (reliability), should be clear from the individual’s behavior in society and beliefs, and the level of “Gewinnungsmöglichkeit” (possibility of being won over) would be gleaned from calculating any material needs and compromising factors that might lead the person in question to agree to collaborate.8 These conditions having been checked, contact could be taken up and meetings scheduled between the future informant and the Stasi officer. At this last stage before the collaboration officially began, the officer was required to pay attention to the individual’s political opinions, including any that were critical with regard to the Stasi.9 The new guidelines of 1979 were the result of three decades of refining the techniques for the recruitment of collaborators, and they remained in force until the dissolution of the Stasi just over a decade later.

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Building upon its earlier iterations, the document sets out recommendations regarding the personality traits and the desirable ideological standpoint of an IM, and in so doing it also specifies what is required of the case officers working with IMs. Führungsoffiziere were the main point of contact between IMs and the rest of the ministry. In 1988 there were around fifteen thousand case officers active, with responsibilities varying according to their areas of activity and to the danger perceived as threatening those areas. These officers were required not only to act responsibly, and to carry out their tasks with precision, but also to approach their work with an attitude that was “schöpferisch” (creative)10 so that they could maintain the highest possible quality of operations. Moreover, as Korth, Jonak, and Scharbert wrote in a dissertation submitted to the Stasi’s dedicated university, the Juristische Hochschule (legal university) in Potsdam, at which all but the founding generation of Stasi officers were trained, officers needed to take particular care in how they represented the ministry to their IMs, because it was considered that one of the most effective “tschekistische Waffe[n]” (espionage weapons) was the “Liebe zur IM-Arbeit” (love for the work of an IM),11 a love that the case officer should actively work to instill. The creative measures that would presumably be necessary to instill that kind of love for IM work might seem excessive, or simply expensive—yet they took place under the specific encouragement of Mielke, who made clear in an order dated October 1982 that the Stasi’s departments should not use their lack of resources as an excuse to avoid “kompliziert[e] Werbungen” (complicated recruitment measures) to ensure the suitability of prospective IMs.12 A model officer in his precision and commitment to thorough work in the recruitment of IMs was Lutz Edel, senior lieutenant in HAXX, the Twentieth Central Division of the Stasi. This division, consisting of a central office and regional branches, was responsible for spying on the literary milieux in the GDR, and Edel’s signature regularly appears approving collaborator reports on East German authors. Alongside his work as case officer to unofficial collaborators, Edel also studied at the legal university, and his undergraduate thesis submitted there was a study on the recruitment of IMs, with an analysis which includes the observation that officers are best served by collaborators who are “ideologisch reife und bewußte Menschen” (ideologically mature and conscious individuals).13 Edel describes how, once selected, IMs should undergo a “politischideologische und tschekistische Erziehung” (politico-ideological and espionage training) to teach them how to work as operatives.14 He also stipulates that those given the special task of infiltrating the literary sphere should be neither “sexuell hörig” (sexually dependent) upon nor intellectually “unterlegen” (subordinate) to the objects of their surveillance,15 so that they could maintain self-control within so-called enemy or hostile circles—places of surveillance whose particular instability (or, one might

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say, dynamism) demanded special resilience on the IM’s part. It seems that the ministry that Edel envisioned was one in which high levels of selfcontrol were prioritized, rather than the “love” of IM work that Korth, Jonak, and Scharbert described in their dissertation. By the time the wall fell, the core syllabus at the legal university included a year-long, 259-hour module titled “Die Arbeit mit IM sowie die Anwendung ausgewählter operativer und kriminalistischer Mittel und Methoden [. . .] zur Ermittlung und zweifelsfreien Identifizierung von Personen” (Working with IMs and using selected operative and criminological means and methods [. . .] for the investigation and identification of individuals beyond doubt).16 Such training of the officers who were to work with IMs occupied considerable resources. And yet, as the literary writing of East German collaborators attests, the Stasi found itself faced with a simple but fundamental problem in controlling its unofficial spies. These spies were arguably its most important surveillance operatives, but if the writing of Maron and Wolf about their Stasi cases is to be believed, at least some of those operatives could hardly control themselves; nor, after German unification, could they give a controlled account of what their intentions and affiliations during the GDR years had been.

Collaboration as Failure of Control in the Case(s) of Monika Maron The Stasi’s project of recruiting a corps of loyal, reliable collaborators to help maintain the security of the GDR was doomed; this much was clear at the very latest in the autumn of 1989, when the GDR itself collapsed. Yet the loyalty and the reliability that the Stasi required in their undercover operatives was not so far removed from the desires of certain collaborators themselves to exhibit those traits. The well-known East German playwright Heiner Müller, when his collaboration was revealed, was keen to stress a high level of control—of loyalty and reliability with regard to his own beliefs—that he had maintained during his encounters with the Stasi. He stated to journalist Thomas Assheuer after unification that “[i]ch war nicht erpreßbar” (they couldn’t blackmail me),17 and “[d]ie direkten Gespräche waren kontrollierte Gespräche” (any direct conversations were under [my] control).18 When pressed, Müller claimed that his self-control was resilient enough when he worked with the Stasi that he could not have contributed to their nefarious purposes. It is unlikely that IMs were able to maintain the self-control which Müller claims to have managed in his case, delivered over as they were to an organization that manipulated its spies even before their recruitment, and in relation to which they had no control over the information they delivered. As revelations of unofficial spying continued into the mid-1990s, the younger playwright, novelist,

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and former spy Monika Maron gave an account contrasting with that of Müller’s claim to have been in control of his actions at all times. Maron’s recruitment as a Stasi collaborator in 1976 included a request that she be open to serving the Stasi’s missions “mit verschiedenen Mitteln, auch mit sexuellen” (using different methods, including sexual ones).19 High-risk operations of this sort, which would have required more resilience than the taking of notes on a surveillance object’s movements or opinions, testify to the Stasi’s faith in Maron’s ability to carry out her surveillance with a degree of self-control, and hence control of what the ministry could get out of her. Yet Maron’s published works in which she writes about her collaboration describe a failure in self-control, and so bear witness to a less resilient behaviour than that which Müller claimed to have mastered, and indeed that the Stasi guidelines had set out as being desirable among its collaborators. During the GDR years, Monika Maron was something of a rebel in the eyes of the authorities. As a journalist at the Wochenpost newspaper, she profiled the good and the bad of working life in the GDR. After ceasing work as a journalist, she published her first, regime-critical novel Flugasche (Flight of Ashes, 1981) with Fischer Verlag in the Federal Republic. However, in 1995 it was revealed that this critic of the regime, who was spied on for years and obliged to smuggle her works to the West in order to publish them, had also agreed to work as a “Kontaktperson,” a subcategory of IM, reporting under the code name “Mitsu” to the ministry’s foreign branch between October 1976 and May 1978. When “Mitsu” decided to end her contact with the Stasi, the ministry pursued an aggressive surveillance operation against her under the code name “Wildsau” (Wild Sow). This second code name, of which Maron was not aware, created a kind of double persona in the files—a shadowing of identity that emerged once again in the early 1990s, when the Stasi archive was divided into Täterakten (perpetrator files) and Opferakten (victim files), with differing access rules applying to each category. The “Mitsu” story hit the headlines in the summer of 1995, giving rise to a backlash including Stasi victim Bärbel Bohley’s accusations in Der Spiegel that Maron had operated at the very “Herz der Stasi” (heart of the Stasi).20 Yet the perpetrator image that dominated the press narratives is not borne out in the lengthy files on “Wildsau,” nor in the thin documentation of the “Mitsu” case. “Mitsu’s” reports make a cutting critique of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party, SED) and of the Stasi. The criticism is compounded by praise for West Germany, where “Mitsu” enjoyed attending events at which “there aren’t clichés, organized choirs of speakers and countless security officials putting the brakes on any kind of feeling before it even gets going.”21 Although the Stasi may have had some use for the rather general feedback that “Mitsu” gave on the West German cultural scene, and on the mood

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among her East German contemporaries, these are not the kind of reports that incriminated individuals or led to arrests. The documents are accompanied by Stasi evaluations in which her critical standpoint appears as a major point of confusion regarding Maron/Mitsu’s true intentions and loyalties. As a result, the Second Central Division commissioned a report to ascertain whether she exhibited “politisch-ideologisch[e] Übereinstimmung” (politico-ideological agreement) with them.22 They concluded that their file on her was “nicht vollständig” (incomplete) and that more work should be done to ensure her loyalty.23 Mitsu collaborated, but she did so from a critical standpoint that made the case especially complex to read, not least for the officers writing it up at the time. Curiously, the problems of legibility that puzzled Mitsu’s case officers also beset the literary life writing that Maron published after the Stasi revelations.24 In her nonfiction collection Quer über die Gleise (Sideways across the Tracks, 2000), Maron comments on the case in a tone of self-defense. However, her novelized family biography Pawels Briefe (Pavel’s Letters, 1999) gives a more complex account of the decision to collaborate. Autobiographical writing was both a dominant and a highly problematic mode of literary production in Germany around 1990. While East Germans were enjoying the new liberty to write about their lives, free of both official and inner censorship, the coincidence of this new era of freedom with the heyday of postmodern thought and aesthetics complicated the status of autobiographical writing. Postmodernism heralded an end to the epistemological certainty that literary authorship might once have appeared to promise. In this context, autobiography, which relied on rendering plausible, factual accounts of the author as an agent in history, was troubled. Those collapses in ideological and aesthetic authority lent new popularity to the phenomenon of “autofiction.” The term was coined by French novelist Serge Doubrovsky in the 1970s to describe the combination of autobiographical fact and literary fictionality that characterized his writing; Monica Kjellman-Chapin defines his practice as “the retention of one’s real name and persona while maintaining insertion into imaginary life, or the creation of a fictional clone who narrates the author’s real existence.”25 Pawels Briefe inhabits a more historically referential mode than autofiction in the Doubrovskian (anti)tradition. Subtitled a Familiengeschichte (family story/history), the “story,” while maintaining the fictionality indicated by “Geschichte,” nonetheless contains the names of Maron’s family members and photographs taken from the author’s family archive. Maron has described the work as “an entirely controlled montage that enabled me to place the past and the present in constant relation to one another.”26 Yet the text strays outside of the fact-oriented and author-controlled mode of historical autobiography. As such, it can also be read as a family romance, with the Freudian resonances

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that the term carries: resonances of the unconscious drives that shape the subject’s conscious actions, and of her complex identifications with the figures peopling her close surroundings. In support of such a psychoanalytic reading, we might observe how the plot circles around the “Erinnerungslücken” (lacunae in memory) of the narrator’s mother Hella, which the narrator attempts to fill using an archive of letters dating from the deportation and murder of her grandfather, Pawel.27 Moreover, it is fitting that this plot, with its central reflections on forgetting, closes with an account of collaboration that is documented in the archive but that the narrator claims had escaped her memory until the archive was opened. That event appears, despite the author’s claims of control over the text’s “montage,” as an uncontrolled eruption in the novel’s plot just as it is ending. This late eruption explains a suspicion that arises earlier in the text—namely, that it might be unfair to focus on Hella’s memory trouble. The narrator expresses discomfort at taking on the role of filling in such gaps in her mother’s memory, because she cannot be sure if her own memory is reliable, or if instead it is at work generating a “Neuinszenierung” (redramatization) dependent on her own desires and changing perspective (PB, 167). In the closing pages of Pawels Briefe, the autofictional narrator lists the reasons that she can recall for collaborating with the Stasi, including a simple desire to travel—the historical collaboration won author Maron a visa to the West that had previously been denied her—and the more complex “Traum von einer sinnvollen Tat” (dream of a meaningful act; PB, 196). This latter desire arises in relation to the death, just before the Mitsu collaboration, of Maron’s stepfather Karl Maron, SED minister for the interior from 1955 to 1963, by whose person and party links she had felt stifled since childhood. Preferring not to rely on her own memory of a time that was fraught with the strong psychodynamics of this family’s story, the autofictional narrator instead turns to her friends’ memories of how she presented herself when the Stasi approached her. Her friends remember her as “[u]ngeheuer energisch” (terribly energetic) at that time, “unbelehrbar” (obstinate), “und von dem Gedanken besessen, jede Sache ließe sich beeinflussen, regeln, verändern” (and obsessed by the idea that everything could be influenced, regulated, changed; PB, 195). The narrator’s close friends recall a decisive, agency-driven energy more set on influencing outside circumstances than susceptible to influence itself. It is all the more surprising, therefore, that the description of the collaboration in the novel closes with a conversation in which the narrator probes with horror the states of mind that might have led her to commit acts that not only escape her memory but may not have resulted from her own agency at all. Thus, she reacts to the accusation that she spied on a close friend, an event she cannot recall—and by which she is therefore particularly troubled—by considering situations, “in which a

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person can do something and not know about it later: hypnosis, schizophrenia or other pathological states.”28 In such pathological states, the collaborator would lack the resilience on which the Stasi, as an agency of security, relied, and would instead be led by unconscious drives and identifications. Maron’s narrator concludes, and her mother reassures her that she is right, that she could not have been hypnotized into acting as the Stasi’s puppet, since her intentions would have remained stronger than any attempts at coercion by her case officer. Yet the image remains of collaboration as a failure of control, and thus as a complication of the collaborator’s responsibility. The concluding passages of Pawels Briefe make clear the limits of trying to work with the GDR’s most slippery body of power, if the Stasi collaborator’s hope was all the while to maintain control of her actions. Recent cultural theory moreover has engaged with the problem of an agency that fails to control itself. For instance, Judith Butler’s recent works on moral philosophy explore the ways in which the influence of others—and of interior, unconscious agencies—shape the actions of the subject in ways that cannot fully be controlled. The attention paid by Butler to the difficulty that such problems of control raise for delivering a legible account of the subject’s actions can help to illuminate the “blinder Fleck” (blind spot) with which Maron’s writing continues to be associated.29 In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler writes of a “shared, invariable, and partial blindness about ourselves”30 which must be taken into consideration as subjects encounter one another and seek to render coherent descriptions to others of their intentions and actions. For Butler, the subject’s blindness to itself is a result, in part, of default patterns of relating that are learned along with language. Although we might adopt linguistic means of describing our experiences, these means are always marked as “ghosted, laden, persuasive, and tactical,”31 qualities that may influence the practices of presenting the self, after such accusations as Maron faced, in a manner that would prevent blame or loss of reputation. Moreover, any report that we might try to give of ourselves to others is heavy, in Butler’s account, with unconscious content that the speaker can never fully control. This further haunting (see Butler’s terminology “ghosted,” above) of the subject by its drives, lost memories, and unconscious desires means that the attempt to give account of and take responsibility for our actions forever risks failure. On the other hand, as the reception of Maron’s collaboration case shows, the account that subjects give of their actions will nonetheless be a principal means by which they are judged by their society. The consequences of that shadowing of life stories by intersubjective dynamics and unconscious content can be further elaborated on through reference to the Stasi files and life writing of another former collaborator, Christa Wolf.

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Collaboration as Collapse in Christa Wolf’s Stadt der Engel and Was bleibt The difficulty that Butler identifies in giving an account of a self whose actions are profoundly shaped by external influences and unconscious agencies is surely exacerbated in contexts where the words spoken or written about the self and its environment can lead to censorship, imprisonment, or exile. Stories by those who collaborated in the German dictatorships of the twentieth century are especially “ghosted,” as Christa Wolf recognized in her review of Günter Grass’s novel Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion, 2006), which delivers an autofictional account of Grass’s service as a teenager in the Waffen-SS. Wolf’s review stresses that Grass never fired a shot, and that he himself came close to death three times. These were events, moreover, “which Grass, and thousands of others who were returning from war, had at first ‘covered up,’ in other words suppressed and kept silent within themselves.”32 Within her sympathetic review of Grass’ collaboration in the Nazi regime, Wolf also expresses the wish that Grass would have voiced stronger support when her collaboration with the Stasi was revealed. Coming to light in 1993, less than a year after the Stasi archive was opened, Wolf’s Stasi scandal was a bombshell in the German media precisely because of Wolf’s status as the most high-profile literary writer from the former GDR. The lengthy discussions in news editorials led to a crisis in Wolf’s reputation, as this literary and moral authority was forced to admit that she had repressed her collaborative past and covered it over in favor of recounting her more personally painful history of lengthy victimization by the Stasi. According to the files, from 1959 to 1962 Wolf worked for the Stasi, first as a “Geheimer Informator” (GI, secret informer) and after that as a full-fledged IM.33 She was known by her middle name, Margarete, a code name that she allegedly chose but then apparently forgot until she was able to access her files in the spring of 1992. In her guise as “Margarete,” Wolf contributed information on conflicts in the editorial staff of Neue Deutsche Literatur, of which she was a member, and it appears that she passed correspondence from within the editorial office on to the Stasi. She also reported on the atmosphere in the Writers’ Union and delivered accounts of literary works that authors in the Berlin Union were writing in 1959 and 1960.34 The only file in the document signed by Wolf herself is an evaluation of the writer Walter Kaufman, wherein she describes him as “endangered by his lack of theoretical knowledge.”35 The language of dangerous lack that registered in the Stasi’s training files cited above, with their concern about lack of reliability or loyalty in their unofficial spies, finds echoes in the words of Wolf-as-informant, and as such it reflects the writer’s loyalty to the GDR earlier in her career—a loyalty surely based on

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the fact that this new regime seemed to offer a complete change from the dictatorship that preceded it. Unlike those of Maron, who had been anti-SED since her childhood clashes with her stepfather, Wolf’s experiences with the Stasi confronted her with deep disappointment in a state for which she still held out a great deal of hope. Yet even this loyal GDR insider was subject to checks and evaluation–as all IMs were–during her early informing work. Though her case officers were content that Wolf’s attitude was “parteilich” (partyloyal) and thus suggested that she would be “abwehrmäßig von großem Nutzen” (of great use to our defense efforts) in the ideological struggle within the GDR arts scene,36 they noted that Wolf did not seem to love what she was doing for them, and they were concerned about certain qualities in her that they perceived as excessively hesitant. The officer writing this evaluation document imputed that hesitancy to “einer gewissen intellektuellen Ängstlichkeit” (a certain intellectual anxiety), and seemed confident that “intensieve [sic] Erziehungsarbeit” (intensive educational work) would help to overcome these “Schwächen des GI” (weaknesses in the informant).37 Such plans for the education of “Margarete” were indeed already put in place in the first document in the file, which set out the preparation of the “Aufklärung” (initial evaluation) of this potential collaborator,38 including an intention to warn her against the “subjektivistischen Tendenzen” (subjective tendencies) of her writing, which strayed from the literary dogma of the era.39 This early educational gesture apparently failed, as Wolf went on in the later 1960s to develop the literary style which she termed “subjektive Authentizität” (subjective authenticity), and which is exemplified in the complex, psychological prose of her novel Nachdenken über Christa T. (The Quest for Christa T., 1968). As Charity Scribner has observed, the mode of “subjektive Authentizität” placed Wolf’s work at the border between “autobiography and denial.”40 The innovative literary form that had shaped the semiautobiographical works that Wolf wrote while in the GDR became a problem when the story of her collaboration emerged. The revelations aroused suspicion of hypocrisy in Wolf’s short prose work Was bleibt (What Remains, 1990), which depicted the Stasi surveillance of a closely autobiographically-informed narrator, and as such left an impression of Wolf’s status only as a victim of the GDR, where she had lived and published her works until the fall of the wall and had even been a candidate for the SED’s Central Committee. Author Erich Loest, who was held in the Stasi prison in Bautzen from 1957 until 1964, wrote in the German news daily Die Welt that Wolf had set herself up as an “Opferlämmlein” (little sacrificial lamb) in Was bleibt,41 and thus delivered a damningly selective account of her more ambiguous experiences with the Stasi. That such an account could only ever be selective becomes clear, however, in Wolf’s final novel published before her death.

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The revelation of Wolf’s collaboration is the major plot event in Stadt der Engel. The autofictional novel is set during a stay at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, which the historical Wolf visited in 1992–93. The narrator, an unnamed “Autorin belletristischer Bücher” (author of fictional books) who has gained international success with such titles as Kindheitsmuster (Patterns of Childhood) and Kassandra (novels by Wolf), is in possession of a set of letters sent to a now-deceased friend by a woman signing her name only as L. It is this woman, who had fled Nazi Germany for Southern California, whom the narrator is determined to find.42 The letters offer an archive of loving words between friends, one to which the narrator turns for comfort (SdE, 119). Other archives prove more ambivalent, however, as the news breaks back home of the narrator’s incriminating Stasi files, leading to the collapse of her reputation—including, as news spreads internationally, among her fellow researchers at the Getty Institute. Like Wolf, the narrator of Stadt der Engel had written a number of IM reports for the Stasi in the distant past. Moreover, it seems in the novel that until she visited the archive after unification, the narrator had entirely forgotten the collaboration history contained in her slim Täterakte (perpetrator file). This story of forgetting reflects that of the historical Wolf herself, who wrote in January 1993 that she did not recall having functioned as an IM, though she did remember a number of visits from members of the “Behörde” (organization), with whom she had conversed about cultural-political matters and the goingson in the Writers’ Union.43 The revelations threaten the psychic stability of Wolf ’s narrator, who succumbs to attacks of stress and panic, to excessively high blood pressure, and to a crisis of shame that she can only express in English, the German words seeming to provoke crises of rumination from which she struggles to emerge. These symptoms are linked back in the narrative to her hospitalization after the Eleventh Plenum of the Central Committee of the SED in December 1965, when her criticism of SED policies was met with little support from those she considered peers, and she was admitted to the hospital, displaying symptoms of a breakdown. She was again hospitalized a matter of days before the fall of the Berlin Wall, after she had made a speech in favor of a democratic alternative to the SED in front of thousands of demonstrators at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz—and collapsed due to a long-standing “Herzrhythmusstörung” (cardiac dysrhythmia; SdE, 25). In California in the early 1990s, visits to alternative medicine practitioners for joint pain, indulgence in the simple pleasures of ice cream, margaritas, Star Trek, and the purchase of a car to pursue what Kaleen Gallagher has elegantly termed a “drive to distraction” into inland Southern California44 cannot protect the narrator from a further breakdown that finds her contemplating suicide one night.

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In an attempt to document and, she hopes, overcome this crisis, the narrator continues to keep a journal that she began at the start of her trip. Its notations are recorded in indented capital letters throughout the novel. These sections appear as fragments, from which readers can trace a line of reflections—reflections on the scandal, on what might have motivated the collaboration, and, crucially, on the difficulty of piecing together the collaboration story with the help of a memory that resists recalling the past. Awakening from a dream in which she was moving furniture slowly across the terrace of a house, the narrator types, “THIS WORK OF WRITING MOVES FORWARD IN MICROSCOPIC DOSES AGAINST A RESISTANCE THAT ESCAPES ME WHEN I GO TO NAME IT.”45 Left in a cheerful mood after a character in her dream appears to advise her against wallowing in guilt, the narrator is able to assess, if not name, the effects of a resistance that is blocking her attempt at accounting for herself. This is the psychic resistance that allowed the narrator to forget the objects attesting to her collaboration, “a series of containers” which remained “hidden for years in a box that ‘they’ were not meant to find.”46 The evidence of collaboration is held in a Russian-doll arrangement of containers, their form affording a construction of mise-en-abyme that proves perfect for screening the collaboration—screening it both from the narrator’s detractors and from her own mind. Yet the collaboration documented by the Stasi’s papers must resurface, and it does so in the 1990s, against the narrator’s will. Whereas the real-life Wolf outed herself in the article “Eine Auskunft” (A Disclosure), published in the Berlin daily newspaper Berliner Zeitung on January 21, 1993, in Stadt der Engel the revelations happen to her literary subject—and in a violently public manner that leads to a personal collapse, as well as a profound self-questioning similar to that of Maron’s narrator in Pawels Briefe. After the revelations, Wolf’s narrator confides in her friend Peter Gutman, wondering: “Who is this supposed ‘I’ that is giving an account. It is not just that I am unsure who is remembering here. One of the many ‘I’s, who, whether in quick or slow succession, have been rotating within me, who have chosen me for their dwelling place.”47 The conversation with Gutman functions as an antiaccount; rather than certainty, we read of a self in collapse, of a “me” in which several “I”s have made their dwelling, apparently rotating roles of agency between them (“abgelöst”) in a manner that suggests a passive lack of agency on the part of the narrating subject. Resonant with the house in the narrator’s recurring dreams, the image of the dwelling also recalls a sense of haunting that was described in relation to the narrator of Was bleibt, who felt that she was driven by something that “had taken possession of me, lodged itself in me and made of me another.”48 In a volume of Text + Kritik devoted to Wolf’s work, Renate Rechtien has noted the prevalence of instances of uncanniness in Wolf’s writing since 1993—that is,

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since the time of the Stasi revelations. Wolf’s preoccupation with ghostly, unreal, and even deathly experiences leads Rechtien to align the author’s concerns with those of Derrida, whose “hauntology” finds the subject of late capitalism caught in an uncomfortable threshold state between living and something altogether more ghostly.49 Though her works turn their attention toward the East German past rather than late capitalism, Wolf’s literary subject certainly dwells in a place that is haunted, and in this manner she even takes on ghostly characteristics herself. In Wolf’s works, it is as if the “I” were inhabited by multiple selves, selves that are both familiar and terribly other—and therefore capable of committing troubling acts. For instance, while the source of the pain that inhabits and drives the narrator of Was bleibt is not specified precisely, its description follows a paragraph that explores the psychodynamics of collaboration with the SED regime. Here, contrary to the accusations by Loest and others that Wolf had hidden her collaboration in this earlier tale, the topic is in fact raised, as her narrator tries to understand the Stasi officers who are observing her so distressingly and wonders if they are able to execute their tasks thanks to “an incurable addiction to conformity and subordination.”50 Furthermore, this earlier narrator wonders if other members of GDR society find themselves collaborating for similar reasons: “Wir, angstvoll doch auch [. . .] es gierte nach Unterwerfung und nach Genuß” (We too were timid [. . .] greedy for submission and for enjoyment).51 In such dynamics of collaboration, individual sovereignty would be subordinated to some aspect of the self that is named, in this grammatically uncanny construction, es. This “es gierte” gives voice to the “es” of drive, or indeed to a whole aggregate of drives that have made their dwelling within the self: the drive to be loved, to subordinate oneself, and to experience the enjoyment of shared labor in which both self and other troublingly, enjoyably, collapse.

Conclusions: An Incomplete Archive The possessed selves in Wolf’s writing on collaboration resonate with the description of collaborating subjectivity in Maron’s first postunification novel, Stille Zeile Sechs (Silent Close No. 6, 1991). The novel’s narrator, Rosalind Polkowski, consents to transcribe the memoirs of retired SED functionary Herbert Beerenbaum, with whose politics she vehemently disagrees. As she carries out this counterintuitive task, Polkowski fights a suffocating invasion of her body by something that is both inside and other: “Something was spreading itself inside of me, a shapeless growth, which slung itself around my arteries like bindweed, grew rampant around my heart and bound into my stomach, so that I sometimes felt afraid that my chest lacked the space to breathe.”52 Prefiguring Maron’s account of collaboration in Pawels Briefe, Polkowski’s contract of co-labor with her

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hated employer appears here as a failure of self-control, one that drives the narrator to attack Beerenbaum. After Polkowski attacks him, Beerenbaum is rushed to the hospital, where he soon dies. In these texts, we read narratives of collaboration as an uncanny presence, one that makes its home in the subject in ways that are viscerally physical or linguistically torturous, and that seems to make her commit acts over which she lacks control. In the postunification era, these events of collaboration then return in collapses of the body, of reputation, and of belief in the self—not least when that self seems to have modified its memories in order to conceal certain incriminating events. These images of collaboration as collapse in the autofictional works of two writers who had informed for the Stasi are unlikely to erase the controversy that remains around their cases. On the other hand, they may yet prove fruitful as countertexts to the Stasi’s view of its collaborators—collaborators that the Stasi considered to be categorizable subjects who could be trained into predictable behavior that would in turn ensure the security of the GDR as a whole. Through their tendencies to collapse, to lose self-control, and to struggle with the agency that would result from a reliable memory, the subjects of Wolf’s and Maron’s autofictional works about their collaborations challenge the authority of the Stasi’s files on them. In this fashion, they illuminate the slippery status of the archive as a whole, as testament to the past that was substantially shaped by the motivations of the Stasi as an organization and is now liable to misreading and misuse by the postunification press and public. Certainly, there is knowledge to be gleaned from the files examined above. For instance, the guidelines that are now held in the BStU archive can tell us much about the intentions of the Stasi leadership in recruiting and educating unofficial spies. Yet the question of knowledge is more problematic when it comes to the most controversial files in the archive—namely, those that offer evidence of collaboration by civilians against their peers. Neither Maron nor Wolf convincingly disputed the contents of their spy files, yet neither were they willing to admit to the kind of collaboration of which they were accused when the East German past was being picked over. The controversy surrounding these documents of collaboration bears witness to the susceptibility of the Stasi files, as identified by Alison Lewis, to “uses and potential abuses.”53 The opening of the files, and their resulting availability for reuse as evidence about the Stasi past by both victims and perpetrators, made them at once an important and an extremely ambivalent currency in the new truth-regime that followed the fall of the GDR. Mindful of some of the more drastic risks attaching to the use of the files in the postunification moment, Christa Wolf wrote to Günter Grass from California that she had contacted Joachim Gauck, then head of the authority responsible for the Stasi files, “and warned him against handling the files in future in the

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same way that he did in my case; it could go wrong again.”54 The narrator of Stadt der Engel resists her urge to commit suicide; in this letter, however, the real-life Wolf expresses her fear for others who might be scapegoated by interpretations of their Stasi files that would lead to their being viewed as “perpetrators.” For her part, even before the archive was opened, Maron criticized the highly popular television interviews that were being staged in the name of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) in her essay of 1991, “Fettaugen auf der Brühe” (Drops of Fat on the Broth)—whose title provided a gloopy image of the media furor surrounding German unification. After the files were opened, Maron turned her attention to the incompleteness of archival evidence that led to the problem of scapegoating of certain collaborators. As Manfred Wilke and Michael Kubina complained in 1993, the files of the many branches of the SED, which themselves relied upon an “umfangreichen Berichtswesen” (comprehensive reporting system),55 were not made available when the Stasi archive was opened. As a result, Maron noted, the accusation of collaboration was leveled only at those who had worked as IMs or something of the sort.56 Individuals who had cooperated with the SED’s other branches (for instance, the literary scholars at Humboldt University who were asked by the Ministry for Culture to review the ideology and form of Wolf’s and Maron’s literary works with a view to their censorship) were not subject to the same kind of attention as the authors themselves, as former IMs. This selective use of the archive risked perpetuating the duplicity to which the files bear witness—duplicity which took the form of doublings of identity, as friends and families informed against one another, and the shadowing of the life stories of victims by an archive that remained hidden until the regime ended. It is this selectiveness or incompleteness of archival evidence in the Stasi’s cases, and the resulting troubling of life narratives by the slippery stories held in the files, to which the literary life writing of Wolf and Maron attests. The autofictional works by Maron and Wolf depict a mode of subjectivity that, even though it might collaborate, nonetheless does so in such a state of un-sovereignty that the ethical status of the collaboration is questionable. Some readers may find the slipperiness of Maron’s and Wolf’s literary subjects and their particular difficulties in accounting for their actions tiresome, or even suspect a postmodern abdication of agency and therefore responsibility. Yet neither writer’s works are resigned to the impossibility of agency. On the contrary, it is impossible to overlook in both of their oeuvres a central focus on autonomy, and on the authorship that a subject hopes to have over her own actions. Maron’s more recent novels, such as Endmoränen (Last Sediments, 2002) and Ach Glück (Oh Happiness, 2007), are narrated by characters that Elke Gilson has termed

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“Aktionistinnen” (actionists),57 self-determined women who desire nothing more than to decide the conditions of their own lives. In Wolf’s Stadt der Engel, for its part, there is a corresponding (if retroactive) struggle— the struggle to grasp, through writing, what the motivations and actions of the past actually were. Nonetheless, the nuanced authority of both writers stems precisely from their literary subjects’ collapses, their failure to grasp agency, and their inability to secure authorship of their life stories. Both Maron’s narrator’s consideration in Pawels Briefe that she might have been susceptible to a loss of control, leading to a failure to be loyal to her friends or to her own intentions, and Wolf’s painfully minute renditions of a collapse of memory and self-knowledge demonstrate a high level of self-critique. Moreover, as testimonies of collaboration with the East German regime, these works shed particular light on the problems experienced by a subject attempting to act from within an environment of surveillance and coercion. Beyond the GDR context, this willingness that the two authors share to explore the lack of sovereignty of the self over its own actions sets them in dialogue with the recent cultural theoretical work of Butler, who has described how any report the modern subject might try to give of itself is laden with unconscious content that the speaker can never fully author or authorize. As such, while the literary writings and Stasi files of these authors who had served as unofficial informants trace a particular failure in producing reliable accounts of East German history—both literary works and Stasi files fail to deliver reliable knowledge about the past—they also have a message to impart about collaborations and complicities in the present day. These cases present us with a challenge: if the subject in the context of the Stasi is not a sovereign, reliable agent, how many of us reading these cases today would be susceptible to co-optation by surveillance elements in the present? To put the question another way, even if the archive of Stasi files has been opened, has that event gone any way to preventing further, harmful collaborations from taking place in the current environment of global capitalism? It is this more global problem that is indexed by the passages in Stadt der Engel referring to the FBI’s persecution of European communists who had fled wartime Europe. The works by Maron and Wolf discussed in this chapter offer a corrective to any attempts we might make to view the history of state socialism with too much surety of judgment. Such attempts would risk falling prey to a flawed logic of totalization, of categorization into black-and-white, victim-versus-perpetrator, and into subjectivities that reliably do what their assigned role requires of them. That is a logic of totalization which, as the collapse of the Stasi proved, could not meet the urgent challenge to control that its most crucial operatives posed. It is also a logic of categorization that remains entirely unhelpful with regard to surveillance and coercion in the present day.

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Notes Translations from Stasi files and literary works in German are by the author. 1

Cf. for instance Christine Wilkening’s early sociology of the Stasi scandals, Staat im Staate. 2

Müller-Enbergs, Anatomie der Staatssicherheit, 3.

3

“Die Schaffung des entwickelten gesellschaftlichen Systems des Sozialismus in der souveränen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik verpflichtet die Organe des Ministeriums für Staatssicherheit, durch eine noch qualifiziertere politischoperative Arbeit die sozialistische Menschengemeinschaft vor allen Angriffen des Gegners zu schützen und gleichzeitig zu ihrer weiteren Stärkung und Festigung sowie zur Entwicklung der sozialistischen Demokratie beizutragen” (“Befehl Nr. 18/67 vom 19. 5. 1967: VVS MfS 008 Nr. 333/67,” Der Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik [hereafter BStU, Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former GDR], Ministerium für Staatssicherheit [hereafter MfS, Ministry for State Security], Hauptabteilung [Main Department] IX, no. 16034, 3). 4

Cf. Müller-Enbergs, Anatomie der Staatssicherheit, 3.

5

Müller-Enbergs, Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, 168–9.

6

Cited in Müller-Enbergs, Anatomie der Staatssicherheit, 42.

7

Müller-Enbergs, Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, 305.

8

Ibid., 342–44.

9

Cf. Müller-Enbergs, Anatomie der Staatssicherheit, 43.

10

BStU, MfS, Büro der Leitung [Head Office] / Dokument [Document] 1523,

7. 11

Cited in Müller-Enbergs, Anatomie der Staatssicherheit, 8.

12

Cited in Ibid., 41.

13

BStU, MfS, Vertrauliche Verschlusssache [Classified Document], 269/81, 8.

14

Ibid., 45.

15

Ibid., 59.

16

Förster, Die Dissertationen, 19.

17

Müller, Krieg ohne Schlacht, 486.

18

Ibid., 488.

19

BStU, MfS, Archivierter Operativer Vorgang [hereafter AOP, Archived Operative Procedure], no. 6784/89, 276. 20

Bohley, “Das Herz der Stasi,” 68.

21

“nicht Klischees, organisierte Sprechchöre und unzählige Sicherheitsbeamte jedes Gefühl bremsen, ehe es auch nur entsteht” (BStU, MfS, AOP, no. 6784/89, 261).

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22

Ibid., 265.

23

Ibid., 267.

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24 My article on Maron’s earlier novel Stille Zeile Sechs (1991) makes the argument for reading it as an autofictional account of Maron’s collaboration, one whose publication before the Stasi scandals calls into question Bohley’s other accusation, namely that Maron made no reference to her collaboration before it was made public. Cf. Ring, “Eine Bindung durch Hass,” 252. 25

Kjellman-Chapin, “Fake Identity, Real Work,” 148.

26

“eine ganz und gar kontrollierte Montage, die es mir ermöglicht hat, Vergangenes und Gegenwärtiges ständig in Bezug zu setzen” (Maron, Quer über die Gleise, 108). 27

Maron, Pawels Briefe, 17. Subsequent references to this work will be by the abbreviation PB, with page numbers in parentheses. 28

“in denen ein Mensch etwas tun könnte, ohne später davon zu wissen, Hypnose, Schizophrenie oder andere krankhafte Zustände” (PB, 200). 29

Cf. for instance Brändle, “Eine Zwiesprache,” unpaginated.

30

Butler, Giving an Account, 41.

31

Ibid., 63.

32

“[d]ie auch Grass, und mit ihm Tausende Kriegsheimkehrer, in sich zunächst ‘überschlagen,’ nämlich verdrängt und beschwiegen haben” (Wolf, “Autobiographisch schreiben,” 45). 33

Vinke and Wolf, Akteneinsicht, 143.

34

Ibid., 147.

35

“gefährdet [. . .] durch mangelhafte theoretische Kenntnisse.” Ibid.

36

Ibid.

37

Ibid., 94.

38

Though Aufklärung usually translates from the German as “enlightenment,” within the Stasi’s in-house vocabulary the term referred to the ideological checking of an individual before they were recruited as a collaborator. 39

Vinke and Wolf, Akteneinsicht, 89.

40

Cited in Schmitz-Burgard, Gewaltiges Schreiben gegen Gewalt, 89.

41

Loest, “Wer zu spät kommt,” in Vinke and Wolf, Akteneinsicht, 151.

42

Wolf, Stadt der Engel, 20. Subsequent references to this work will be by the abbreviation SdE, with page numbers in parentheses. 43

Wolf, “Eine Auskunft,” in Vinke and Wolf, Akteneinsicht, 143.

44

Gallagher, “The Problem of Shame,” 388.

45

“DIESES SCHREIBWERK SCHIEBT SICH VORWÄRTS IN MIKROSKOPISCHEN DOSEN, GEGEN EINEN WIDERSTAND, DER SICH MIR ENTZIEHT, WENN ICH IHN BENENNEN WILL” (SdE, 107). 46

“jahrelang in einem Kasten versteckt [. . .] die ‘sie’ nicht finden sollten” (SdE, 95). 47

“Wer soll dieses Ich sein, das da berichtet. Es ist ja nicht nur, daß ich nicht sicher bin, wer sich da erinnert. Eines von den vielen Ichs, die sich, in schneller

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oder langsamer Folge, in mir abgelöst haben, die mich zu ihrem Wohnsitz gewählt haben” (SdE, 214). 48

“hatte von mir Besitz ergriffen, sich in mir eingenistet und ein anderes Wesen aus mir gemacht” (Wolf, Was bleibt, 240). 49

Rechtien, “Spurensuche im Labyrinth,” 129.

50

“einem untilgbaren Hang zur Ein- und Unterordnung” (Wolf, Was bleibt, 236). 51

Ibid., 239.

52

“[Es] breitete sich etwas in mir aus, ein gestaltloses Gewächs, das sich um meine Adern schlang wie Ackerwinde, das um mein Herz wucherte und den Magen einschnürte, so daß ich manchmal fürchtete, es fehle meinem Brustkorb der Raum zum Atmen” (Maron, Stille Zeile Sechs, 122). 53

Lewis, “Reading and Writing,” 380.

54

“und davor gewarnt, in künftigen Fällen mit den Akten so umzugehen wie in meinem Fall, es könnte auch mal schiefgehen” (Vinke and Wolf, Akteneinsicht, 306). 55

Wilke and Kubina, “Von der Aussagekraft,” 97.

56

Maron, Nach Maßgabe meiner Begreifungskraft, 36.

57

Gilson, “Doch das Paradies ist verriegelt,” 101.

Bibliography Bohley, Bärbel. “Das Herz der Stasi.” Der Spiegel, November 28, 1995, 68–72. Brändle, Rea. “Eine Zwiesprache mit dem eigenen Leben.” Die Wochenzeitung, November 28, 2013. Accessed May 3, 2014. http://www.woz.ch/1348/ monika-maron-zwischenspiel/eine-zwiesprache-mit-dem-eigenen-leben. Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Förster, Günther. Die Dissertationen an der “Juristischen Hochschule” des MfS: Eine annotierte Bibliographie. Berlin: BStU, 1994. Gallagher, Kaleen. “The Problem of Shame in Christa Wolf’s Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud.” German Life & Letters 65 (2012): 378–97. Gilson, Elke, ed. “Doch das Paradies”: Zum Werk von Monika Maron. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2006. Kjellman-Chapin, Monica. “Fake Identity, Real Work: Authenticity, Autofiction, and Outsider Art.” SPECS Journal of Art and Culture 2 (2009). Accessed March 28, 2014. http://scholarship.rollins.edu/specs/vol2/iss1/51. Lewis, Alison. “Reading and Writing the Stasi File: On the Uses and Abuses of the File as (Auto)Biography.” German Life & Letters 56 (2003): 377–97. Loest, Erich. “Wer zu spät kommt, den bestraft das Mißtrauen.” Die Welt, January 22, 1993. Reproduced in Vinke and Wolf, Akteneinsicht, 151. Maron, Monika. Nach Maßgabe meiner Begreifungskraft: Artikel und Essays. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1993. ———. Pawels Briefe: Eine Familiengeschichte. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999.

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———. Quer über die Gleise: Artikel, Essays, Zwischenrufe. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2000. ———. Stille Zeile Sechs. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991. Müller, Heiner. Krieg ohne Schlacht: Leben in zwei Diktaturen. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003. Müller-Enbergs, Helmut. Anatomie der Staatssicherheit. Vol. 4, no. 2, Die inoffiziellen Mitarbeiter. Berlin: BStU, 2008. ———, ed. “Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter des Ministeriums für Staatssicherheit.” Part 1 in Richtlinien und Durchführungsbestimmungen. Berlin: BStU, 2001. Rechtien, Renate. “Spurensuche im Labyrinth: Momente des Unheimlichen in Christa Wolfs Früh- und Spätwerk.” Text + Kritik 10/12, no. 46 (2012): 128–42. Ring, Annie. “‘Eine Bindung durch Hass [A Hateful Bind]’: Double-Agency, Mimesis and the Role of Hands in Monika Maron’s Silent Close No. 6.” German Life & Letters 63 (2010): 250–64. Schädlich, Hans-Joachim, ed. Aktenkundig. Berlin: Rowohlt, 1992. Schmitz-Burgard, Sylvia. Gewaltiges Schreiben gegen Gewalt. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011. Vinke, Hermann, and Christa Wolf. Akteneinsicht Christa Wolf: Zerrspiegel und Dialog: Eine Dokumentation. Hamburg: Luchterhand, 1993. Wilke, Manfred, and Michael Kubina. “Von der Aussagekraft der Akten.” Text + Kritik 120 (1993): 89–97. Wilkening, Christine. Staat im Staate: Auskünfte ehemaliger Stasi-Mitarbeiter. Berlin: Aufbau, 1990. Wolf, Christa. “Autobiographisch schreiben.” In Rede, daß ich dich sehe: Essays, Reden, Gespräche, 42–46. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2012. ———. “Eine Auskunft.” Berliner Zeitung, January 21, 1993. Reproduced in Vinke and Wolf, Akteneinsicht, 143–44. ———. Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010. ———. Was bleibt: Werke. Vol. 10, edited by Sonja Hilzinger. Munich: Luchterhand, 2001.

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5: Perpetrator as Victim in Jana Döhring’s Stasiratte Carol Anne Costabile-Heming Aber so sehr es eine Freude sein kann, sich zu erinnern oder erinnert zu werden, ist leider auch das Gegenteil häufig der Fall. [As much as it can be a joy to remember or to be remembered, it is unfortunately also the case that quite often the opposite is true.] —Jana Döhring, Stasiratte, 7

T

HIS INTRODUCTORY COMMENT IN THE FOREWORD TO JANA DÖHRING’S Stasiratte (Stasi Rat, 2012) underscores the Janus-faced nature of memory. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the confrontations that East Germans have had with their secret police (Stasi) files. More than twenty-five years after the dissolution of the oppressive regime that ruled the German Democratic Republic for forty years, the legacy of the Stasi files continues to impact personal biographies in myriad ways. The peculiarity of the Stasi remains a source of fascination, and the Academy Award–winning film Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006) made the surveillance activities of the East German secret police a household concept for millions of international viewers. Writers were the first to thematize the Stasi openly in the immediate post-Wall years: Reiner Kunze (1990), Erich Loest (1991), Christa Wolf (1993), Günter Kunert (1997), and Jürgen Fuchs (1999) all incorporated aspects of their own Stasi files into their essays and fictional works.1 By bringing these “secret” documents into the public sphere, these writers were attempting to reclaim their biographies, for the Stasi’s characterizations of them represent a biased interpretation of their biographies. The Stasi intentionally manipulated information in order to make these cultural figures conform to a specific category—namely, dissident behavior that was viewed as harmful to the state—in a practice that Alison Lewis has proposed resulted in the creation of hostile biographies of others.2 Most critical attention has been paid to victims of the Stasi, when they have chosen to publish

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the information contained in their files. Former Stasi employees and Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (unofficial informants, or IMs) have also made their side of the story public.3 Notable cases here too have involved writers, such as Christa Wolf and Sascha Anderson.4 Jana Döhring’s Stasiratte, published by Hartriegel Verlag in 2012 and marketed as a novel, relates the story of the author and her life as a Stasi IM.5 Though she originally planned to keep her past a secret, an old friend uncovered the truth when reviewing his own Stasi file. Forced to confront her past, Döhring reveals in Stasiratte how she became an IM and what her motivations were for doing so. In presenting her own incriminating biography, Döhring attempts to reclaim her life and present her side of the story, thus countering the existing perpetrator narative. Döhring’s book depicts in fictional form her perception of the way that the Stasi manipulated individuals to engage in informant activity. While there is no denying that Döhring’s spying caused those she informed on to suffer both personally and professionally, the way in which she portrays her IM story in the novel makes it possible to believe that the Stasi corrupted her. Thus, while she was writing hostile biographies of others, the Stasi actively created a hostile biography for her. In this chapter, I examine the narrative strategies that Döhring uses to frame her story, exploring the interweaving of three temporal planes within the narrative. I consider the ways in which Döhring strives to create a counter-narrative and the extent to which she succeeds. I propose that these narrative techniques are designed to evoke sympathy from readers, allowing Döhring to depict herself as a victim rather than as a perpetrator. In reflecting on the way that Döhring’s novel is a form of life writing, I expand Lewis’s definition of hostile biographies to include the implications of perpetrators as victims, a continued point of contention in debates about coming to terms with the GDR past.6 Hartriegel Verlag identifies Stasiratte as a novel. This descriptor is deceptive, however, for though the text masquerades as fiction, it uses Döhring’s biography as a springboard and thus conflates reality and fiction. Using many of the strategies employed in fiction writing, such as flashbacks and framing techniques, the plot neatly interweaves three temporal planes: the present (approximately six hours and twenty minutes), the immediate past three years (the time period during which the protagonist-narrator-author, Jana,7 is “tortured” by Gerry, a person on whom she informed), and the period twenty years prior to that when the narrator began working as a waitress at the Palasthotel and later the hotel’s Kristallbar. Three different emotions characterize these temporal planes. In the brief section detailing the present, Jana expresses feelings of relief. The immediate past three years are characterized by feelings of anxiety. In describing her years at the Palasthotel, Jana is wistful, expressing a sense of longing and nostalgia for the past.

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The Present The narrative begins on the day that the narrator, Jana, will confront her former coworker in court: “Now I am accusing someone, Gerry, my old friend and colleague.”8 Though the nature of the accusation is not yet clear to readers, the narrator primes them for a quick resolution: “When I wash off my makeup tonight, everything will be over.”9 Döhring leads readers to believe that Jana is a victim, while simultaneously preparing them for an undesirable verdict: “[I]t’s far from certain that the court will decide in my favor.”10 Jana’s portrayal of herself in this part is factual and relies heavily on legal terms; for instance, she describes herself simply as the Klägerin (plaintiff, 13, 175). Her anxiety remains, though, as she hopes for a positive outcome: “With the help of legal terms the tide appears to be changing.”11 The court hearing lasts only thirty minutes; the two sides reach a compromise. This compromise does not absolve Jana of her culpability.

Three Years Ago For readers, the reason for the hearing is not initially clear. The suspense surrounding the narrator’s situation resolves itself a few pages into the story. We learn that Jana has successfully ignored her past for fifteen years: “I had left the past behind me”;12 indeed, she has been able to establish a comfortable life for herself in unified Germany until her former coworker Gerry sends a letter that forces her to confront her past: Hello Jana, Finally was able to view my STASI FILE! It was hard to read that 6 IM-rats were tailing me. For this reason, I’ve decided to publish my file after 2 newspaper guys bent my ear about it while I was in the entryway to the Stasi office.13

Feelings of “shame, guilt, and panic”14 fill the narrator as she worries that her “secret” will become public. Jana views Gerry’s letter as an accusation that contains a pronouncement of revenge. She initially experiences feelings of shock but still is able to understand Gerry’s perspective: “This is not a cock-and-bull story. He was a friend! And this is the reaction to a bitter surprise and a huge disappointment following a friendship.”15 A few months later, she receives a Christmas postcard, followed each month by another postcard with the words “Greetings to my Stasi informant.”16 Like the original letter, the postcards evoke feelings of shame and fear, but Jana also begins to feel annoyance: “Yes, I did something that cannot be undone. What is this supposed to be? Aren’t you man enough to call or come over, I wanted to scream.”17 Unlike the sealed letter, these

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postcards are open for all to see, and the possibility that Jana’s past will become public knowledge grows with each passing month. Eventually, Jana cannot withstand the pressure of hiding her past, particularly from her husband, Mike, to whom she has been happily married for seven years. As a West German, Mike has little understanding for the complexity of life in a surveillance state. When former Stasi spies’ pasts are uncovered in the media, Mike’s response is: “I can’t judge whatever might have prompted these people to align themselves with that system. [. . .] They have to shoulder the responsibility for their past.”18 Jana worries about her relationship with Mike and how it will change if she reveals her past misdeeds. She does not even know how to broach the topic with him, for she wonders, “Will Mike understand what I can only explain to myself with difficulty?”19 Jana receives postcards from Gerry for a year, and it begins to weigh on her mind to tell Mike. But she wonders about his reaction: “Will I just be a contemptible opportunist in his eyes, or will it suffice to explain my transgression that I was living in a dictatorship?”20 Jana has been enjoying a comfortable life following unification, and she is fearful that coming clean about her past will destroy her relationship with Mike. While the two are celebrating his birthday in Dessau, the differences between their upbringing in East and West trouble Mike, who remarks, “A good thing that you didn’t associate yourself with them.”21 Unable to restrain herself, Jana blurts out her confession: “I was with the Stasi.”22 Following this moment of truth, Jana experiences feelings of relief: “I feel like I puked up a viper. [. . .] I freed myself from it.”23 Jana has difficulty explaining everything to Mike in a logical fashion: “Everything was connected. Growing up in a world of forked tongues, my special job, my relationship with Paul [a regular customer who is involved in the illegal black market], the promise of advantages, and finally the continuing strain of trying to repress everything.”24 After confessing to Mike, she writes to Gerry, expresses regret, and requests that he stop sending the cards. Nothing changes. Because he is a lawyer, Mike counsels Jana to pursue a harassment suit against Gerry. Six weeks after submitting her claim, she learns that Gerry has hired a defense attorney. Instead of Gerry’s cards, she now receives mail from his attorney. Though she no longer has to hide her secret from Mike, she is still beset by fear. The court hearing is public, and she agonizes over the fear that other colleagues from her past could witness the proceedings.

Twenty Years Earlier Döhring uses a series of narrative flashbacks to disclose the story of Jana’s recruitment. These flashbacks also reveal that Jana misses her past life in

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the GDR. It is the longest section in the book, and Jana reflects fondly on her job at the Palasthotel, her friendships, and the people she encountered. These reflections are tinged with nostalgia for her old life, containing commentary about life in the GDR. Indeed, it describes her relationship with Gerry as incredibly close.25 Working first as a banquet waitress in the East Berlin Palasthotel,26 Jana was promoted after two years to waitress in the hotel’s Kristallbar, a position that put her in contact with international visitors and where tips were often given in hard currency—a dream job for a young woman in her early twenties, especially one whose family was not strictly loyal to the state. Because her parents believed in a Christian upbringing, Jana went through both the expected socialist Jugendweihe (youth initiation ceremony) and a Christian confirmation. Unfortunately, the familial desire for the religious ceremony prevented her from being admitted to the university. Jana’s initial contact with the Stasi occurred innocently enough, and she portrays those years as “a time of zest for life and adventure.”27 Though readers know that Jana was an IM, Döhring does not introduce the details of her recruitment until almost halfway through the book, which seems to be a ploy to keep readers engaged in the story. One day Jana’s boss informed her that she was to report to room 4060 in the hotel, where she encountered a man from the Stasi: “I could imagine what he was, but what was I doing here? [. . .] Now I was sitting across from one of them. One of those who secretly get whispered about and maligned, whom one prefers to laugh at in order not to be afraid.”28 There was a touch of revulsion in Jana’s reaction, but the skillful agent was able to persuade her. She began to imagine herself working for the Stasi. She felt “flattered” (geschmeichelt), “important” (wichtig), “needed” (gebraucht), “suited” (geeignet), the “chosen one” (Auserwählte) (109). All these things coupled with a naive sense of adventure in being a detective like James Bond make it fairly easy to see how the Stasi was able to sway an impressionable young woman.29 Along with her apparent naïveté was a desire to manipulate the situation for her own benefit. She was involved in a relationship with a man named Paul, a regular customer in the Kristallbar who dealt in black-market goods. Collaboration with the Stasi offered her a chance “actively to do something for our protection.”30 Her handling officer, Micha, was adept at making Jana feel comfortable, immediately offering the informal form of address (133). And it worked: She viewed Micha as the “friendly man with the harmless vibes.”31 Jana characterized their conversations as “chitchat” (plaudern, 135), a term that normally describes talks among intimate acquaintances. The two celebrated Jana’s willingness to collaborate with a glass of sparkling wine and a few hors d’oeuvres.

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Perpetrator versus Victim Jana’s story is probably not all that uncommon; indeed, Döhring’s intent in writing the book was to reveal how easy it was for a young person to get roped into collusion with the Stasi.32 Though it reads like a confessional novel, Döhring insists that the writing of the book was not an attempt at whitewashing her past but rather was intended as an apology.33 Despite this intention, aspects of the narrative make it difficult for readers to believe that Jana regrets her actions. As Jana confronts her past, she expresses anger that she is lumped together with all the other Stasi spies: “Is the unofficial informant, as he is officially called, worse than the fulltime informant? The fulltime informant is the sucker who didn’t find a respectable job, while the one who works covertly is the betrayer, because he talks behind the backs of his victims.”34 The narrative also makes clear that Jana understood the choices she was making. When contemplating the Stasi’s proposal to collaborate, she saw two clearly delineated sides: “Stay decent and reputable and wait out the consequences or grit my teeth and collaborate?”35 Indeed, Jana even pondered whether the latter arrangement could bring her some advantages and for this reason found the offer “tempting” (verlockend, 110). Because of her upbringing in a household where one could say what one wanted, but had to be careful in public, Jana had from a young age lived a kind of “double life” (Doppelleben, 112). She reveals, “It wasn’t even hard for me to tell my agent controller anecdotes about my workday, as I would have told a pal.”36 In this passage, Jana tries to downplay the information that she passed on to the Stasi as mere anecdotes, but a few pages later she acknowledges that she had become part of a sinister system: “The unknown spy passes random information on to the Stasi. He can report the truth, twist the facts, invent stories. All dependent on his sympathies for the people he is asked about. The betrayed cannot fight back, cannot set anything straight, cannot defend themselves.”37 Jana kept up her covert activities for four years, until 1988. Döhring portrays Jana as cold, calculating, and unwilling to think beyond the benefits she received as an informant. It is not until Gerry’s confrontation that she truly considers the impact that her activity may have had, even though she inwardly may not want to accept the fact that she may have done harm: “In the end it didn’t matter what I wrote. Micha needed a full page for his superior.”38 Rather than admit to the potential influence that an IM could have, she preferred to call herself “the tiny informant” (der winzige Informant) who wrote down “a story of halftruths” (eine Geschichte der Halbwahrheiten, 160). Within the fictional setting, Döhring crafts an image of a Jana who appears incapable of comprehending the significance of her spy activity or the ways in which the Stasi could use seemingly innocuous information. When pondering what

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her fate would have been had the Wende (the turning point in 1989–90) not occurred, Jana goes so far as to suggest that the reports she wrote were fictive: “Would I still be sitting around in musty living rooms thinking up stories?”39 Indeed, Jana tailored the content of her reports to the degree to which she liked someone, a fact that seems to negate the image of innocence which parts of the narrative attempt to project. When she felt jealous of her coworker Katrin, she exploited her power: “The report about Katrin did not turn out entirely favorably, and I didn’t care.”40 When a new employee, Chiara, joined the team at the Kristallbar, Jana was annoyed. Chiara was very good-looking, charming, and agile; Jana disparagingly dismissed her as “full-figured” (üppig, 217). When given the opportunity to write a report about her, Jana took full advantage of her position: “Gloweringly determined to eliminate the competition, I embellished my report with invented details that insinuated that she met regularly with guests from West Berlin.”41 Two weeks later, Chiara lost her job in the Kristallbar. These two examples emphasize the way that Jana assimilated into the sinister system and crafted hostile reports on the individuals in question. Because Stasiratte presents Döhring’s biography in a fictional framework, it is up to the reader to interpret what might be fact and what might be fiction. Indeed, it is difficult to find either corroborating or contradictory reports. Whereas perpetrators typically are not permitted to view their Täterakte (perpetrator file), it is questionable whether one even exists in Döhring’s case.42 Public figures who have published their victim files appear to have done so as an attempt to reclaim their biographies, as Lewis suggests. In Döhring’s case, the reason for publishing her account is not so clear-cut; she is not a public figure, nor does she appear to have an Opferakte (victim file). Quite simply, Stasiratte is her attempt to counter her accuser’s accusations.43 Indeed, Jana initially is portrayed as persecuted by the postcards Gerry sends each month. The subsequent revelation that Jana was an IM results not in a reevaluation of her biography, but rather in a counter-narrative that positions Jana as a victim. Indeed, Jana’s distress stems from her fear that her pre1989 biography will be rewritten, which would wreck her comfortable post-1989 life. She fears seeing her name in the newspaper, having her relationship with Mike destroyed, losing the life that she worked so hard to build after unification. These are all personal motivations for Jana to keep her past secret. She never forgot her past as an IM, but she held onto “the hope that she would be overlooked [as an IM], that she could simply forget everything.”44 Because it is written as a fictional account, Stasiratte is different from the other texts discussed in this volume.45 The novel gives voice to Jana as a perpetrator, but close reading reveals that the goal of the story is to claim victimhood, which the cloak of a first-person narrator allows her to

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do. The switch from perpetrator to victim occurs at the moment when Jana files the harassment complaint against Gerry, making him the perpetrator in Jana’s eyes. Mike even disparagingly refers to him as a “stalker” (154). Alison Lewis has written that access to the Stasi files allows victims to reclaim “missing parts of their life stories,”46 and the act of writing about their files affords them the opportunity to respond to the Stasi version of their biographies—indeed, even to rewrite the Stasi version. In the case of Stasiratte, Döhring does not write about her file, but about her life. The desire to tell her side of the story arose not from the shock of reading her victim file, as with the Stasi’s many victims, but from a different kind of shock: the shock of being stalked by Gerry’s postcards. Despite seeing herself as wronged in post-unification society, Jana does manage to work through her past with insight and some clarity, resulting in a sober assessment of her collaboration. With the hindsight of some twenty years, Jana feels differently toward her past. Even though she had been a willing participant in Stasi surveillance and informant activity, leaving her Stasi life behind her was in fact her way of responding to the biography that the Stasi had inscribed for her: “This time with its abysses and wrong decisions should not belong to me anymore. I only wanted to look forward and go my own way, without stepping on fragments of memories over which I could stumble.”47 The act of telling her story in Stasiratte provides Döhring with a vehicle to process the way that the Stasi impacted her biography. Despite her apparent lack of remorse, the telling of her story allows “Jana” to reclaim at least a piece of her biography. As she notes in the foreword to the book: “My past was not always friendly to me. It could be very serious and critical. Now we are friends again.”48 Whereas Lewis has noted that throughout the 1990s, writings about the files privileged the victim’s voice,49 Gerry’s point of view is not privileged. This is evident too in the judge’s attitude toward Gerry: “The whole thing happened more than twenty years ago.”50 This statement trivializes Gerry’s emotional state. It seems that because so much time has passed, there is no longer any need for justice for Gerry. The judge decides for Jana, sending a clear signal that the pain that Jana’s betrayal caused Gerry is insignificant. Justice is turned on her head, for Jana’s judicial triumph confirms that her present-day victim status trumps Gerry’s past victim status. And thus Gerry becomes a victim for a second time, only this time he is the victim of the justice system rather than an unjust security organization. Psychotherapist Ursula Plog suggests that reconciliation between Stasi perpetrators and Stasi victims only can occur when the betrayal is recognized and accepted, but that in order for true healing to follow, there must also be forgiveness.51 Whereas Jana shows little regret within the context of the narrative, Döhring’s post-publication interviews reveal that she does feel considerable remorse for her actions: “It is incredibly

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painful. [. . .] That is my guilt and I will never get rid of it.”52 She also no longer hides from her past, for she has given multiple newspaper, television, and radio interviews, and a quick Google search takes one to YouTube videos of her talking about her past. While we can view her narrative as an attempt to free herself from her past, the story itself leaves the question of Gerry’s victimhood unresolved. Jana has acknowledged and accepted her past: “Crimes expire according to the statute of limitations, but personal guilt remains throughout one’s life. I’m now learning to live with my guilt. That is the benefit that Gerry’s postcards bring. The feeling of a new truthfulness has a freeing effect. [. . .] Still I also believe that I have paid my dues.”53 In the end, Jana admits her guilt and reclaims her biography, but the narrative never acknowledges that her story had consequences for others. Jana never takes the next step in the reconciliation process by apologizing or at least asking forgiveness. Instead, the real-life Jana is content in her role as a media personality, who now profits from her counter-narrative.

Notes Epigraph. Subsequent references to Stasiratte will be noted parenthetically in the text. Unless otherwise noted, all translations into English are my own. 1

Foreign scholars were also spied upon, and both Timothy Garton Ash (1997) and Richard Zipser (2013) have used the files to shed light on their personal histories. 2

Lewis, “Reading and Writing,” 377.

3

See for instance Christine Wilkening, Staat im Staate, and Gisela Karau, Stasiprotokolle.

4

Alison Lewis makes the point that stories by former Stasi informants sell better than those of victims. See Lewis, “Reading and Writing,” 380. Christa Wolf is an especially complex case, because she worked as an IM in the 1950s but subsequently was an object of Stasi surveillance. For additional details see Vinke, Akteneinsicht Christa Wolf. 5

Döhring’s book is Hartriegel’s only publication. The publishing house, located in Cologne, was founded in 2012 by Döhring’s husband, with a specific focus on what life was like in the GDR. See http://www.hartriegel-verlag.de/. 6

In her nonfiction book Stasiland (2003), Anna Funder wrote quite disparagingly about the proliferation of Stasi perpetrators casting themselves as victims, calling former Stasi officers “wannabe victims of democracy and the rule of law” (Funder, Stasiland, 84). 7

Because the protagonist and the author share the same first name, I will distinguish between the two by using Jana to refer to the character in the novel and Döhring to refer to the author. 8

“Nun beklage ich also jemanden, und zwar Gerry, meinen alten Freund und Kollegen” (Döhring, Stasiratte, 14).

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9

“wenn ich heute Abend die ganze Schminke herunterwasche, wird alles vorbei sein” (8). 10

“es [ist] längst nicht sicher, ob das Gericht in meinem Sinne entscheiden wird” (8). 11

“Mithilfe [sic] der juristischen Begriffe scheinen sich die Dinge umzukehren” (175). 12

“Die Vergangenheit hatte ich vor die Tür gesetzt” (15).

13

“Hallo Jana, Hab’ jetzt meine STASIAKTE einsehen können! War ganz schön heftig zu lesen, dass ich 6 IM-Ratten an der Backe hatte. Aus diesem Grund habe ich mich entschlossen, nachdem mich 2 Zeitungsfritzen im Foyer der Stasistelle zutexteten, meine Akte zu publizieren!” (19).

14

“Scham, Schuld and Panik” (18).

15

“Das hier ist keine Räuberpistole. Er war ein Freund! Und dies hier ist die Reaktion auf eine üble Überraschung und große Enttäuschung nach einer Freundschaft” (20). 16

“Meinem Stasispitzel einen [G]ruß” (33).

17

“Ja, ich habe etwas getan, was nicht mehr rückgängig zu machen ist. Was aber soll das hier werden? Bist du nicht Manns genug, anzurufen oder herzukommen, möchte ich herausschreien” (23). 18

“Was auch immer diese Leute damals bewogen hat, sich mit dem System gemein zu machen, kann ich nicht beurteilen. [. . .] Die müssen schon die Verantwortung für ihre Vergangenheit übernehmen” (73). 19

“Wird Mike verstehen, was ich mir selbst nur mühsam erklären kann?” (73).

20

“Werde ich in seinen Augen eine verachtenswerte Opportunistin sein oder wird es genügen, meine Verfehlung mit dem Leben in der Diktatur zu erklären?” (7). 21

“Ein Glück, dass du dich nicht mit denen gemein gemacht hast” (120).

22

“Ich war bei der Stasi” (120).

23

“Ich fühle mich, als hätte ich eine Natter ausgekotzt. [. . .] Ich habe mich von ihr befreit” (120). 24

“Alles hing mit allem zusammen. Das Aufwachsen in einer Welt der Doppelzüngigkeit, meine besondere Arbeitsstelle, die Beziehung zu Paul, das Versprechen von Vorteilen und schließlich die fortwährende Anstrengung, alles zu verdrängen” (132). 25

Jana does remark that the closeness ended after unification, though the reasons are not entirely clear. “But after the fall of the Wall twenty years ago as our lives changed, I sought out new paths and retreated from this friendship more and more. With a new love in my life and a new job, I tried to burn all the bridges behind me. I didn’t want my old life anymore, and I didn’t want to be reminded of anything negative.” (“Doch nach dem Mauerfall vor zwanzig Jahren als unser Leben so anders wurde, suchte ich nach neuen Wegen und zog mich von dieser Freundschaft immer mehr zurück. Mit einer neuen Liebe und einem neuen Job

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versuchte ich, alle Brücken hinter mir abzubrechen. Mein altes Leben wollte ich nicht mehr und möglichst an nichts Negatives darin erinnert werden” [15].) 26

The Palasthotel, which opened in 1979 was the GDR’s premiere hotel in the center of East Berlin, used by government leaders for receiving guests. The hotel was supposed to be closed to ordinary GDR citizens, because it accepted payments only in hard currency. It played an important role for the Stasi, who used it to spy on Western visitors. The hotel closed in December 2000 and was torn down in 2001. 27

“eine Zeit der Lebenslust und des Abenteuers” (39).

28

“Was er war, konnte ich mir nun vorstellen, aber was machte ich hier? [. . .] Jetzt saß ich also allein einem von denen gegenüber. Von denen, über die im Verborgenen getuschelt und gelästert wurde, über die man lieber lachte, um keine Angst haben zu müssen” (107; emphasis in original). 29

Lewis notes that the Stasi files fulfilled a dual purpose. They served primarily as a means to monitor subversive activity. Secondarily, however, they also served as a surreptitious means for the Stasi to keep tabs on the informants. See Lewis, “Reading and Writing,” 389. This approach is evident in Stasiratte, for at one of their meetings, Jana’s handling agent inquires about her extramarital affair with a Libyan. 30

“aktiv etwas zu unserem Schutz zu tun” (130).

31

“freundlichen Mann mit der harmlosen Ausstrahlung” (134). Stasi officers were primarily men. See Huberth, Aufklärung, 13. 32

“Protokolle im Schnüffelland; Jana Döhring: Ex-DDR-Bürgerin.” SWR1. February 14, 2013, accessed October 20, 2015, http://www.swr.de/swr1/bw/programm/leute/doehring-jana-ex-ddr-buergerin/-/id=1895042/did=10950492/ nid=1895042/10lixkd/index.html. 33

“Protokolle im Schnüffelland; Jana Döhring: Ex-DDR-Bürgerin.” SWR1. February 14, 2013, accessed October 20, 2015, http://www.swr.de/swr1/bw/programm/leute/doehring-jana-ex-ddr-buergerin/-/id=1895042/did=10950492/ nid=1895042/10lixkd/index.html. 34

“Ist der Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, wie er offiziell heißt, schlimmer als der Hauptamtliche? Der Hauptamtliche ist der Trottel, der keinen anständigen Beruf gefunden hat, während der im Verborgenen Operierende der Betrüger ist, weil er hinter dem Rücken der Opfer plaudert” (33). 35

“Ehrbar und anständig bleiben und die Konsequenzen abwarten oder Zähne zusammenbeißen und mitmachen?” (110). 36

“Es fiel mir gar nicht schwer, [meinem Führungsoffizier] wie einen Kumpel Anekdoten meines Arbeitsalltags zu erzählen” (135). 37

“Der Spitzel, von dem niemand weiß, dass er einer ist, gibt willkürliche Informationen an die Stasi weiter. Er kann die Wahrheit berichten, die Tatsachen verdrehen, Geschichten erfinden. Ganz nach Sympathie für die nachgefragten Personen. Die Verratenen können sich nicht wehren, nichts richtigstellen, sich nicht verteidigen” (144–5).

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38

“Schließlich war es im Grunde egal, was ich da hinschrieb. Micha brauchte einen ausgefüllten Bogen Papier für seinen Vorgesetzten” (146–7). 39

“Würde ich wohl heute noch in miefigen Wohnungen herumsitzen und mir Geschichten ausdenken” (148; my emphasis). 40

“Der Bericht über Katrin geriet nicht nur wohlwollend und es machte mir nichts aus” (152). 41

“Finster entschlossen, die Konkurrenz aus dem Weg zu schaffen, schmückte ich meinen Bericht fantasievoll mit erfundenen Zusätzen aus, die ihr unterstellten, sich regelmäßig mit Gästen aus Westberlin zu verabreden” (218). 42

“Protokolle im Schnüffelland; Jana Döhring: Ex-DDR-Bürgerin.” SWR1. February 14, 2013, accessed October 20, 2015, http://www.swr.de/swr1/bw/programm/leute/doehring-jana-ex-ddr-buergerin/-/id=1895042/did=10950492/ nid=1895042/10lixkd/index.html. 43

“Protokolle im Schnüffelland; Jana Döhring: Ex-DDR-Bürgerin.” SWR1. February 14, 2013, accessed October 20, 2015, http://www.swr.de/swr1/bw/programm/leute/doehring-jana-ex-ddr-buergerin/-/id=1895042/did=10950492/ nid=1895042/10lixkd/index.html. 44

“die Hoffnung, [als IM] übersehen zu werden, einfach alles vergessen zu können” (19). 45

Paul John Eakin points out that there are elements of fiction in any narrative dealing with the self. See Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories. 46

Lewis, “Reading and Writing,” 378.

47

“Diese Zeit mit ihren Abgründen und Fehlentscheidungen sollte nicht mehr zu mir gehören. Ich wollte jetzt nur nach vorne sehen und meinen Weg gehen, ohne auf Bruchstücke von Erinnerungen zu treten, über die ich stolpern könnte” (16). 48

“[M]eine Vergangenheit ging nicht immer freundlich mit mir um. Sie konnte sehr ernst und kritisch sein. [. . .] Jetzt sind wir wieder Freunde” (7). 49

Lewis, “Reading and Writing,” 381.

50

“Das Ganze ist jetzt allerdings schon über zwanzig Jahre her” (227).

51

“‘Immer auf der richtigen Seite stehen’: Psychologin Ursula Plot über die Verhaltensmuster von Stasi-Zuträgern,” Der Spiegel 33 (1995): 64. 52

“[Es] ist ungeheuer schmerzhaft [. . .] Das ist meine Schuld und die werde ich auch nicht mehr los” (Becker, “‘Stasi-Ratten’”). 53

“Verbrechen verjähren dem Gesetz nach, doch eine persönliche Schuld bleibt ein Leben lang bestehen. Mit meiner Schuld lerne ich jetzt umzugehen. Das ist der Gewinn, den Gerrys Karten bringen. Das Gefühl der neuen Ehrlichkeit wirkt befreiend. [. . .] Allerdings bin ich auch der Meinung, dass ich meine Strafe jetzt ‘abgelesen’ habe” (157).

Bibliography Becker, Claudia. “‘Stasi-Ratten’ waren an ihm dran, eine war ich.” Die Welt, June 17, 2013.

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Döhring, Jana. Stasiratte. Cologne: Hartriegel, 2012. Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Fuchs, Jürgen. Magdalena: MfS, Memfisblues, Stasi, Die Firma, VEB Horch & Gauck—ein Roman. Berlin: Rowohlt, 1999. Funder, Anna. Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall. London: Granta Books, 2003. Garton Ash, Timothy. The File: A Personal History. New York: Random House, 1997. Huberth, Franz. Aufklärung zwischen den Zeilen: Stasi als Thema in der Literatur. Köln: Böhlau, 2003. “‘Immer auf der richtigen Seite stehen’: Psychologin Ursula Plot über die Verhaltensmuster von Stasi-Zuträgern.” Der Spiegel 33 (1995): 62–64. Karau, Gisela. Stasiprotokolle: Gespräche mit ehemaligen Mitarbeitern des Ministeriums für Staatssicherheit. Frankfurt am Main: dipa, 1996. Kunert, Günter. Erwachsenenspiele: Erinnerungen. Munich: Hanser, 1997. Kunze, Reiner. Deckname Lyrik. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1990. Lewis, Alison. “Reading and Writing the Stasi File: On the Uses and Abuses of the File as (Auto)Biography.” German Life & Letters 56, no. 4 (2003): 377–97. Loest, Erich. Die Stasi war mein Eckermann oder mein Leben mit der Wanze. Göttingen: Steidl, 1991. Vinke, Hermann, ed. Akteneinsicht Christa Wolf: Zerrspiegel und Dialog. Hamburg: Luchterhand, 1993. von Donnersmarck, Florian Henckel. Das Leben der anderen. 2006. Wilkening, Christine. Staat im Staate. Berlin: Aufbau, 1990. Zipser, Richard A. Von Oberlin nach Ostberlin: Als Amerikaner unterwegs in der DDR-Literaturszene. Berlin: Christoph Links, 2013.

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Part III Performing Files and Surveillance

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6: Before “It Gets All Wiped Out”: Document-Affect and History-Effect in the Hungarian Performance Apaches on the Danube Aniko Szucs

A

on the small stage of a studio theater in Budapest. She is telling a tale of an Indian tribe, seemingly of distant America, from the world of Karl May’s Winnetou, about the friendship of the tribe’s Chief Gray Eagle and its medicine man, Black Moon, who together led the Apaches. The audience soon learns, however, that this tale is not about some imaginary tribe in May’s books but about a real group of “Hungarian Indians,” young men and women who spent their free time “playing Indians” in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They sewed authentic Native American clothes, used Indian tools, practiced archaic rituals, and, most importantly, strived to establish a tribal sense of belonging, unconditional trust, and communion, under the surveillance of the totalitarian communist regime. The play Apaches on the Danube is based on dramaturg Krisztina Kovács’s research at the Historical Archive of the Hungarian State Security, which guards the files of the former state security and secret police. There, while researching Hungarian dissident theater performances for her doctoral thesis, Kovács came across former secret informants’ reports about the so-called Indian players as well as transcripts of interrogations. The files depict how the Hungarian secret police collected information about the gatherings, and how they infiltrated this group to uncover the “conspiracy involving the youth to weaken the state and social order of the Hungarian People’s Republic.”1 When the Radnóti Theater in Budapest commissioned film director Ferenc Török to stage his first theatrical piece, Kovács recommended this charged topic and, in collaboration with Hungarian playwright Géza Bereményi, wrote the play Apaches on the Danube. The production opened in October 2009, and soon after, Török also shot a televised drama of the piece (using the same title) which won the Best Television Drama Award at the Hungarian National Film Festival in May 2010. GRANDMOTHER IS PROJECTING A FILMSTRIP FOR HER GRANDCHILD

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The production’s creators had no desire to single out and expose one particular former informant, so they decided not to focus on the story of a real person or a real group of people whose acts, collaborative or dissident, were preserved in the records of the Historical Archives. What they aspired to do instead was to create a fictitious but historically authentic narrative that would provide for the audience an affective experience about life under the surveillance of the secret police in communist Hungary. Apaches on the Danube engages with the debate about the “informant question”2 in contemporary Hungary by suggesting that it is impossible to accurately reconstruct historical events based solely on the fragmented and often unreliable documents of the state security archive. The authors of the play depict the oscillation between historical accuracy and imaginative storytelling in two different aspects of the performance: first, in its affective evocation of the files, and second, in the collision of the different perspectives of the characters (who lived through the communist period) and of their children and grandchildren, who are forced to confront this legacy today. Even though the state security files are never quoted word for word in the script, the repressive language and the distinctive terminology of the documents still determine the style of the dialogue in the scenes that take place in the 1960s. The files are present through what I will term the “document-affect”—the vivid and visceral evocation of the historical records to authenticate the fictitious characters and historical events. Document-affect creates the impression that what the audience observes onstage is historically accurate, that the events could have occurred or perhaps did occur in reality. It creates an affective experience through which the audience feels what everyday life interactions and relationships must have been like in a world in which individuals and groups were surrounded, pressured, or persecuted by secret informants and state security officers. Roger Bechtel describes this visceral experience as a “living relationship with history” (26) and emphasizes the importance of the audience identifying with and owning this historically authentic experience. He has coined the term “history effect” (26) to analyze the process in which the audience personalizes and even internalizes the historical past. Apaches on the Danube creates this effect, I will argue, by looking at the historical moments of the 1960s from the perspective of the present and by highlighting how different the stakes of the informant question are for those generations who lived through communism and for those who confront its legacy today. Document-affect and history-effect together prompt the audience to negotiate between historicity and fiction and to empathetically engage with the individual life choices mapped out in the performance. This ongoing negotiation makes categorical moral judgments about past decisions and actions impossible, and emphasizes that historical “truth is contextual, multiple and subject to manipulation.”3

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The Play Apaches on the Danube starts in 2009. A family gathers in the living room of an apartment somewhere in Budapest to celebrate the grandmother’s birthday. The grandmother, her son, and her grandson’s girlfriend are impatiently waiting for the grandson, Dániel Horváth (hereafter Horváth Jr.), to arrive. Horváth Jr.,4 an aspiring movie director, has just met with the Committee of the Hungarian Film Funding Board to obtain funding for his project. He wants to direct a feature film based on his grandfather’s memoir of his engagement with the Hungarian Indians in the 1960s. The grandfather, Sándor Horváth (hereafter Horváth Sr.), was a member of a tribe; he was the medicine man of the Apaches on the Danube. The committee responds positively to his proposal, except for the chair, Imre Szoboszlai Jr., who accuses Horváth Jr. of distorting the history of the Indians: “This whole thing is one big lie, a conspiracy of silence . . . What is missing from this . . . script is that playing Indian could kill you or ruin you. Of course now it is easy to tell these lies to the future generations.”5 Szoboszlai too has firsthand knowledge of the Apache tribe, as his father was the chief until “playing Indians got him murdered.”6 How exactly he died is not revealed in the beginning of the play. Instead, the scenes that follow go back to the 1960s and invoke the everyday experience of the generation of Szoboszlai’s father and Horváth Jr.’s grandfather, both as “Indians” and as young men living under the repression of the communist state. Imre Horváth, or Black Moon, and István Szoboszlai, or Gray Eagle, were close friends and the leaders of the Apache on the Danube tribe in the late 1950s and early 1960s. After a suspicious encounter with a real Native American man—a Westerner in the eyes of the communist regime—the secret police arrested the two young men. The violent interrogations that followed resulted in the recruitment of Horváth Sr. into the secret informants’ network. From this moment on, the young man informed on his Indian friends for two years, until Szoboszlai was arrested again (partially because of the information Horváth Sr. had provided to his case officer) and he mysteriously died during his interrogation. After this tragic event, Horváth Sr. confessed his collaboration to his wife, and together the two decided to abandon the Indians. The chief’s death meant the end of the Apaches on the Danube; the tribe, just as the secret police had wished, disintegrated for good. Szoboszlai Jr. has learned what really happened to his deceased father from the confidential documents he obtained in 2009 at the Hungarian Historic Archives of State Security. After the Film Funding Board’s meeting, he shares the files with Horváth Jr., suggesting that the history these folders reveal should also be part of the film. Horváth Jr. goes to his grandmother’s house, but he is in no mood for celebration.Instead, he confronts his grandmother about why she hid the truth from him and

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Fig. 6.1. The Hungarian Indians in front of their tepees, 1963. Gábor Karalyos, Kata Wéber, Virág Marjai, Zoltán Schneider, Bálint Adorjáni, and Viktor Klem in Apacsok (Apaches on the Danube, 2009). Photo by Zsuzsa Koncz. Courtesy of Radnóti Színház.

the rest of the family for so many years. Despite the shock of the family members, the grandmother still refuses to talk about the past. She urges her grandson “[to] live with it. Because you can live with this without ever talking about it.”7 But now that the secret is out, Horváth Jr. cannot be silent about it anymore. “We have to talk about the truth. And if you won’t, then I will talk about it,” he says, and exits, leaving his stunned and devastated family members behind.8 The grandmother desperately repeats to herself: “I couldn’t remember. I can’t remember now either. No matter how hard they want to remind me. I don’t remember. Somehow my mind has wiped it all out. Just believe me this one thing. I don’t remember anything anymore.”9 Apaches on the Danube has an unusual temporal structure: after the play’s opening in the present day of the first production (2009), it takes a step back in time with every scene, from 2009 to 1986 to 1963 and then to 1961, only to return later, similarly step by step, to the present in the second half of the play.10 Each scene comes to an abrupt stop in its middle, almost midsentence, leaving something open and unexplained, only to complete the unfinished thoughts and respond to the unanswered questions later in the second part of the scene and reveal to the audience what motivated the characters’ open-ended utterances and actions in the first part. The center of the play is 1961, which is the defining moment in the two young men’s lives. This is when their long-awaited meeting with a real Indian takes place, which then results in their arrest and Horváth Sr.’s fateful recruitment by the secret police. Although the authentic

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encounter between the Native American and the Hungarian Indians was supposed to be a transformative experience, a rite of passage in which the two young men were to become “real” Indians, in reality a different transformation takes place: with the recruitment of Horváth Sr., “playing Indians” will never be the same again, either for the medicine man or for his friends. From now on, Horváth Sr. has to spend every day of his life in schizophrenic duplicity, being and acting as an Indian and an informant at the same time, while the rest of the group is more persistently and violently harassed and persecuted by the secret police, resulting in the killing of the chief. The medicine man, whose role should have been to protect and heal his people, brings death and destruction to the tribe.

Secret Police Documents: Uncovering the Past Kovács studied three cases at the Historical Archives of Hungarian State Security in preparation for this project. The eight thick files of the socalled Indians’ case include documents about the persecution of ethnographer-writer Sándor Borvendég Deszkáss, whose Indian name was White Deer. Borvendég Deszkáss was under surveillance, then arrested and interrogated by the secret police because of his former Boy Scout and Indian activities.11 In 1963, he was tried and convicted for “the preparation of a conspiracy to ruin the state order.”12 Borvendég Deszkáss’s file includes interrogation transcripts, confessions, and secret informant reports written by his cellmate in prison. Kovács also used documents from two informants’ cases for her work on Apaches: the file of József Dávid, alias “Kovács Péter,” a journalist who was blackmailed into collaboration in 1957 because of his participation in the oppressed Hungarian Revolution of 1956; and the reports of László Borsányi, an ethnographer who informed for the secret police under the code name “Fung Sándor” between 1964 and 1975. This latter case is especially interesting for Apaches on the Danube since Borsányi too was an active participant in the Indian movement and majored in ethnography at the Eötvös Lóránd University of Budapest with a focus on North American Indians. Neither of these informants was “outed” in a scandalous way; while their immediate family members and colleagues have learned about their state security pasts, they were not well-known public figures to be discussed by the national media.13 The files of “Fung György” shed light on different areas of the private and public life of communist Hungary in the 1960s and 1970s: Regarding the private sphere, they reveal minute, seemingly insignificant details of everyday activities (such as information about drinking parties, study groups, family affairs) and of the Indians’ lives specifically (such as planning of outings and informal meetings). Regarding the liminal world of the secret police, where the violent yet invisible repression of the state

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erases the boundaries between the private and the public, the documents underline the lowly position informants had in the hierarchy of state security. Furthermore, they also show how this hierarchical and most often abusive relationship between an informant and the officer of the state apparatus sometimes transformed into a more complex and codependent collaboration, in which the collaborator could also request (and often receive) privileges and rights unavailable to ordinary citizens. The confidential files of the “Indians” and “Fung Sándor” offered a wide range of themes for the playwrights, from the moral deterioration of one young man to the violent persecution and destruction of another, and to the disintegration of a group of friends in an atmosphere of fear, suspicion, and betrayal. Indeed, based on the similarities between the files and the plot of Apaches on the Danube, one could certainly assume that the scenes that take place in the 1960s are documentary reconstructions of the events depicted in Borvendég Deszkáss’s, Kovács’s, and Borsányi’s files. The basic context of the secret police records and the fictitious play is the same: there is a circle of young friends playing Indians in Hungary. They all live for this secret community; they have Indian names and practice Indian rituals. What we see on the stage is strikingly similar to what the state security reports have revealed about the activities of the groups to which Borvendég Deszkáss and Borsányi belonged, from the enactment of Indian rituals to the correspondence with a “real” Native American individual to the weekend outings by the Danube “to try what a teepee (the Indian tent) feels like in the winter.”14 The parallels between the young men Borvendég Deszkáss and Borsányi and their fictional alter egos, Szoboszlai Sr. and Horváth Sr., are also evident: they all had similar childhoods, having grown up reading Karl May and playing Indians, and later, as adults, they all chose to research the Native American peoples. They even initiated contact with real Indian tribes—with the enemy of the communist state, the citizens of the “imperialist” United States of America. They also share similar worldviews: although their convictions are not in sync with the communist ideology, they still try to establish a life as academics within (and not in opposition to) the regime. However, the state cannot tolerate any form of alternative lifestyle; the secret police in the play persecutes the fictional characters of Szoboszlai Sr. and Horváth Sr., just as in real life the secret police persecuted Borvendég Deszkáss and Borsányi. Just as in the play, the secret police’s interrogation of potential coconspirators usually had one of two outcomes in the early 1950s: imprisonment or enlisting of those who were considered “hostile elements.” Both Borvendég Deszkáss and the fictional Szoboszlai Sr. are victims: while Borvendég Deszkáss was interrogated and then imprisoned, Szoboszlai Sr., as the tension of the drama heightens, is murdered by the secret police.15 At the same time, the state security officers offer the two other Indians (the ethnographer Borsányi and the play’s protagonist,

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Fig. 6.2. Horváth and Szoboszlay meet a real Native American, 1961. Bálint Adorjáni, Zoltán Schneider and Sándor Csányi in Apacsok (Apaches on the Danube, 2009). Photo by Zsuzsa Koncz. Courtesy of Radnóti Színház.

Horváth Sr.) a way out at the end of the violent interrogations: if they agree to collaborate with the secret police in the future, they can return to their old lives. As a result of the secret police’s threats and blackmail, at the end they leave as enlisted informants. From this moment on, they too are part of the invisible network of spying perpetrators. The informant in the files and the informant in the play are similar to the extent that they are both well-intentioned, honest men who genuinely care about their friends and families. Their lives are deeply shaken by their collaboration, which they are coerced into and from which they feel they cannot escape. Still, the playwrights of Apaches on the Danube put a greater emphasis on the informants’ struggles and sufferings than what the informants’ files reveal today. Kovács and Bereményi, for example, chose to insert a scene that there was no trace of in the archive: the interrogations with the officers’ violent threats and deceitful manipulations that eventually resulted in the Horváth’s giving in and agreeing to collaborate.16 With such obvious departures from the files, which are silent on the recruitment, the playwrights chose to construct their own historical narrative, one that prompts empathy and makes moral judgment more difficult for the audience. Kovács and Bereményi’s unorthodox and creative use of the archival documents is rather unusual in the contemporary theater of the former Soviet bloc that focuses on the repressive operations of state security. The

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authors decided to step away from the documents and distance themselves from the real-life characters therein. Instead of creating a verbatim or documentary piece,17 they wrote a fictitious plot, using motifs and personas expressed in a language that evokes the jargon of the archival documents. Even though almost every scene from the 1960s in Apaches on the Danube references the style and the content of the files, the playwrights chose not to speak through the documents (as creators of documentary theater would do) or to allow the documents to speak for themselves (as verbatim pieces would do). In doing so, they suggested that the files, evoking but often misrepresenting past events, should not narrate the history of the Hungarian State Security by themselves, since black-and-white pages can only outline black-and-white scenarios. The literal presentation of the informants’ and officers’ words with no contextualization or explanation would inevitably focus the attention on the question of individual responsibility. The verbatim citations of the reports, of the enduring traces of betrayal and duplicity, would prompt the play’s audience to make moral judgments on the authors of the files, entangled in the communist state security apparatus18 instead of encouraging the audience to take into account the historical context in which individuals became both perpetrators and victims in such an unpredictable and violent manner. For this reason, Kovács and Bereményi focused on playfully reimagining the history of the Hungarian Indians “beside” what the files depict; they emphasize incidents that could have preceded and accompanied the events described in the files and what it may have felt like to be part of the “Indian” community and persecuted by the secret police. This “beside,” as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick points out, is the “location of the affect”—a performative force, I shall argue, which allows the audience to negotiate and accept the simultaneous historicity and fictitiousness of Apaches on the Danube.

From Past to Present: The Document-Affect The “horizontal method”19 with which Kosofsky Sedgwick approaches performance affect emphasizes that “a number of elements may lie alongside one another” (8). Instead of searching for that which is “beneath and behind” and that which leads to a “drama of exposure,” Kosofsky Sedgwick suggests that examining what is “beside” gives greater freedom and opens new horizons both to the author and the researcher. By applying this methodological proposition and shifting the focus from the “beneath and behind” to the “beside,” the playwrights of Apaches on the Danube refuse to fixate on the “hidden truth” that archival documents may conceal.20 They are not trying to reconstruct (and canonize) one historically accurate and truthful narrative based on the files. Instead, their creative approach powerfully highlights that there are pieces of information left out of the documents, significant and perhaps not so significant details,

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which, in the absence of any historical record, we may never be able to fully reconstruct. Most importantly, we will never be able to accurately reconstruct what it felt like living under the surveillance of a repressive political regime solely based on the files—what affective and emotional states may have led someone to agree to collaboration, and the inner struggles informants may have had or the excuses they may have made up for themselves regarding their entanglement with the secret police. Apaches on the Danube attempts to shed light on the particular sentiments of fear, shame, and guilt, and the experience of loss and betrayal the files most often fail to register. Within the three-dimensional theatrical world of the performance, the black-and-white state security documents lose the central authoritative position they generally assume both in contemporary documentary theater and in public debate. Apaches on the Danube does not cite the state security reports directly; still, the archival documents powerfully determine its atmosphere and performative register. The files transcend each scene about the state security through an affective potency which I have called the “documentaffect.” The document-affect, which builds on Brian Massumi’s concept of “affective facts” and Roger Bechtel’s notion of “history-effect,” makes a connection between the performance, the archive, and historiography by affectively referencing the files that inspired Apaches on the Danube. Massumi’s investigation of “affective facts” is crucial for this analysis, as it seeks to explain why people are willing to attribute an unquestionable truth-value to certain political claims and unconfirmed pieces of information. He calls such manipulative (and often prognostic) claims “future actual facts” or “affective facts” and argues that politicians present them so convincingly that people feel them “to be real” with “the certainty of a gut feeling” (53).21 “Affective facts” feel real as they elicit certain sentiments such as fear, shame, or excitement in the spectators. It is the realness of these feelings that people experience intensely and then transfer back to, or project onto, those original facts that triggered the emotions in the first place. In other words, the stronger the emotion a future fact prompts in the audience, the more real that fact will feel. The documents used in the writing process of Apaches on the Danube generate affect in a similar way, even though the files reference real events.22 They too possess what Carol Martin has called “an elusive truth claim.”23 The incidents, whether real or invented, that directly evoke the state security (and thereby the archive) have the most powerful effect on the audience. Whether it is interrogation, humiliation, or the moment of recruitment, the audience feels the same fear and shame that the characters experience. The best example of how document-affect shapes the audience’s perception is Horváth’s recruitment scene, in which the state security officer violently interrogates, threatens, and manipulates the young man:

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Fig. 6.3. Interrogation, 1961. Sándor Csányi and Gábor Kocsó in Apacsok (Apaches on the Danube, 2009). Photo by Zsuzsa Koncz. Courtesy of Radnóti Színház. CASE OFFICER HORVÁTH CASE OFFICER HORVÁTH ... HORVÁTH CASE OFFICER HORVÁTH CASE OFFICER HORVÁTH CASE OFFICER HORVÁTH ... CASE OFFICER

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Still denying it? No. I don’t. I modify my confession, Smoky Cauldron ... John Caldron . . . John Caldron indeed visited Hungary. But only to share some ethnographic knowledge. So what will happen now? (sitting down opposite HORVÁTH) That’s up to you, Imre. I find it quite hard to believe that Szoboszlai made that confession [against me]. You haven’t got a little boy, he has. This is why it is so hard for me to believe that he said these things. He is worried about his son. But what will that child say when he learns the things his father told to you? Look, Imre, things are still intense here. You are nervous, too, and my colleagues also quickly get angry. I know what you want. You wish life were a beautiful game where friendship, romance and love prevail; you don’t want any upheavals. For now that’s just a dream, but just between the two of us, you and me, we should

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do everything we can to make sure things go in the right direction. Tell me, do you want this Indian game to carry on? Yes. I know that’s what you want. And isn’t it wonderful to be in love? What do you mean? When is your wedding again? A week from Sunday. And this only crosses your mind just now? No.

They certainly won’t let you out of here before then.24

This scene is entirely fictitious. Still, the playwrights accurately adapt the manipulative interrogative style of the secret police, from the coerced confession (“Still denying it?”—they ask multiple times) to the passive-aggressive implication that the accused has a choice in this situation (“[What happens now] is up to you”), and to the open threat (“They certainly won’t let you out [for the wedding]”).25 The case officer’s intimidating questions reference the files so powerfully and evocatively that it becomes hard to watch this scene as mere fiction. The violent scene prompts the fear and anxiety in the audience that informants must have felt at the moment of their recruitment. The “phenomenological experience” of the audience members, through which they “validate or contest the truth-value of the [in this case referenced] documents,”26 prompts them to presume that these events did in reality take place.27 Moreover, the fictive dialogues, whose language and style convincingly evoke the state security documents, like Massumi’s “affective facts” elicit a powerful emotional response from the audience. The realness of these feelings, the sense of uncanniness and shame represented in and mediated through the performance, reaffirms this presumed connection with the archive and impels the audience to attribute a sense of documentarian truth to the plot. It is because of this affective, performative force that certain scenes may feel as if they were an edited and theatricalized compilation of the original files. Apaches on the Danube is similar to Massumi’s object of study to the extent that they both operate with the spectators’ assumption of factuality and truthfulness. While politicians take advantage of their audiences (the voters) when they create certainty to win their trust in order to impose certain political decisions on them, in the case of Apaches, the desire for authenticity derives from the audience too. Here, the creative team, the members of the audience, as well as the general zeitgeist in Hungary (and in the Western world) together authenticate the historical narrative and allow the audience to claim the fictitious story as their own personal and

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collective past. Roger Bechtel’s theory of “history-effect” explains how the affective experience and reference to a historical record in a performance prompt the audience to establish a deep and personal connection with the fictitious narrative.

Confronting the Legacy of the Grandfathers and Fathers: The Present In his book American Theater and the Historical Imagination, Bechtel investigates how historical plays can help an audience take possession of and make a personal connection to their historical past.28 He calls this potentiality of the performance the “history-effect”29 and defines it as “a provocation of the spectators’ historical imagination which compels them to discover themselves as situated in a living relationship with history” (26). The history-effect therefore prompts the audience to establish an imaginary but simultaneously identificatory relationship “to the real conditions of the past” (21).30 It “appeals not only to our cognitive understanding but to our kinesthetic or aesthetic apprehension,” offering spectators “a kind of historical experience in its own right” (27). The historical experience Bechtel describes here is an affective experience, in which the spectator is prompted to feel that what he or she is watching “really happened” in the past (Bechtel’s emphasis, 15). Apaches on the Danube establishes this “living relationship with history” by creating a referential connection to the historical record. Document-affect creates a “seductive allure” (15) of witnessing history and situates the fictitious plot of Apaches within the historical imagination. The evocation of the state security files promises an authentic experience of history, while the performance nonetheless oscillates between historical authenticity and creative fiction. This performative tension compels the audience to negotiate how they “relate to historic events, how the past becomes (or doesn’t become) part of [their] present lived experience” (21). History in Apaches, just as in the theater pieces Bechtel investigates, does not merely make “reference to the historical record”; rather, it “marshals historical reference to interrogate history” (22) and the audience’s relation to it. Apaches on the Danube interrogates its audience’s relation to history by developing a narrative framework around the historic events of the 1960s that reflects on them from the present with fictional characters who are forced to confront and negotiate the secrets and sins of the past. By juxtaposing three different generations of the same family (the grandmother, the middle-aged father, and the grandchild), the playwrights are able to demonstrate the different ways in which each generation addresses the secret that has burdened their past.31 That all of their lives were—if

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Fig. 6.4. Birthday Dinner, 2009. Mari Csomós, Tibor Szervét, and Kata Wéber in Apacsok (Apaches on the Danube, 2009). Photo by Zsuzsa Koncz. Courtesy of Radnóti Színház.

unknowingly—affected by the family secret is best demonstrated by the bitter words the father utters when at the end of the play he learns about Horváth Sr.’s collaboration: “Mother, why didn’t you ever tell me? . . . Then I would have seen everything differently. Like why I screw things up. Why I always think about things I actually don’t want to think about. I have lived another life. Not this life that I have.”32 Even though the play reveals little about the father, as he is only part of the opening and closing scenes, it is still evident how deeply his life was determined—and traumatized—by the secrets of the past. In the first scene we see him as a bitter man, disconnected both from his family and from the present in which he lives. Again and again, he brings up a patent that he invented but someone stole from him. He berates his son in connection with this, insisting that “he should make a movie about corruption. Who cares about the 1960s? . . . Germans stealing an invention, stealing from his own father, oh no, he couldn’t care less. But when it comes to his grandfather making wigwams in Pomáz? It’s a whole different story.”33 Only in the second part of the scene do we begin to understand where the father’s resentment comes from; it becomes clear that he could never live up to the heroic image his mother had created of his father. “No one knew a man like him,”34 says the grandmother as she recalls the memory of Horváth Sr., adding that “he was a good, honest

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man. He worked hard all his life and I will not allow anyone to think of him otherwise.”35 Even though the father tries to contradict her, reminding her that Horváth Sr. abandoned them, went to America, and died in a Brooklyn homeless shelter as an alcoholic, the grandmother still refuses to acknowledge the truth: “He went to the Indians to die amongst them.”36 The grandmother had buried the truth a long time ago. The first thing she says about herself at the beginning of the play is that what she can do best is to keep a secret. “This will all be buried deep inside me,” she says, when her granddaughter-in-law Kata shares with her in private that she is pregnant.37 It is the very same answer she gave to her husband in 1963 in a situation when there was a lot more at stake, when Horváth Sr. admitted to her that he was collaborating with the secret police: “This will all be buried inside me. I won’t even talk to you about it. And from now on, don’t even say a word of this to me. I won’t even take any notice. I won’t hear a word of it. I have forgotten. From now on, I know nothing. I’m talking to myself, not to you. I have forgotten. It won’t even spring to mind. For as long as I live. If anyone were to ask, I wouldn’t even understand. It’s been shut out. From now on, my mind will wipe it all out. I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything anymore.”38 Silence and forgetting has indeed determined the rest of her life. Her husband’s confession traumatized her to such an extreme extent that forty years later she is still struggling with recollecting and sharing what happened in the past. As she repeatedly says, she indeed “wiped it all out.”39 Thanks to the peculiar temporal structure of Apaches on the Danube, the audience both learns about the grandfather’s collaboration and witnesses how the grandmother repressed this memory before the grandson does so in the last scene of the play. Her reluctance to remember can best be described by social scientist Susanne Buckley-Zistel’s notion of “chosen amnesia.” Buckley-Zistel introduces this term for her analysis of postgenocide Rwanda (Between Pragmatism, 2006) and describes it as “a coping mechanism to avoid antagonisms and to be able to live peacefully.”40 For those who, perhaps unconsciously, “choose” amnesia, “there is a benefit of not remembering”; it “serves a particular function deriving from the particular needs of the present.” Even though Buckley-Zistel coins this term “to refer to the social, collective inability to remember,” the play Apaches on the Danube demonstrates how individuals within a community can also experience this kind of amnesiac state. The advantage the audience has over the grandson is that viewers get to see the moment when the grandmother had to make the decision to remain silent. We get to see the pregnant and scared woman from forty years earlier, immediately after the secret police had killed one of her best friends. The decision she had to make then was whether to respond to her husband’s betrayal with another betrayal and disclose his secret to all their friends, or to try to move on together and live with this secret for the rest

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of their lives. It is an impossible dilemma, and the only way she could resolve this cognitive dissonance was to choose amnesia; as she herself says, “It’s been wiped out.” The grandmother’s fragmented and contradictory sentences make it impossible for the audience to decide whether she remembers the conversation between herself and her husband on the night of Szoboszlai’s death;41 she has been repressing the truth for such a long time that by now she is truly questioning her own shattered recollection of the past. However, as Buckley-Zistel points out, “chosen amnesia” is selective, and the grandmother, like other traumatized individuals, did not forget everything. She held onto the memories of the Indian past of her youth, looking back at it as some kind of an innocent originary experience—the last moment before paradise was lost forever. In her amnesiac state of mind, though, the cause of her family’s unhappiness was not that her husband agreed to collaborate with the secret police and later could not live with his guilt. Instead, she feels that her husband sacrificed his life for the Indians and for his family: “Where would you all be had he done things differently? . . . Had he made different decisions? You would not be an engineer. And you would not be a movie director. . . . Thank him. Thank him that we are all alive and that the family is together.”42 The construction of these false memories, which she has truly come to believe, is what keeps the grandmother going; she idolizes the deceased grandfather and celebrates Horváth Jr. for wanting to make a film out of the grandfather’s memoirs. At the same time, she seemingly has a hard time accepting (maybe even loving) her own son.43 His failed and frustrated life, and his unhappiness, perhaps subconsciously remind her of what the grandfather may have really been likebefore he abandoned the family. Furthermore, the father’s dismissive attitude toward the Indians belittles past experience, the memory the grandmother tries so hard to hold onto; so it is inevitable that in the grandmother’s eyes, it will be Horváth Jr. who has to carry on the legacy of the family legend. She alludes to this when she tells her grandson: “Last night I dreamt you were an Indian, and you were the spitting image of your grandpa. . . . And you were a magician, the tribe’s medicine man, just like him. You were in Paris, standing on a glamorous stage in a feather headdress, and Yves Montand was there with you, in top hat and tails. Yves Montand handed an award to you for your film, first prize it was, and everybody clapped. In my dream I watched all this on TV together with the whole world.”44 The playwrights make it clear in multiple ways that there is a correspondence between grandfather and grandson. Already the opening scene makes this parallel evident: in the prelude (as well as in the epilogue) of the play, two Hungarian Indians, projected on the walls upstage, recount the tribe’s rituals. The Indians, the stage directions describe, are “the two faces of Horváth”:45 we see grandfather and grandson next to one another.

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In the Radnóti Theater’s production, one of the faces is a black-and-white shot of Horváth Sr. and the other one is an animated image of an Indian whose face is strikingly similar to his. This juxtaposition of the images of the two men speaking in sync establishes the analogy: grandfather and grandson together become the narrators of Apaches. Through this identification, which in the Radnóti Theater production becomes complete by casting the same actor in the roles of both Horváths,46 the young movie director becomes an equally important protagonist of the play. His character shifts the attention to a generation of young people in 2009, mostly in their thirties, who, like their parents and grandparents, are still haunted by the ghosts and guilt of the past. Although they spent their childhood in the so-called soft goulash-communism of the late 1970s and 1980s and only heard about the repressive violence of early totalitarianism after the collapse of communism, the family secrets and their elders’ chosen amnesia continue to determine their lives as well.47 For the grandmother, erasing the past is the only way to live with the grandfather’s sin, to pretend for a whole lifetime that it never happened. Because the grandmother never acknowledges her husband’s collaboration with the secret police, she never has to forgive him. This lack of forgiveness may very well have ruined their family life, as the plot suggests that the grandfather could never forgive himself either. It was most likely for this reason that he became an alcoholic and abandoned his family. And because the two of them chose not to talk about this ever again, his wife could not forgive him either. By making up an excuse for him, she has managed to find a way to live with the fact that her husband left the family behind. But the fact that he betrayed the only thing that was sacred to their community, playing Indians, has had to be silenced and forgotten for good. It is the task of the new generation, who unwillingly became part of their fathers’ and grandfathers’ life stories, to come to terms with the secrets of the past and learn how to forgive and only then to forget. “[D]idn’t know it was a family thing for you too,”48 says the murdered chief’s son. “You’re not responsible for what your grandfather did. [For] your children maybe, but certainly not your grandfather,” he continues. “But you are responsible for what kind of film you make out of this story.”49 In this metatheatrical moment, it becomes clear that the question of responsibility for the storytelling extends beyond the grandson to the whole generation that learns about their family legacies today. The playwrights here reflect on their own responsibilities as artists and indicate the audience’s role, too, in the telling and retelling of stories and histories of the past.

Conclusion The complex ways in which history and fiction are intertwined in Apaches on the Danube underline the fact that there is not one exclusive

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Fig. 6.5. The Informant reports, 1963. Tibor Szervét and Sándor Csányi in Apacsok (Apaches on the Danube, 2009). Photo by Zsuzsa Koncz. Courtesy of Radnóti Színház.

metanarrative telling the history of state security that would prompt or establish the moral judgment of the informant. Instead, the playwrights of Apaches focus on everyday life in communist Hungary in the early 1960s, demonstrating the ways in which the repressive surveillance system of state security dissolved communities and ruined individual lives through torturous interrogations and coerced recruitment. The document-affect in Apaches creates the sense of an authentic historical narrative by making historical records affectively experiential; while history-effect convincingly suggests that what the audience witnesses is not merely a fictitious story but a dark and much debated period of Hungarian history. The residual effects of this era—the demoralizing secrets of the past and the unethical and scandalous ways in which they are regularly revealed by tabloids and other newspapers—determine both the public debate about the so-called informant question and, more generally, contemporary society’s relation to the communist past. It is for this reason that the playwrights’ intention was to expose the inescapable cruelty of communist surveillance, and, even more importantly, to question through the juxtaposition of the present and the past the audience’s perspective on how Hungarian society should treat the state security network’s crimes. Document-affect creates a performative tension between historical truth and fiction, which forces spectators to constantly negotiate how they feel about the misdeeds of the past and the informant question in the present. The framing of the informant story in the present shifts the Apaches audience’s attention from the past to the contemporary public debate

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regarding former collaborators: what is at stake in the here and now is not what the forefathers did in the past, but how contemporary society chooses to tell their stories to future generations. It becomes a shared interest of the grandfather, the grandson, the creators, and the audience as well, to break with the secrecy that silences the crimes of the past and also to keep the memory of the Indians alive. Apaches on the Danube commemorates the groups of young men and women who devoted their lives to creating a space of freedom and autonomy in communist Hungary. Despite their efforts and commitment, the repressive regime still managed to break down these communities in the 1950s and 1960s, ruining many of their members’ lives. As the now identical animations of grandfather and grandson conclude together in the epilogue: “If there’s no Indians, where do you go? You go to work, you sit on a chair, look at the wall, then go home. Or to a bar. Alone or not alone. But you sit somewhere and stare at the wall. Or you go for a daytrip on the bus. Then you go home and go to bed. If there’s no Indians, what is there instead? Nothing” (70).50

Notes 1

Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára [hereafter ÁBTL, Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security], 3.1. 27-5557/63, Kutatói dosszié: Borvendég/Deszkáss Sándor és társai” [Investigation Folder: Sándor Borvendég/Deszkáss and Company], record no. 3.1.9. V-147492/1, 1962, 21. 2

Hungarian politicians, lawmakers, historians, and columnists started to reference all the issues related to the former state security informants as the “informant question” soon after the collapse of communism. The queries that the informant question today still includes are: What should happen to the files of the former state security network? Who should have access to them? Should the identities of all former informants be revealed? How should the contemporary legal system and society define and judge the informants of the past regime? 3

Martin, “Introduction,” 3.

4

Even though the play makes it clear that Horváth the Elder is called Imre, while his grandson, Horváth Junior, is Daniel, most of the time they both are referenced as Horváth. On the pages of the manuscript both characters are indicated as “Horváth,” while on the cast list, the older generation is indicated by their Indian names (Horváth the Elder as Black Moon and Szoboszlai the Elder as Gray Eagle). As I shall later argue, using the family name instead of the first name is important to establish the continuity between the respective generations. For this reason, I will also refer to both Horváths by using their family name. However, to make the distinction between the two characters easier, I will always indicate whether I am speaking of Horváth the Elder (Sr.), or Horváth the Younger (Jr.)—a differentiation the playwrights do not make in the drama. (The timeline of the performance makes it clear to the audience which Horváth is onstage in any given scene.) 5

“ . . . ez az egész egy hazugság, egy sötét elhallgatás . . . Az nincs benne ebben a . . . forgatókönyvben, hogy az indián játékban gyilkoltak, abba bele lehetett

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halni, tönkre lehetett menni, és persze most az utókornak össze-vissza lehet hazudozni” (Bereményi and Kovács, Apacsok, 11–12). 6

“Az Indiánozás megölte” (12).

7

“Együtt fogsz élni vele. Mert lehet ezzel együtt élni” (63).

8

“[A]z igazságról beszélni kell, és ha ti nem, akkor majd én fogok beszélni róla” (63). 9

“Nem emlékeztem. Most sem emlékszem. Nem is tudom. Hiába akarják eszembe juttatni. Nem emlékszem. Valahogy töröl az agyam. Ezt az egyet hidd el nekem. Én nem emlékszem. Én már nem emlékszem semmire” (64). 10

The playwrights borrowed this “funnel structure” from Tom Stoppard’s 1972 radio play Artist Descending a Staircase. 11

The scouting movement and other religious or alternative youth organizations were prohibited during Communism. Young children had to join first the “little drummers’” and later the pioneer association. 12

ÁBTL, 3.1. 27-5557/63, Kutatói dosszié: Borvendég/Deszkáss Sándor és társai,” record no. 3.1.9. V-147492/1, 1962, 21. 13

László Borsányi’s state security past was revealed in a journal of cultural anthropology, AnBlokk, distributed only in a few thousands copies, and to my knowledge József Dávid’s collaboration was never exposed to the public. 14

ÁBTL, 3.1. 27-5557/63, Kutatói dosszié: Borvendég/Deszkáss Sándor és társai,” record no. 3.1.9. V-147492/1, 1962, 21. 15

The tragic death of the chief, Gray Eagle, is crucial for the play’s dramaturgical structure, both in respect to the past and to the present. It demonstrates, though admittedly exaggerates, how severe the consequences of seemingly innocent reports were, and it also raises the stakes in the encounter of the two men’s descendants. At the same time, it is important to emphasize that according to the files accessible at the Historical Archive, none of the “Indian” interrogations and trials ended with the death of the accused/interrogated individual (Makrai, “Állambiztonság és békepipa”). 16

Once it was obvious for the Hungarian communist government that the change of the political system was unavoidable, the employees of the State Security Department at the Ministry of Interior (A Belügyminisztérium III/III-as osztálya) immediately started to shred all confidential documents. Some of the earliest files they destroyed were the so-called B files, which recorded the process of and all the background information on the informants’ recruitment, as these files revealed most openly the violent crimes of the state security officers. 17

A number of verbatim performances using only confidential documents have been produced all over Central Europe since the opening of the state security archives. The best-known example is perhaps the Polish theater company Theater of the Eighth Day, which used only excerpts of confidential documents, informants’ reports, and the Cultural Committee’s internal correspondence for their production, the Files (2007). In 2011, Romanian playwright-director Gianina Cărbunariu created the performance X mm out of Y km with the company ColectivA, which is based on ten pages from the folder of Romanian dissident writer Dorin Tudoran. Later, in 2013, Cărbunariu revisited the same topic, when she created Tipografic

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Majuscul as part of an international collaborative project, Parallel Lives, initiated by the Slovakian theater festival in Nitra, in which theater companies from Romania, Poland, Slovakia, Germany, and Hungary created productions—all based on or inspired by confidential documents from the state security archives of the former Eastern bloc. The genres of these shows varied from documentary operas and dramas to verbatim performances and to contemporary fringe productions. 18

This is the reason why journal articles that aim to uncover a public figure’s past collaboration can easily manipulate the readers into forming a negative view of the former informant (see Berkovits, 1999, and Gervai, 2006). The excerpts from the files that are included in such articles, carefully selected to demonstrate the nature of collaboration without the knowledge of the original context (of both the content and the creation of the report), can only testify to the guilt of the person in question. Such judgmental narratives will very likely exaggerate or misrepresent the individual’s involvement in the activities of the secret police. 19

I am borrowing this term from James Thompson, who developed the notion of “horizontal method” describing Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of beside as “an ethics of the position of inquiry” (Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 133). 20

Kosofsky Sedgwick’s proposition of beside as an analytical tool is relevant for the hermeneutical-phenomenological interpretation of Apaches on multiple levels. On the one hand, investigating affect, as Kosofsky Sedgwick suggests, in the beside is crucial for our understanding of how historical authenticity is constructed through the affective evocation of the files within the fictitious plot. On the other hand, investigating what the playwrights added to the narrative beside their findings in the archive also helps us delineate the creative process in which the creators reimagined a historical period using traces and excerpts of the archive as pieces of a historically authentic (though not documentarian) puzzle. 21

Massumi centers his attention on the George W. Bush administration and the speculative and dubious assertions with which it justified the Iraq war, chiefly that Iraq possessed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. 22

Massumi emphasizes that these affective facts “operate on an affective register and inhabit a nonlinear time operating recursively between the present and the future”; in other words, in this recursive temporality people experience feelings in response to events that have not and may or may not take place (Massumi, “Future Birth,” 56–57). The parallel is striking here, since in the peculiar temporal structure of Apaches, time also operates recursively between the present (which is also the future within the play’s dramaturgy) and the past (the present days in the 1960s). The reverse chronology of the play also enhances the performative force of the affect: the audience is first confronted with a sentiment, whether it is fear, shame, or grief, and only later learns what causes these negative feelings. This sense of not knowing and suspense also intensifies the emotions and makes them feel more real. The desire to know what stirs up these intense emotional responses becomes so strong that it overpowers the audience’s critical distance; the scenes that reveal what has caused the protagonists’ anxiety and embarrassment will feel undoubtedly real as they finally provide an explanation for the high level of tension palpable both onstage and in the audience. 23

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24

As I emphasized above, the playwrights made up this scene in its entirety. Even though it depicts the recruitment of the informant, Kovács and Bereményi used the real-life victim, Borvendég Deszkáss’s interrogation transcripts (and not the real-life informant’s files) as inspiration for the language and the dramatic structure of the scene. This is another example of how creatively they handled the archival files in their writing: Even though the original interrogations were not conducted with the purpose of recruitment, their style and aura fit perfectly into this scene. This excerpt from the original files demonstrates how strikingly similar the language of Borvendég Deszkáss’s interrogation and the fictive scene is: QUESTION: ANSWER: STATEMENT:

ANSWER:

25

HADNAGY HORVÁTH HADNAGY HORVÁTH ... HORVÁTH HADNAGY HORVÁTH HADNAGY HORVÁTH HADNAGY HORVÁTH ... HADNAGY

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Besides the activities you already described in your confession, have you done any literary work in other fields? I have not done any literary work in other fields. I do not accept your answer. I am showing you the copies of the illegally distributed typescript “Council-Fire,” obtained in your apartment, which was created by L.N., a Czechoslovakian citizen. At our disposal is the table of content, which shows that you published several of your works in this publication under the alias of “White Deer.” Make a confession about this. I admit that after L.N. requested, I sent him some of my old typescripts on multiple occasions, which he then published in the illegally produced “Council-Fire.” I also sent him the first three chapters of my unpublished Indiannovel . . . ] (ÁBTL, 3.1. 27-5557/63, Kutatói dosszié: Borvendég/Deszkáss Sándor és társai,” record no. 3.1.9. V-147492/1, 1962, 88). Még továbbra is tagadod? Nem. Én nem. Helyesbítem a vallomásomat, Kormos Üst ... John Caldron . . . John Caldron tényleg járt Magyarországon. De csak néprajzi ismeretterjesztés céljából. És most mi lesz? (leül Horváthtal szemben) Magától függ, Imre. Tényleg? Szoboszlai hajlandó volt ilyeneket vallani? Magának nincsen kisfia, neki van. Ezért hiszem el nehezen, hogy ilyeneket mondott. Félti a gyerekét. De hát mit fog szólni az a gyerek, ha megtudja, hogy mit mondott maguknak az apja? Nézze Imre, nálunk még nem nyugodtak le a kedélyek. Maguk is idegesek, az én kollegáim is nagyon könnyen fel tudják kapni a vizet. Én tudom, mik a maga céljai. Maga azt szeretné, ha az élet egy szép játék volna, amiben a barátság,

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a romantika, a szerelem dominál, és maga sem akar semmiféle felfordulást. Ez egyelőre csak egy álom, de nekünk kettőnknek, magának meg nekem, mindent meg kéne tennünk, hogy a későbbi fejlemények efelé tendáljanak. Mondja, akarja egyáltalán, hogy folytatódjon az indián játék? Tudom, hogy ezt akarja. HORVÁTH Igen. HADNAGY És ugye szerelmesnek lenni sem rossz? HORVÁTH Ezt hogy érti? HADNAGY Mikorra is van kitűzve a maga esküvője? HORVÁTH Vasárnaphoz egy hétre. HADNAGY És ez csak most jut az eszébe? HORVÁTH Nem. HADNAGY Innen magát biztosan nem engedik ki addig. (33–35) 26 Reinelt, “Promise of Documentary.” 10. 27

In her article “The Promise of Documentary,” Janelle Reinelt emphasizes that “the value of the document is predicated on a realist epistemology, but the experience of documentary is dependent on phenomenological engagement” (7). This means that the audience members coming into the theater mobilize their knowledge, their experience, and their expectations while they are watching the performance and they become “co-producer[s] of the [historical] reality in question” (10). Even though, as I emphasized earlier, Apaches on the Danube is not a documentary piece, the audience would have been familiar with the linguistic jargon of the state security. They would have often encountered such language directly in historical and journalistic accounts of the operation of the state security and its informants, or indirectly through the few films, theater, and literary pieces that had been created about the state security network. 28

For Bechtel, a history play is one that “draws its characters and scenarios from the historical record and so makes some claim to represent real figures and events from the past” (Bechtel, American Theater, 15). History, he argues, can be dramatized or performed in two different ways: There is “at one end of the spectrum, docudrama’s arrangement of archival text into theatrical text, and at the other, the creation of patently fictitious scenes and dialogue meant to flesh out the most meager of historical data” (ibid.). Bechtel discusses some of the most outstanding pieces of twentieth-century American theater, including Suzan LoriPark’s Venus, Wendy McLeod’s The House of Yes, the Wooster Group’s adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones, Robert Wilson’s production of Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine, and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. While history plays a key role in each of these pieces, none of them uses documents to construct or reconstruct a historical narrative. 29

Even though Bechtel does not reference Roland Barthes’s work, “historyeffect” in many ways evokes the French philosopher’s famous study of the “reality-effect.” Barthes investigates the aesthetic convention of realism to demonstrate how historical narratives construct reality through the accumulation of descriptive details and realistic observations. He argues that with the exactitude of detailed descriptions writers create a “referential illusion,” which suggests that everything that is being narrated is real. The realistic elements become “the signifiers of

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realism” (Barthes, “The Reality-Effect,” 148) through which the “reality-effect,” a new kind of verisimilitude is formed. Reality-effect and history-effect are both performatives that create a sense of reality and historical authenticity within a fictitious world. However, while Barthes’s primary interest is to explore what the “reality-effect” does to the aesthetics of representation, Bechtel’s objective is to explore how the “history-effect” shapes the audience’s understanding of past and present. It is for this reason that Bechtel’s theoretical concept proved more useful for my analysis. 30

Bechtel claims that his use of “historical imagination” and Louis Althusser’s definition of “ideology” are homologous to the extent that they both “represent the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (Bechtel, American Theater, 21). For this reason, we can also argue that historical dramas, by prompting their audiences to identify their fictitious plots as symbolic narratives, reaffirm the group’s shared history and identity. 31

Interestingly enough, we never learn the father’s name, he is only called Father, and the grandmother does not have a name either—she is called Grandmother. (The audience learns that her first name is Edit, when the other characters call her by her first name in the scenes that take place in the 1960s.) In the scenes set in the present, however, she stands for the generation that spent its twenties and thirties in the 1960s, while her son, the father, represents the generation that was born into and spent most of his life in communism. This generation had never lived in or known any other political systems. 32

“Anyuka, miért nem mondta el soha? . . . Akkor értettem volna. Akkor másképp értettem volna mindent. Hogy miért csináltam hülyeségeket. Miért jutnak mindig eszembe olyan dolgok, amiket nem akarok? Én egy másik életet éltem. Nem azt, ami van” (64). 33

“[a] korrupcióról kell filmet csinálni. Kit érdekelnek a hatvanas évek? . . . Az nem érdekes, hogy a németek ellopnak egy találmányt, hogy hogyan lopják meg a saját apját, az viszont érdekes, hogy a nagyapja hogyan épít wigwamot Pomázon” (5). 34

Senki nem ismert hozzá fogható embert” (59).

35

“Rendes, tiszta ember volt. Becsületesen dolgozott élete végéig, és nem hagyom, hogy bárki mast gondoljon róla” (62). 36

“Az indiánokhoz ment ki, hogy köztük haljon meg” (62).

37

“Ez úgy lesz eltemetve bennem, mint annak a rendje” (3).

38

“Ez úgy lesz eltemetve bennem, mint annak a rendje. Még neked sem fogok beszélni róla. Csinálsz, amit csinálsz, nem szólok bele. Nekem ezentúl erről ne szólj egy szót se. Én pedig oda se figyelek. Akármi van, nekem se mondd meg. Hallani se akarok róla. Elfelejtettem. Mostantól nem mondok semmit . . . Elfelejtettem. Eszembe sem fog jutni. Soha az életben. Még az álmaimba sem engedem be. A hátsógondolataimba sem. Ha bárki rákérdezne, nem is fogom érteni. Ki van zárva. Mostantól töröl az agyam. Én már nem emlékszem. Nem emlékszem” (49). 39

In Hungarian: “töröl az agyam” (49, 59, 64). Literal translation: “my brain wiped it out.”

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Buckley-Zistel, “Between Pragmatism, Coercion, and Fear,” 134.

41

This is not surprising for those who struggle with “chosen amnesia.” For the “memory is still stored in the mind”; one only “chooses not have access to it” (ibid.). After decades of repression, the recollection of such memories may become too difficult, as it is for the grandmother in Apaches. “Mi lett volna belőletek, ha nem úgy él, ahogy él? . . . Ha akkor más döntéseket hoz. Másképp csinálja az életét. Te biztos nem mérnök lennél. De te sem lennél filmrendező . . . Köszönd meg neki. Köszönd meg, hogy életben vagyunk és együtt a család” (62–63). 42

43

Because only two short scenes with fragmentary dialogue center on the contemporary (i.e., 2009) family life of the Horváths, we can only infer the dynamics of the relationships between the family members. Magdolna Jákfalvi, in her 2009 article “Rekomponált jelen—Kovács Krisztina—Bereményi Géza: Apacsok,” emphasizes the “two-dimensionality” of the protagonists of Apaches. She argues that “in this text there are only roles, no personality, no soul, only characters entering stereotypical situations” and remaining “the same in every present moment.” Although there is indeed little growth or development of the characters in this piece, partially because of the short, almost screenplay-like miniscenes, in my view the spectators still get insight into their personalities and relationships based on the decisions they have made in the past and the ways in which they confront the dramatic changes of the present. 44

“Álmomban múlt éjjel te indián voltál, de szakasztott a nagyapád . . . És varázsló voltál, az apacs törzs varázslója, mint ő. Párizsban álltál egy fényes színpadon, indián tollakkal, és Yves Montand ott volt veled frakkban. Egy serleget adott át neked Yves Montand, ami fődíj volt a filmedért, és mindenki tapsolt, és ez a tévében volt, ott láttam álmomban, az egész világgal együtt” (58). 45

“a Horváth két arc[a]: egymás mellett a nagypap[a] és az unok[a]” (4).

46

The second production of Apaches on the Danube, directed by one of the playwrights, Géza Bereményi, at the Hevesi Sándor Theater in the Hungarian town of Zalaegerszeg also cast one actor for both roles. According to the playwrights’ preface (1), this double casting is only a suggestion; directors of future productions of Apaches on the Danube can decide themselves whether they want to cast the same actor in the roles of Horváth Sr. and Horváth Jr. 47

In mainstream Hungarian culture as well as in historiography the period between 1963 and 1989 is often referred to as “goulash communism.” In 1963, the general secretary of the Hungarian communist party, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, declared general amnesty for all of those who had participated in the Hungarian Revolution and had been imprisoned since 1957, he also introduced a form of softer dictatorship, which entailed improvements in the quality of life and a reduction in violent state repression, in order to ward off social conflicts and prevent the dissatisfaction of the masses. 48

“Nem tudtam, hogy neked is családi ügy” (55).

49

“Te nem tehetsz arról, hogy mit csinált a nagyapád. A gyerekeidért talán majd te felelsz, de a szüleidért biztosan nem. És azért is felelős vagy, hogy milyen filmet csinálsz ebből a történetből” (55–56).

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“Ha nincs indián, hova mész? Bemész a munkahelyedre, ülsz egy székben, nézed a falat, aztán hazamész. Vagy beülsz valahova. Egyedül vagy nem egyedül. De ülsz mindenhol, és bámulod a falat. Vagy kirándulsz Hévvel. Aztán hazamész és lefekszel. Ha nincs indián, mi van helyette? Semmi” (63).

Bibliography Barthes, Roland. “The Reality-Effect.” In The Rustle of Language, translated by Richard Howard, 141–48. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. Bechtel, Roger. American Theater and the Historical Imagination. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007. Bereményi, Géza, and Krisztina Kovács. Apacsok. 2009. Unpublished Script. ———. Apaches on the Danube. Translated by Lucy Frankel. 2010. Unpublished Script. Berkovits, György. “‘Hajdu’ besúg” [“Hajdu” Informs]. Budapesti Jelenlét [Budapest Presence], 23–24 (1990): 30–41. Buckley-Zistel, Susanne. “Between Pragmatism, Coercion and Fear: Chosen Amnesia after the Rwandan Genocide.” In Memory and Political Change, edited by Aleida Assmann and Linda Shortt, 72–88. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Forsyth, Alison, and Chris Megson. Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. ———. Introduction to Get Real, 1–5. Gervai, András. “Egy ügynök azonosítása” [The Identification of an Informant]. Élet és Irodalom [Life and Literature], L. 4 (2006). Accessed May 20, 2011. http://www.es.hu/gervai_andras;egy_ugynok_azonositasa; 2006-01-29. html. Jákfalvi, Magdolna. “Rekomponált jelen—Kovács Krisztina—Bereményi Géza: Apacsok” [Recomposed Present—Krisztina Kovács—Geza Bereményi: Apaches on the Danube]. Jelenkor [Present] 52, no. 6 (2009). Accessed May 16, 2011. http://jelenkor.net/main.php?disp=disp&ID=1785. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Makrai, Sonja. “Állambiztonság és békepipa” [State Security and Peace Pipe]. Magyar Nemzet Online [Hungarian Nation Online] 123 (2011). Accessed May 20, 2011. http://mno.hu/migr_1834/allambiztonsag_es_bekepipa-183119. Martin, Carol. “Introduction: Dramaturgy of the Real.” In Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage, 1–14. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Massumi, Brian. “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Fact.” In The Affective Turn, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 52–70. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Reinelt, Janelle. “The Promise of Documentary.” In Forsyth and Megson, Get Real, 6–23. Thompson, James. Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

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7: The Stasi Files on Center Stage: Life Writing, Witnessing, and Memory in Recent Performance Ulrike Garde

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PPROXIMATELY TWO DECADES AFTER THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL, a number of theater practitioners began to work with documents related to the German Democratic Republic’s Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security), the so-called Stasi files, in which the secret police service had gathered information on the lives of its fellow citizens. This chapter focuses on artistic engagements with this specific type of life writing in theater productions which encouraged individual performers who had been directly affected by the surveillance to engage, along with their audiences, with fragments of Stasi files in public performance spaces in and around Germany’s capital, Berlin. It focuses on Staats-Sicherheiten (State Securities, 2008), directed by Clemens Bechtel,1 and the audio tour 50 Aktenkilometer (50 Kilometers of Files, 2011) by the performance collective Rimini Protokoll.2 The two productions approached the Stasi files in different ways: In Staats-Sicherheiten, former detainees from the Stasi remand prison Hohenschönhausen recounted directly to the audience important chapters of their lives as victims of the Stasi, both in and out of prison. In 50 Aktenkilometer, individuals reconstructed their experiences with secret police surveillance in recorded personal interviews with the Rimini Protokoll team. These interviewees spoke only indirectly, addressing two separate audiences: first, when excerpts from the recorded interviews became part of a “radio play for walkers” through Berlin, and second, when selected passages from the interviews were subsequently integrated into a more traditional, publicly broadcast radio play.3 In the latter project, the protagonists’ individual engagement with their personal files was juxtaposed with other audio files from the period between 1975 and 1990. These included original surveillance recordings and original audiotapes of informants being briefed and reporting information, as well as telephone records from the Stasi’s telephone switchboard which received all calls reporting surveillance activities. Rimini Protokoll and their team edited

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this audio material into 125 short narratives of two to fifteen minutes in length and distributed them across the Google map of Berlin. Participants of a prebooked audio tour received headphones and a GPS phone that triggered the playback of a narrative whenever they approached one of the zones to which one of the more than a hundred “acoustic bubbles” had been allocated. Despite their different performance formats, Aktenkilometer and Staats-Sicherheiten both give a voice and space to the life writing contained in the original Stasi documents, most of which would otherwise be filed away, frozen in their status quo in the Bundesbehörde für die StasiUnterlagen (Federal Archives for the Stasi Records). In their active and dynamic engagement with the past, it is crucial that both projects directly involve actual victims. Instead of being represented by actors, victims and perpetrators become the protagonists, telling their stories from their own perspectives and, largely, in their own words. The practice of using “selfrepresenting people as both the artistic medium and material of a theatre event” is a key element of what Meg Mumford and I have called “Theatre of Real People.” We have defined this mode of performance as “characterised by the foregrounding of contemporary people who usually have not received institutional theatre training and have little or no prior stage experience. [. . .] A key feature of real people performers is that they present aspects of self—their perspectives, personal histories, narratives, knowledges, skills, environments, social worlds, and/or socio-economic categories.”4 In Staats-Sicherheiten and Aktenkilometer, the real people performers share important aspects of their own lives through reading and interpreting their files for an audience. Alison Lewis has observed that reading their Stasi files can enable victims to appropriate “their ‘stolen biographies’ and to reclaim [. . .] their lost lives.”5 In line with this observation, Staats-Sicherheiten and Aktenkilometer not only function as a source of information for the audience but also represent an act of publicly reclaiming ownership of the protagonists’ life stories. Furthermore, the aesthetic choice of staging real people performers influences audience reception—creating, for example, a sense of direct contact with the people who have experienced the Stasi firsthand. While these protagonists are mainly victims of the Stasi, the audience also gains some insights into the perpetrators’ stories: In Aktenkilometer, Rimini Protokoll have interviewed a few active supporters and informants of the former East German regime, and in Staats-Sicherheiten, the victims also briefly play the roles of (or quote) the perpetrators. This article focuses on the intersections between these aesthetic choices and their sociopolitical impact. It analyzes how the performance aesthetics of “Theatre of Real People” shape an engagement with personal experiences of the Stasi past, focusing on the following questions: How do these performance aesthetics generate a sense of authenticity?

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How do they affect the protagonists’ and audience members’ roles as potential witnesses of past traumatic events? And how do they shape individual and collective memories? The first part of the article analyzes how performance aesthetics give the protagonists as individuals a sense of subjective agency in both Aktenkilometer and Staats-Sicherheiten. The second part focuses on both the protagonists and their audiences in the context of witnessing and collective memory-making. As audience members experience Staats-Sicherheiten simultaneously as a group, this production will be the principal object of discussion in the second part.6 The article closes with a brief discussion of the performances’ aftermath, both in the context of collective experience in Staats-Sicherheiten and in that of individual and asynchronous reception in the Aktenkilometer projects. Where appropriate, the analysis will also refer to the 2013 Dresden-based theater performance Meine Akte und ich (My File and I, directed by Bechtel) and Rimini Protokoll’s later audio tour 10 Aktenkilometer.

Real People Performers Reclaiming Individual Life Stories in Staats-Sicherheiten and 50 Aktenkilometer Both Staats-Sicherheiten and 50 Aktenkilometer are largely based on narrative; audiences listen to the protagonists’ stories, which are constructed around biographical information contained in Stasi files, on which they also provide extensive commentary. The protagonists reclaim this oftenfragmented information referring to their lives as seen through the eyes of Stasi informants,7 initially by preparing their respective performances in interviews with the performance makers and, in the case of Staats-Sicherheiten, also in private rehearsals with coperformers. Subsequently, they reclaim their own stories through publicly performing them, simultaneously overwriting the autobiographical information contained in the Stasi files with a counternarrative and thus themselves shaping how the past will be remembered. The productions’ impact at both the individual and the collective level is reflected in the dual meanings of the German word Geschichte, which Natascha Gillenberg uses when labeling 50 Aktenkilometer “[t]he—at least partial—re-appropriation of one’s own (hi)story.”8 When the protagonists of 50 Aktenkilometer recorded their comments for Rimini Protokoll’s audio tour (and subsequent radio play by the same name), and when the protagonists of Staats-Sicherheiten shared their stories in public performance, they were performing “a work of self-construction.”9 Indeed, many narrative passages in the two projects illustrate that “narrative is an essential part of our sense of who we are,”10 including in contexts where individuals are searching for a self “existing continuously across time.”11 Narratives can also enable “a sense of subjective

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Fig. 7.1. Vera Lengsfeld, Staats-Sicherheiten. Photo by Stefan Gloede. © Stefan Gloede / Hans Otto Theater, Potsdam.

agency, inserting it retrospectively into the event where that very agency was destroyed.”12 In Staats-Sicherheiten, subtitled 15 Schicksale aus dem Gefängnis (15 Destinies from Prison), the protagonists recounted the relevant phases of their lives under the headings of “Arrest,” “Transport,” “Custody,” “Trial,” “Execution of the Sentence,” “Release,” and “Legacies.”13 These seven headings suggest a dramatic arc in which individual experiences are presented as episodes of a semiopen station drama. This structure of presenting parallel lives and suffering allows, in each of the episodes, for an individual renegotiation of life writing in the broader context of shared experiences; the individual experiences are shown as representative of many lives under police surveillance. Esther Slevogt, for example, acknowledges this interwoven presentation of individual and exemplary lives in her review of the scene entitled “Arrest”: “The arrest took place in broad daylight or early in the morning, when one was still in bed. One was arrested when trying to cross the border illegally.”14 Although Bechtel and his team point to parallels in the protagonists’ lives, they try to avoid stripping the stories (frequently presented as monologues) of their individuality, which would reduce the importance of personal experiences and memories. As real people performers, the protagonists in both Staats-Sicherheiten and Aktenkilometer, when telling or acting out their own encounters with the Stasi, are in charge of their own narratives rather than entrusting actors to represent them. In the

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two projects, the protagonists all adopt a similar critical stance toward the files, albeit through different dramatic means. While in Staats-Sicherheiten the people onstage express their critique through body language and positioning, in 50 Aktenkilometer the interviewees rely on voice and intonation to convey their disbelief, criticism, or brief amusement when reading aloud from their files. As Natascha Gillenberg points out, “They comment on reports, correct them, complete them, [. . .] and insist on their own interpretation.”15 The files thus serve as a point of reference for reconstructing biographical narratives—or as “a mirror” reflecting the protagonists’ own life stories, to use a comparison suggested by Sebastian Brünger, who was responsible for research and dramaturgy in Aktenkilometer.16 All the protagonists felt the need to assert their own view of their lives as found in the files. As Deidre Heddon has shown, autobiographical performance can serve as “a tool of resistance, intervention and/or reinvention.”17 This function is particularly important in the context of the Stasi files which Alison Lewis has described as “hostile, unauthorised biograph[ies] [with] harmful and aggressive intentions.”18 For example, when the protagonists in Staats-Sicherheiten communicated their perspectives on their persecuted lives in Hohenschönhausen to the audience, the audience members seemed to share the protagonists’ desire to produce public counternarratives to the Stasi files.19 Several reviewers reported how the individual stories moved the audience to tears and how the audience responded to the premiere with a standing ovation.20 In both projects, the theater practitioners and protagonists carefully chose the language of their narratives, including the use of figurative language for describing the relationship between victims and their oppressors. In her analysis of 50 Aktenkilometer, Emily Collett points out that one of the protagonists, Barbara Stephanowa, when discussing her application for an exit permit to leave the GDR, “refers to her citizenship as if it was a relationship”: “And I said, ‘we no longer get along, we have to separate, because one doesn’t have to stay together forever (laughs), the state and I.’”21 Collett also shows how humor and certain metaphors function as tools of resistance—for example, when Hartmut Richter, one of the protagonists of Staats-Sicherheiten, compares the power games in the relationship between prisoners and their interrogators to a dance: “I consider myself invited to dance, dance, however, how I wish and in doing so I will well and truly step on the toes of my tormentors.”22 When using the Stasi files as documentary material, both projects combine verbatim passages (such as excerpts from original surveillance files or court rulings) with elements that have been fictionalized through acts of selection, combination, and aesthetic reframing.23 In Staats-Sicherheiten, the protagonists’ statements appear as rehearsed individual scenes that are part of a larger, highly structured piece directed primarily at the audience.

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In 50 Aktenkilometer, segments of individual interviews are juxtaposed with other documentary material, thus further highlighting the editorial work. Since the people who undertook the audio tour did not know which “acoustic bubble” their GPS phones would access next, the sequence of audio files led in some instances to ironic contrasts, such as when original recordings of songs that celebrate life under GDR socialism in one “acoustic bubble” followed stories of persecution in the prior “acoustic bubble.” On the one hand, this editorial approach used in 50 Aktenkilometer, which encouraged random access to individual sound recordings, resulted in the protagonists having little control over how the audience contextualized their life stories. On the other hand, the juxtaposition of excerpts from individual biographies in both productions could facilitate access to the traumatic dimension of the individual narratives.24 Rather than asking victims to recount their traumatic experiences, which might retraumatize them,25 the theater makers’ careful editorial work instead alluded to the traumatic dimensions of narratives by leaving meaningful blanks which, as in fiction, spectators were asked to fill imaginatively with meaning.26 These blanks included the unspeakable and the unrepresentable dimensions of the traumatic events that Slavoj Žižek also refers to as “the real,” which we are only able to sustain “if we fictionalize it.”27 In 50 Aktenkilometer, in particular the radio play version, the traumatic dimension of events frequently loomed large in the pauses during the conversations and in the “empty” spaces between edited, cut, and rearranged interviews. In Staats-Sicherheiten, Bechtel and his team facilitated some access to the traumatic aspects of the prisoners’ lives by carefully selecting and structuring excerpts from their autobiographies as temporarily parallel stories, thus leaving room for the audience’s imagination. For example, the parallel individual narratives under the heading “Strafvollzug” (Execution of the Sentence) were structured by the repeated orders of the prison guards, “Come here” and “Move there,” referring to the commands used to prevent any prisoner from encountering a fellow inmate on the way to and from individual interrogations.28 Onstage, traffic lights directed the movements of the protagonists playing prisoners. This recreated the original control system in Hohenschönhausen that indicated to prison guards when a prisoner was approaching so that they could prevent visual or any other contact between prisoners. In the interrogation rooms, the prisoners met the only person they were allowed to communicate with, the interrogator. In Staats-Sicherheiten, the guards’ orders and their prevention of encounters between prisoners served as structuring leitmotivs. They became formalized movements onstage, as protagonists retraced their original steps, this time without guards. Yet many effects of the psychological torture that stem from complete isolation in prison could not be shared or represented directly, and here spectators needed to fill in the gaps with their imagination.

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However, despite these careful editing and structuring processes, both productions also contain moments when individual protagonists appear temporarily overcome by distressing aspects of their past. One of several instances occurs in 50 Aktenkilometer when Salomea Genin—“a Jewish girl who left Berlin as a child refugee and settled in Melbourne, but later returned to Germany to pursue her [communist] political ideals”29—shares a passage from her file that illustrates how the Stasi intervened in her private life. Her voice becomes agitated when reading aloud the inappropriate remarks made by the people she had been loyal to at the time, including insinuations that she might have been a “floozy” (leichtes Mädchen). In Staats-Sicherheiten, Hans-Eberhard Zahn’s voice reminds the audience repeatedly of the trauma that cannot be represented onstage. His diction and tone of voice combine the firmness of the former psychology student, who had the mental strength to develop subtle yet effective strategies of survival and resistance, with the frailty of an eighty-year-old man, who, even under GDR law, had been wrongly imprisoned for seven years.30 Zahn’s performance of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 43,” which he used to recite in German during his imprisonment as a means of staying sane, creates a touching moment onstage, giving the audience some sense of the cruel conditions experienced in prison during solitary confinement: “When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see / For all the day they view things unrespected; / But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee.”31 Some audience members may interpret the signs of vulnerability as “authentic,” in line with Florian Malzacher’s observation that “[i]nsecurity and fragility are the defining moments of what is understood by many to be authenticity” (27). As I have shown elsewhere, in productions involving real people performers, these moments can also occur when the protagonists show signs of being nervous, or struggle with their text, or when their untrained voices, as well as their seemingly natural use of dialects and sociolects, become apparent.32 While all of these signs can be observed in the theater, the nonprofessional use of language and voice can also be perceived when listening to the audio files of 50 Aktenkilometer. Although impressions of authentic moments in performance may contribute to an overall impression of a valuable and touching collective experience,33 it is important not to confuse the mode of delivery with the quality of the content, based on the fact that in many instances, “authentic” is used as a synonym for “genuine,” “truthful,” or “unmediated,”34 sometimes without a clear differentiation between the meanings of these terms. For example, Eberhard Spreng seems to rely on an arbitrary connection between the mode of delivery and quality in his comparison of Staats-Sicherheiten with the concurrently performed Der Fall Janke, which he considers an “entertaining” play about the GDR.35 The underlying premise in his assessment, which he calls “authentic testimony,”

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is that the “authentic” delivery of a personal narrative is an indicator of truth, even when referring to past real-life events. He concludes, “In cases where recent history still has to be worked through and understood, authentic testimony can produce incomparably better results than the artifice of theater.”36 Spreng’s desire for an “authentic testimony” reflects his concern that due to their acute importance, these unresolved topics of recent history should be treated in what he considers an appropriate aesthetic way. When asking how this chapter of GDR history can be best represented in the theater, Spreng’s concern reminds us of previous approaches to dealing with sensitive chapters of history onstage. Analyzing West German documentary theater of the 1960s, Brian Barton observes that when engaging with highly sensitive topics in the context of the Shoah, some “questions [were] considered too complex or too overwhelming” to be transformed into openly fictionalized texts.37 Indeed, there are similarities between the documentary style of contemporary performances centering on the Stasi and West German documentary theater of the 1960s, insofar as many theater productions integrate quotes from original documents into their dramatic texts or scripts. As Barton observes, using documents in the theater in this way can effectively establish a relationship to the outside world.38 In the contemporary theater and performing arts, this intertextual work has been combined with visual or aural references to the Stasi files—the use of props that represent the original documents, in the case of Staats-Sicherheiten, and in 50 Aktenkilometer the sound of pages being turned, an aural reminder of leafing through Stasi files. However, unlike the documentary theater of the 1960s, the contemporary “Theatre of Real People” productions not only involve documents but also feature witnesses as protagonists. The presence of primary witnesses onstage is an invitation to interpret the protagonists’ engagement with life writing as testimony, in the sense of being “language events or speech acts with special claims to truth and authenticity.”39 For example, critic Natascha Gillenberg appears to take up this invitation when expressing a strong interest in the “intensity of the authentic fates” experienced by the protagonists in 50 Aktenkilometer and criticising the production’s references to contemporary surveillance phenomena as unnecessary distractions from the victims’ narratives.40 When reviewing Staats-Sicherheiten, Frank Dietschreit appreciates that the protagonists “document [. . .] through their words and memories the subjective truth of an objective dictatorship.”41 He thus concurs with scholars Mark Freeman and Jens Brockmeier’s claims that “the widespread idea that there is such a thing as a uniquely true, correct, or even faithful autobiography is misleading. [. . .] If a life story is about truth at all, it is about narrative truth.”42 However, in Staats-Sicherheiten and 50 Aktenkilometer, the public engagement with the Stasi files not only focuses on individual biographies but also

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concerns interpretations of a commonly shared past, where different narratives compete in the process of memory-making.43 When excerpts from private files are remediated through public performance, protagonists and audiences alike participate in a process of collective memory-making.

Individual Life Stories and Collective Memories in 50 Aktenkilometer and Staats-Sicherheiten Several researchers have acknowledged that individual life writing is embedded in a collective or social context, albeit with different emphases. For example, Freeman and Brockmeier see the “narrative integrity of the self” emerging “in line with specific social historical and discursive conditions regarding the importance of the individual as well as the importance of accounting for the life one has led in line with an overarching cultural system of ethical and moral values.”44 Brodzki stresses the sociopolitical importance of testimonies, claiming that what they “testify to always exceeds the boundaries of an individual life, of individual experience.”45 Within the broader context of memory studies, Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning emphasize the “socially constructed nature” of all memory,46 while Erll and Ann Rigney acknowledge the “embeddedness of all mediation and remediation in social constellations.”47 In Staats-Sicherheiten and 50 Aktenkilometer, protagonists and theater critics alike share an awareness that the act of performing personal memories contributes to how we remember the past and how we write history. This is apparent in reviews of Staats-Sicherheiten bearing titles such as “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (Coming to Terms with the Past)48 and “Späte Sieger der Geschichte” (Eventual Winners in History).49 In their press release for 50 Aktenkilometer, Rimini Protokoll mention “records based on memory”50 together with observation reports, personality profiles, and operational plans as parts of their project. While both productions were committed to dealing with life writing and memory, they took different aesthetic approaches to dealing with the past. In line with what Carol Martin has shown for other recent theater productions engaging with memory, both Staats-Sicherheiten and 50 Aktenkilometer illustrate “how the staging of memory creates records of human experience with aesthetic frames that select and condense reality in ways that participate in the construction of social and historical memory.”51 Rimini Protokoll took their production out into the urban environment, “haul[ing] the Stasi files out of the archives,” in order to make a city’s historical past “palpable.”52 When critic Esther Slevogt listened by headphones to the recorded interviews on her walk through the streets of Berlin, she felt she was being absorbed more or less by “a web of small audio pieces [. . .], which add[ed] a layer of sound track

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from past times to today’s city.”53 In Staats-Sicherheiten, Bechtel used a different aesthetic approach to highlight the collective experience of primary witnesses and audience members publicly engaging with the past. He chose to stage a more conventional play, which some audience members perceived as a highly effective way of spawning interest in politics past and present.54

Empowering the Protagonist through Verfremdung in Staats-Sicherheiten One reason for the Staats-Sicherheiten project’s success is that Bechtel juxtaposed and temporarily undermined the sense of intimacy and authenticity with Verfremdung (defamiliarization).55 The director presented the familiar power hierarchies in the prison Hohenschönhausen in a fresh way so that audiences could understand them as neither natural nor inevitable. In these instances, the aesthetics of creating distance from past events, while relying on intimate knowledge thereof, allowed for individual and collective renegotiation of past events in a critical light. This strategy worked particularly well in a scene where Gilbert Furian gave insights into his interrogation during imprisonment in Hohenschönhausen. In this key scene, Furian first plays the role of the interrogator (with the Stasi alias “Herr Schneider”) and then that of the prisoner, in this case “[him]self, the accused Gilbert Furian with the number 314/1.”56 However, he does not identify with any of the positions and is able to comment on the attitudes of both while playing the two roles. Furian’s ability to switch roles is reminiscent of Brecht’s “Street Scene,” which the playwright considered as “a basic model for epic theatre.” In Brecht’s model, “an eyewitness demonstrate[s] to a collection of people how a traffic accident took place [. . .], act[ing] the behavior of driver or victim or both in such a way that the bystanders are able to form an opinion about the accident.”57 Similarly, Furian first takes the seat of the accused in the interrogation room and tries out the interrogator’s, playing both roles with a good measure of distance. This fresh encounter with the past is further enhanced when Furian observes his own behavior in a detached way by describing himself in the third person, as if looking at his former self from the point of view of his interrogator:58 “[I see] at the other end of the interrogation table . . . myself, the accused Gilbert Furian with the number 314/1. He is sitting there because of his small, twenty-page-long brochure because we simply do not need squabbles by political non-conformists. He is pale, is wearing—like everyone else who [has to] sit opposite me—a blue tracksuit; he has short hair, and does not show any emotion, although he is surely afraid because he does not know what I know.”59

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Fig. 7.2. Staats-Sicherheiten. Photo by Stefan Gloede. © Stefan Gloede / Hans Otto Theater, Potsdam.

By retrospectively describing his situation as a prisoner from the point of view of the superior interrogator, Furian reminds his audience how much the power structures in an oppressive regime depend on detailed knowledge of the individual. In real life, the prisoner Furian was exposed because he had no indication of what his interrogator knew about his political activities and his life in general. The performance, however, makes a point of changing the original distribution of power: in the scene onstage, Furian is retrospectively endowed with control over the encounter. In his present position as a confident and detached protagonist, Furian invites audiences to critically assess how the former oppressive structures were organized. In the performance, he is able by swapping seats to take the position of the man who was authorized to “write his life” and determine his fate as an accused man, all the while maintaining the freedom to choose which role he would have rather played in the GDR. In the end, Furian concludes: “I think that this [the interrogator’s] place is not the right one for me. Thus I would rather remain the accused with the number 314/1.”60 This quote exemplifies how the production effectively combines sociopolitical issues and their individual implications, including personal ethics. Furian’s “interrogation scene” builds on the tension between self-perception and observation under oppressive surveillance. It shows that Furian’s biography continues to be embedded in the political circumstances of the time, simultaneously demonstrating the empowering function of performing criticism of past wrongs. This scene

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provides Furian with the opportunity to publicly challenge and transform the biographical information contained in his Stasi file. He achieves this through remediating the originally written biographical information in a performance which produces an individual counternarrative in the context of collective memory-making.61 Moreover, Furian’s key scene invites audiences to become primary witnesses to the act of rejecting the interrogator’s role, in contrast to the other parts of Staats-Sicherheiten in which they function as what Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub call secondary witnesses, or “witness[es] to the testimonies of others”62 because they listen to the reports of what the primary witnesses onstage have experienced firsthand. By contrast, Furian rejects the interrogator’s role live onstage and in the presence of the spectators who can in turn witness his act of rejecting the interrogator’s role as a firsthand experience and move up the chain of witnesses as a result.63 What further added to the dramaturgically empowering impetus of Furian’s performance was the phenomenon of his personal strength, apparent in his composure throughout the scene, a strength gained through his continued political activism and intellectual engagement with the past. These experiences, such as being a Zeitzeuge (eyewitness) contributing to the Hohenschönhausen Memorial project, might have also allowed him to develop a more detached attitude to the role-playing in the scene above.64 Moreover, Furian had previously engaged with this chapter of his biography when he wrote about his life experiences under communism in his book Mehl aus Mielkes Mühlen (Flour from Mielke’s Mills, 2008).65 This collection of “experiences, letters, documents” contains an interview that preempted the scene in which Furian turns the tables on his interrogator in Staat-Sicherheiten. In Furian’s interview with “Herrn Schneider,” now referred to by the actual name of Furian’s interrogator, “Wolfgang M.,”66 he admits that he is fully aware of the impact of surveillance and imprisonment on individual lives. Asked by Furian whether he feels ashamed for certain aspects of his former role, he responds thus: “Yes, being ashamed—there is some truth to that. But anyway: my being ashamed now won’t do anybody any good who was in your situation at the time. And I am surely guilty because I have participated in things that hindered people’s personal development and completely destroyed their careers. It is a terrible situation; one does not like to talk about it. One would prefer to forget it completely.”67 In Staats-Sicherheiten, Furian quotes Wolfgang M.’s statement directly from Mehl aus Mielkes Mühlen. This verbatim passage adds to the complexity of the concept of remembering and forgetting in Staats-Sicherheiten because it shows that the “biographer” and the “target person” are inextricably intertwined in life writing. As Max Saunders states, “A memoir of someone else, by virtue of the fact that you are writing about them because they are important in your life, will be part of your autobiography.”68 It

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does not appear to be relevant in this case whether a person was important because of their position in state security or for personal reasons. Acutely aware of the interwoven nature of people’s lives on either side of the Stasi surveillance system, Bechtel made a point of involving both victims and interrogators in his follow-up theater project Meine Akte und ich (My File and I, 2013). He stated: “The collaboration of both groups [victims and their interrogators] was of great importance to me when working in Dresden because I find this kind of dialogue lacking when dealing with the GDR in general; [it was also important to me because] Staats-Sicherheiten had to do with only playing the roles of or quoting ‘perpetrators’; so their perspective of the prisons was left out of the bigger picture.[. . .] [H]owever this invisibility demonizes and mystifies them and makes dealing with the past much harder, in particular for the ‘victims.’”69

“Hinterlassenschaften”: The Aftermath of Performing Life Writing in Staats-Sicherheiten and Aktenkilometer Both the passage just quoted from Bechtel and Furian’s continued engagement as Zeitzeuge for a coordinated witness office,70 as well as the latter’s book, indicate that the renegotiation of life writing under the Stasi is an ongoing process that not only exceeds the initial act of making file excerpts publicly available but also goes beyond the last act in Staats-Sicherheiten, which is entitled “Hinterlassenschaften” (Legacies). This lingering influence comprises the availability of the entire or parts of both projects via DVD and web platforms such as YouTube, which provide excerpts from the original productions.71 As Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney have shown, it is often “through the inter-medial reiteration of [a] story across different platforms in the public arena [. . .] that [a particular] topic takes root in the community.”72 The prolonged and complex reiteration and reception process of recent theater projects is of special relevance for 50 Aktenkilometer, because it encourages the ongoing availability and flexible use of its audio recordings via an application for downloading.73 Rimini Protokoll continue to provide this tool because they not only intend to make selected files from the archive accessible but also want to draw parallels between past and present surveillance.74 The drawing of such parallels became even more pronounced in the follow-up project 10 Aktenkilometer (Dresden), in which the participants were more aware of being monitored themselves. In this version of the audio tour, they noticed that the “control center” was observing their movements through the city; the phones with GPS they received as part of this project identified other participants in the tour who were in their vicinity.75

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However, while advances in technology and developments in media allow for considerable flexibility in both space (across the city) and time (with continued access to applications), both versions of Aktenkilometer risk losing the historical context that binds together the individual narratives in Staats-Sicherheiten. In 50 Aktenkilometer, it is left to chance whether the participant encounters and connects the different “acoustic bubbles” of an individual’s story, spread across many hours of audio material and the many places in the city that have been allocated a sound file.76 Moreover, the projects rely on individuals having the necessary historical knowledge to contextualize the auditory information.77 Listening to those isolated snippets of audio material that reveal the absurd aspects of police surveillance without historical preknowledge might lead to participants dismissing the surveillance system as “silly.”78 While the absurdity of the surveillance system is also briefly referred to in StaatsSicherheiten,79 here the audience’s potential response of laughter is embedded in the collective reception that guides spectators who watch a play live.80 This guiding framework is not present in 50 Aktenkilometer, in which individual walkers are largely “enclosed within their immediate sonic landscape”81 (consisting of the prerecorded material), which does not allow a dialogue with the protagonists and limits an exchange with fellow walkers. When Rimini Protokoll developed the material into a radio play, individual fragments of a personal narrative were no longer presented in isolation, since this more traditional format contained five personal stories as succinct narratives of individual life writing, each segment lending additional meaning to the others. These narratives give listeners a more comprehensive impression of the intertwined personal and historical factors that have shaped individual lives. By contrast, an individual segment of 10 Aktenkilometer, which contains video footage of a young man undertaking the audio walk, together with the relevant “acoustic bubble,” suffers from the absence of a broader intertextual guiding framework. Uploaded by the Staatsschauspiel Dresden, this video, made available via a YouTube platform,82 initially captures the map with the different “acoustic bubbles” but only features a single one. Here, the isolated recording of a phone call with an informant telling the authorities about “dangerous” graffiti on the wall of a neighboring house turns into a joke, because neither the informant nor his interlocutor is able to pronounce or correctly interpret the English slogan “Run for Fun.” This individual exchange, marked by a distinct Saxon accent, has lost its historical context. Thus, “the walker [and even more the online viewer] becomes a consumer and not an interrogator of the audio [or video] files.”83 The performances discussed in this chapter illustrate that public reclaiming of individual life writing contributes to collective memorymaking. They show, as Carol Martin has demonstrated in her analysis of

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theater performances that engage with past traumatic experiences, “how the staging of memory creates records of human experience with aesthetic frames that select and condense reality in ways that participate in the construction of social and historical memory.”84 As a result of the increasing availability of performance material, facilitated by modern technology, the engagement with secret police surveillance does not stop when the curtain falls but continues to be reiterated across different media platforms. Consequently, it is not only the performance aesthetics that are of great importance; one must also pay attention to a production’s “legacy.”

Notes 1

All subsequent translations are mine unless noted otherwise. Staats-Sicherheiten’s concept was by Lea Rosh and Renate Kreibich Fischer; Clemens Bechtel directed it. Stage design was by Christoph Schubiger, music by Stephan Krawczyk; and the protagonists were Vera Lengsfeld, Heidelore Rutz, Edda Schönherz, Dieter Drewitz, Gilbert Furian, Stephan Krawczyk, Mathias Melster, Erhard Neubert, Thomas Raufeisen, Hartmut Richter, Mario Röllig, Harry Santos, Dieter von Wichmann, Peter-Michael Wulkau, and Hans-Eberhard Zahn. 2 50 Aktenkilometer was a project by Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel (Rimini Protokoll), part of Radioortung: Hörspiele für Selbstläufer. Research and dramaturgy was by Sebastian Brünger; technical production manager was Falco Ewald; production managers were Heidrun Schlegel and Katja Sonnemann; voice was by René Stäbler. Rimini Protokoll is a performance collective who jointly share the research, dramaturgy, and directorial work for their productions. Bechtel worked in a more conventional way. For this reason, I use the broad term “theater makers” to refer to both types of artists. 3 The radio play 50 Aktenkilometer was directed by Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, and

Daniel Wetzel, and featured Salomea Genin, Mario Röllig, Barbara Stephanowa, Günther Jeschonnek, and Hans-Dieter Schütt; sound was by Hermann Leppich and Bernd Friebel. It was produced for Deutschlandradio Kultur, first broadcast December 19, 2011. All subsequent quotes are taken from this broadcast. 4

Mumford and Garde, “Staging Real People,” 5.

5

Lewis, “Reading and Writing,” 388.

6

Rancière emphasizes that ultimately audiences are made up of individuals whose reactions vary (Emancipated Spectator, 13). 7

Cf. also Miller, “Wiederaneignung,” 369–77.

8

“[d]ie—zumindest teilweise—Wiederaneignung der eigenen Geschichte.” “This takes place because those spied upon read from their files [and] decide themselves which passages are heard and which aren’t” (Sie funktioniert darüber, dass die Bespitzelten aus ihren Akten lesen, selbst entscheiden, welche Teile hörbar werden und welche nicht,” Gillenberg, “Nicht allein”). 9

Eakin, Living Autobiographically, 2.

10

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Ibid., IX.

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Ibid., 2.

12

Oliver, Witnessing, 93.

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13

“Festnahme, Transport, Untersuchungshaft, Prozess, Strafvollzug, Entlassung, Hinterlassenschaften.” 14

“Die Verhaftung fand auf offener Straße statt. Oder früh morgens, als man noch im Bett lag. Man wurde beim Versuch festgenommen, illegal die Grenze zu überqueren” (Slevogt, “Das Reden”). 15

“Sie kommentieren die Berichte, korrigieren sie, ergänzen sie, erzählen ihr Leben selbst, bestehen auf der eigenen Deutung” (Gillenberg, “Nicht allein”). 16

“die Akte ihres eigenen Lebens [. . .] wirkt auch als Spiegel zurück” (Meier, “Verwanzt”; the file of their own life . . . also reflects back as a mirror). 17

Heddon, Autobiography, 5.

18

Lewis, “Reading and Writing,” 383.

19

Many of the protagonists in Staats-Sicherheiten also act as Zeitzeugen and tour guides for the tours that are available in Hohenschönhausen. 20

See for example Schäfer, “Späte Sieger,” and Slevogt, “Das Reden.”

21

“Und ich habe gesagt ‘wir verstehen uns nicht mehr, wir müssen uns trennen, weil man ja nicht ewig zusammen bleiben muss (lacht), der Staat und ich’” (Collett, “Reconstructing the Past,” 55). I would like to thank Emily Collett for sharing her thoughts on the two projects with me while I supervised her Honors thesis. 22

“Ich betrachte mich zum Tanz aufgefordert, tanze aber, wie ich will und werde meinen Peinigern dabei gehörig auf die Füße treten” (Collett, 59). 23

Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary, 222–38.

24

For the therapeutic aspects of Staats-Sicherheiten, see Hermann and Pross, “Erinnerung als Rekonstruktion von Wirklichkeit.” For a cautious approach to the interviewing process, see Reynolds, “Trauma and Life History Interviewing,” 78–88.

25

For instances of retraumatization in the context of people testifying onstage, see Wake, “The Accident and the Account.” 26

Iser, “Reception Theory,” 64.

27

Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 19.

28

“Komm’Se,” “Gehn’Se.”

29

Heuthe, “Memories of an Australian Stasi Informer.”

30

Cf. “He had lawfully deposited money in East Berlin for the relatives of students from West Berlin. He was arrested on the spot although his actions were in accordance with GDR laws.” (Er hatte legale Geldeinzahlungen für die Verwandten von Westberliner Studenten in Ostberlin vorgenommen. Dabei wurde er verhaftet, obwohl sein Handeln durch DDR-Gesetze legitimiert war. StaatsSicherheiten, DVD notes) 31

“Wenn sich mein müdes Aug’ im Schlafe schließt, erschaut es Dinge, die ich tags ersehnen, entbehren muss, bis nachts, im Tau der Tränen, dein holdes Bild aus tiefen Träumen sprießt” (Shakespeare, “Sonnet 43,” 25).

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32 Cf. for example Rimini Protokoll’s Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Erster Band (The Capital, Volume 1). This performance piece features several real people performers who are experts on a specific aspect of Marx’s work. When onstage they also show signs of being nervous, by their untrained voices, their use of dialects and sociolects. The authenticity effects generated in this performance apply to many other productions. Garde, “Reality and Realism,” 184. 33

Cf. Dietschreit, “Hans-Otto-Theater Potsdam.”

34

“Wahrhaftig, eigentlich, unvermittelt, unverstellt, unverfälscht” (Knaller and Müller, “authentisch/Authentizität,” 43). 35 Der Fall Janke by Adriana Altaras and Dirk Olaf Hanke was also shown at the Hans-Otto-Theater (Spreng, “Gutmenschentheater”). 36

“Wo die jüngste Geschichte erst noch verarbeitet, verstanden werden muss, kann das authentische Zeugnis oft ungleich mehr leisten, als die Kunst des Theaters” (Ibid.). 37

Barton, Das Dokumentartheater, 1–2.

38

Ibid., 3.

39

Brodzki, “Testimony,” 870.

40

“Eindringlichkeit der authentischen Schicksale” (Gillenberg, “Nicht allein”).

41

“dokumentieren im Akt des Erinnerns und Sprechens die subjektive Wahrheit einer objektiven Diktatur” (Dietschreit, “Hans-Otto-Theater Potsdam”). 42

Freeman and Brockmeier, “Narrative Integrity,” 81.

43

Beattie illustrates this regarding the state’s involvement. Cf. Beattie, “Politics.”

44

Freeman and Brockmeier, “Narrative Integrity,” 83.

45

Brodzki, “Testimony,” 870.

46

Erll and Nünning, “Concepts and Methods,” 12.

47

Erll and Rigney, “Introduction,” 9.

48

Spreng, “Gutmenschentheater.”

49

Schäfer, “Späte Sieger.”

50

“Gedächtnisprotokolle” (Rimini Protokoll, “50 Aktenkilometer”).

51

Martin, Theatre of the Real, 61.

52

Rimini Protokoll, “50 Kilometers of Files.”

53

“ein Gespinst aus kleinen Hörstücken [. . .], das die Stadt von heute mit der Tonspur einer vergangenen Zeit unterlegt[e]” (Slevogt, “Mit dem kleinen (Stasi-) Mann”). 54

“A spectator states, ‘I wish this [theater] evening had taken place before the local elections in Brandenburg’” (‘Ich hätte mir gewünscht, dass dieser Abend vor der Kommunalwahl in Brandenburg stattgefunden hätte,’ sagt ein Zuschauer, Schäfer, “Späte Sieger”).

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55

Bechtel introduces Verfremdung earlier through Stephan Krawczyck’s songs.

56

“Untersuchungshaft,” Staats-Sicherheiten, DVD.

57

Brecht, “Street Scene,” 469.

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58

Brecht recommended this transposition as an aid for “defamiliarizing the remarks and actions of a character being portrayed” in “Kurze Beschreibung,” 644. I have used my own translation in order to avoid the misleading term “alienate” used by Willett in Brecht on Theatre, 138. 59

“[Ich sehe] am andern Ende des Vernehmertisches mich, den Beschuldigten Gilbert Furian mit der Nummer 314/1. Er sitzt dort wegen seiner kleinen 20-seitigen Broschüre, weil wir solche Querelen von politisch Andersdenkenden einfach nicht brauchen können. Er ist blass, trägt—wie alle, die mir hier gegenüber sitzen—einen blauen Trainingsanzug, hat kurz-geschnittene Haare, zeigt aber keine Emotionen, obwohl er sicher Angst hat, weil er nicht weiß, was ich alles weiß” (“Untersuchungshaft,” Staats-Sicherheiten, DVD). 60

“Ich glaube, dieser Platz ist doch nicht der richtige für mich. Da bleibe ich doch lieber der Beschuldigte mit der Nummer 314/1” (“Untersuchungshaft,” Staats-Sicherheiten, DVD). 61

For a further example of the processes that reshape collective memories through remediation, see Erll, “Remembering.” 62

Felman and Laub, Testimony, 75–76.

63

Wake, “The Accident and the Account.”

64

For further information on Furian’s past and his voluntary work as a guide for the Gedenkstätte Hohenschönhausen, see Furian. 65

Furian, “Wenn die Richterin,” 176–93.

66

Ibid., 176.

67

“Ja, schämen—da ist schon irgendwo was dran. Dafür, dass ich mich jetzt schäme, kann sich allerdings keiner was kaufen, der in einer Situation war wie Sie damals.[. . .] Und ich habe ja echt Schuld, weil ich eben Dinge mitgemacht habe, durch die viele in ihrer Persönlichkeit beeinträchtigt wurden oder das persönliche Fortkommen völlig zu Bruch gegangen ist. [. . .] Es ist eine schlimme Situation, eigentlich spricht man nicht mehr gerne darüber. Man würde es doch lieber ganz vergessen” (ibid., 188–89). 68

Saunders, “Life-Writing,” 321.

69

“Das Zusammenwirken dieser beiden Gruppen war mir an der Dresdner Arbeit sehr wichtig, weil ich diesen Dialog in der ganzen DDR-Aufarbeitung vermisse, und weil Staats-Sicherheiten eben nur mit gespielten/zitierten ‘Tätern’ vonstatten gehen musste, und so deren Perspektive auf die Verhältnisse in den Gefängnissen in keiner Weise in das Gesamtbild miteinfliesst.[. . .] [A]ber diese Unsichtbarkeit dämonisiert und mystifiziert sie und macht die Aufarbeitung—gerade für die ‘Opfer’—viel schwieriger” (Bechtel, Email to Ulrike Garde. Meine Akte was part of Parallel Lives: 20th Century through the Eyes of Secret Police). 70

Furian, “DDR Zeitzeuge.”

71

Cf. Belvedere, “Staats-Sicherheiten.” A DVD of the same title is available. Cf. “50 Aktenkilometer.” 72

Erll and Rigney, “Introduction,” 2.

73

Radioortung: Hörspiele für Selbstläufer.

74

GPS technology lay at the project’s origin and inspired the idea to link the possibilities of monitoring people via digital technology to a historical form of

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surveillance. See Brünger, “Interview with David Barnett,” and also Barnett, “Sampling the Stasi.” 75

“Kontrollzentrum.” “While I experience the surveillance of the GDR, I am myself under surveillance: my walk is being traced by the control center. However, I also watch [other people]: I can see the other walkers as little headphones on my mobile-phone map.” (Während ich die Überwachung der DDR nacherlebe, werde ich selbst überwacht: Mein Spaziergang wird in der ‘Zentrale’ aufgezeichnet. Aber auch ich überwache: Die anderen Spaziergänger kann ich als kleine Kopfhörer auf meiner Handy-Karte sehen. Scholz, “Der Türaufhalter”) Cf. also Meierhenrich, “Auf Stasi-Spuren.” 76 In 50 Aktenkilometer “[a] total of approximately 10 hours of audio material were distributed across the Google Map of Berlin” (“RADIOORTUNG”). 77

Because the audio tour is a recently developed performance format, it might attract a wider range of audiences—from people interested in avant-garde performance to those seeking out an alternative tour of the cities—than traditional theater performances. 78

Regarding “Die dumme Stasi,” see Nicht, Die “Stasi” als Erinnerungsort, 161–64. Regarding laughter as victims’ initial reaction toward the “absurdity of the accounts in the files” see Lewis, “Reading and Writing,” 386. Barbara Stephanowa, one of the protagonists of 50 Aktenkilometer, pointed out that despite the fact that in hindsight certain aspects of the Stasi’s spying practices might be perceived as funny, they were no laughing matter. (Beim Blättern und Sprechen darüber stellt sich für mich heraus: Trotz [der lächerlichen Fakten] finde ich das alles nicht lustig. 50 Aktenkilometer.)

79

For example, the protagonist Hans-Eberhard Zahn reports having been accused of “threatening the peace of the German people. And of the world.” (Gefährdung des Friedens des deutschen Volkes. Und der Welt.) 80

While Rancière emphasizes that ultimately audiences are made up of individuals whose reactions vary, it is worthwhile considering that “[p]erformance might inspire an audience to feel, at least momentarily, part of a community” (Heddon, Autobiography, 6). See also Rancière, Emancipated Spectator,13. 81

Oddey, “Tuning-in to Sound and Space,” 142.

82

“Einblick in das Projekt ‘Radioortung 10 Aktenkilometer Dresden.’” Accessed March 4, 2014. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQAAfitKvuI. 83

Barnett, “Sampling the Stasi,” 102. While Barnett applies this statement to the 50 Aktenkilometer audio tour, it seems to be even more pertinent to the video excerpt of 10 Aktenkilometer. 84

Martin, Theatre, 61.

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Meier, Ines. “Verwanzt: Q&A mit Rimini Protokoll über ‘Radioortung—10 Aktenkilometer Dresden.’” BLOUINARTINFO, April 25, 2013. Accessed March 12, 2014. http://de.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/895012/ verwanzt-qa-mit-rimini-protokoll-ueber-radioortung-10. Meierhenrich, Doris. “Auf Stasi-Spuren durch die Stadt.” Berliner Zeitung, May 5, 2011. Accessed March 6, 2014. http://www.berliner-zeitung.de/archiv/ ein-begehbares-smartphone-hoerspiel-von-rimini-protokoll-auf-stasi-spurendurch-die-stadt,10810590,10788158.html. Miller, Barbara. “‘Wiederaneignung der eigenen Biographie’: The Significance of the Opening of the ‘Stasi’ Files.” German Life & Letters 50 (1997): 369–77. Mumford, Meg, and Ulrike Garde. “Staging Real People: On the Arts and Effects of Non-Professional Theatre Performers.” Performance Paradigm 11 (2015): 4–14. Nicht, Frank Lothar. Die “Stasi” als Erinnerungsort im vereinigten Deutschland 1990–2010. Marburg: Tectum, 2011. Oddey, Alison. “Tuning-in to Sound and Space: Hearing, Voicing and Walking.” In Modes of Spectating, edited by Alison Oddey and Christine White, 133–45. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2009. Oliver, Kelly. Witnessing: Beyond Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Radioortung: Hörspiele für Selbstläufer. App download. Accessed April 15 2014. http://www.dradio-ortung.de/radioortung.html. “RADIOORTUNG: Radio Plays for Walkers (dradio-ortung.de).” Deutschlandradio Kultur. Accessed March 7, 2014. http://archive.aec.at/media/ archive/2012/194213/HA_120037_194213_AEC_PRX_2012_50_aktenkilometer_1530023.pdf. Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2009. Reynolds, Robert. “Trauma and Life History Interviewing.” Australian Historical Studies 43, no. 1 (2012): 78–88. Rimini Protokoll. “50 Aktenkilometer: Ein begehbares Stasi-Hörspiel.” Accessed March 3, 2014. http://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/de/project_4969.html. Saunders, Max. “Life-Writing, Cultural Memory, and Literary Studies.” In Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 321–31. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008. Scholz, Nina. “Der Türaufhalter.” Jungle World, June 1, 2011. Accessed March 21, 2014. http://jungle-world.com/artikel/2011/22/43316.html. Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 43.” In The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, edited by Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan, 25. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001. Schäfer, Andreas. “Späte Sieger der Geschichte.” Tagesspiegel, October 21, 2008. Accessed March 22, 2014. http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/theaterspaete-sieger-der-geschichte/1351522.html. Slevogt, Esther. “Mit dem kleinen (Stasi-)Mann im Ohr.” Nachtkritik, May 17, 2011. Accessed June 20, 2011. http://www.nachtkritik.de/index.php?option=com_ content&view=article&id=5650:50-aktenkilometer-rimini-protokoll-wandern-mit-der-staatssicherheit-durch-berlin-mitte&catid=38&Itemid=40.

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———. “Das Reden der anderen.” Nachtkritik, October 19, 2008. Accessed March 2, 2014. http://www.nachtkritik.de/index.php?option=com_content &task=view&id=1913&Itemid=40. Spreng, Eberhard. “Gutmenschentheater oder Vergangenheitsbewältigung?” Deutschlandradio, Kultur heute, October 19, 2008. Accessed February 12, 2014. http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/gutmenschentheater-oder-vergangenheitsbewaeltigung.691.de.html?dram:article_id=52090. Staatsschauspiel Dresden. Einblick in das Projekt “Radioortung—10 Aktenkilometer Dresden” 1. Accessed March 4 2014. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=cQAAfitKvuI. Staats-Sicherheiten: 15 Schicksale aus dem Gefängnis, DVD, including notes, ZDF, 2009. Wake, Caroline. “The Accident and the Account: Toward a Taxonomy of Spectatorial Witness in Theatre and Performance Studies.” Performance Paradigm 5, no. 1 (2009): 1–21. Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on 11 September and Related Dates. London: Verso, 2002.

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8: Surveillance and the Senses in a Documentary Portrait of Radio Free Europe Yuliya Komska

Radio Free Europe’s Tangled History

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HE STORY OF RADIO FREE EUROPE (RFE; since 1976, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, or RFE/RL), the West’s key Cold War–era broadcaster into five Eastern European countries in six languages, is laced with tales of mystery, murder, and espionage.1 Founded in 1950 and covertly financed by the CIA until 1967, based in divided Germany’s western half, amplified along fascist Portugal’s coast, and jammed east of the Iron Curtain, the station remained for decades in the spotlight of more than one country’s secret police. In addition to the CIA and its Western European counterparts, “[a]ll of the intelligence services of the Warsaw Pact,” RFE’s chronicler and former security director Richard H. Cummings observes, took a keen interest in the station’s operations.2 In Czechoslovakia alone, the former Ministry of National Security’s RFE dossier, started as early as April 1953, exceeded forty thousand pages.3 To a greater extent than other Western broadcasters into the Eastern bloc—including the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the Voice of America (VOA), and Rundfunk im Amerikanischen Sektor (RIAS)— RFE and its Munich headquarters set the stage for suspense worthy of a John le Carré novel. The allegedly unrivaled “visibility of Munich’s invisible [spy] community,” to quote le Carré himself, amounted to increasing infiltration of RFE by undercover Soviet-bloc agents disguised as RFE’s Eastern European employees.4 This entailed poisonings and suspected irradiation conspiracies against the station’s exile staffers (in the 1980s, three directors of the Romanian service fell victim to cancer within seven years) as well as a 1981 bombing of RFE’s Munich headquarters, coordinated by the infamous international terrorist Carlos the Jackal. In return, RFE kept a close watch on Soviet-bloc secret police forces, all the while being watched by them. The CIA, as far as we know, kept in the background. It did not directly stipulate the content of the station’s

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programs and thus remained, in the words of its historian and former director A. Ross Johnson, “a consumer rather than the source” of the information collected for broadcast.5 However, the agency did supervise RFE to ensure that the station’s exile employees, hired to simulate home radio broadcasts, did not stray too far from US foreign policy guidelines. It is small wonder that this dense story, with its web of archival sources, eyewitness accounts, and word-of-mouth anecdotes, has spellbound RFE’s lay and academic chroniclers. And yet, suspense notwithstanding, the story as told has hardly done justice to the station as one of the American exports with “complicated biographies [that] changed shape and meaning in different settings.”6 It has related but a part of RFE’s tangled history, which reaches far beyond the fact-driven “reflection-of-society perspective” as well as beyond its narrow definition of surveillance.7 This history includes not only the enmeshed pasts of broadcasting technologies, media, dissidence, advertising, and labor in the United States, Germany, Portugal, and the Eastern European target countries.8 It is equally tied to the fictional or documentary representations that have helped make RFE recognizable on both sides of the Atlantic—especially in still and moving images. Elsewhere, I have considered the Cold War trajectories of some such visuals.9 To begin examining their production and circulation after the Cold War, here I zoom in on just one particularly vivid example. By parsing out its unconventional depictions of surveillance, this essay commits to paper a chapter of RFE’s tangled history. My focus on RFE’s first Eastern European on-screen biography—Alexandru Solomon’s Cold Waves (Romania, 2007), a three-part, 2.5-hour-long chronicle of RFE’s longest-lived and most turbulent Romanian section—is not accidental.10 The film breaks with the long tradition of visualizing RFE in Western (specifically, American) terms. Instead, it stakes out a place for Eastern European vantage points and offers, as I point out in the coda, implicit commentary on the asymmetrical East–West memories of the broadcaster. The aforementioned tradition goes back to the structure of the station’s sponsorship in the 1950s and 1960s, when RFE’s fundraising arm, the Crusade for Freedom, provided cover for the CIA sponsorship by asking ordinary Americans to lend the ostensibly private broadcaster their financial support.11 To encourage donations, the organization commissioned a number of newsreels, short promotional films, and television mystery series episodes about RFE. Since then, the memory of RFE has relied heavily on this set of visuals, and it is a rare twenty-first-century documentary that has been able do entirely without the footage. Cold Waves is still somewhat dependent on this stock but does more than most comparable works to diversify it. Like no other RFE-themed documentary shot to date, Cold Waves pushes the boundaries of its genre by making use of unorthodox studio sets and montages. The most

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extensive and experimental among the existing attempts to capture RFE’s workings retrospectively, the film reflects (and reflects upon) the underpinnings of documentary filmmaking, dubbed by film critic Siegfried Kracauer “mental realities” (the ideological biases that lurk behind even the most factual histories) and “formal relationships” (the narrative and aesthetic frameworks into which such histories are forced).12 In the process, Cold Waves proposes a much less familiar definition of surveillance. In contrast to most written accounts of RFE, the film does not take surveillance to be a clear-cut phenomenon, related to activities of secret police forces. Instead of presuming clarity, it asks about the meaning of surveillance in the station’s tangled history. In lieu of an answer, Cold Waves draws attention to the following paradox: while we think of RFE and the Soviet-bloc secret police agencies as antagonists in real life, their representations (Solomon’s among them) continually bring to light surprising parallels in their workings. The most easily identifiable are linked to the two institutions’ relationship to the senses, especially sight and sound, both locked in a battle for what prominent early media theorist Rudolf Arnheim called “sensory preponderance.”13 This is the relationship that I set out to investigate here. Radio as a mechanism for sound transmission and secret police as a mechanism for state control and intelligence-gathering, as I explore in more detail below, share an invisibility that remains contested—not only for listeners and everyday citizens, but also among scholars and architects of their memory such as Solomon. On the one hand, the two are rendered inaccessible to the physical eye. Surveillance, as we know from Michel Foucault’s classic account, is historically predicated on seeing while remaining unseen. Radio waves and voices, for their part, have thrived on being perceived as “invisible but audible.”14 On the other hand, both are vividly present in private and public imagination—radio in “acoustic images” and surveillance in “highly visible spectacle[s] of secrecy.”15 In short, surveillance is an important knot in the tangled history of RFE— not as the expected web of intrigues that shadowed the station’s operations but, I argue, as an uncanny double of radio itself. In this regard, it is especially significant that Solomon’s film plots intersections between the history of Cold War broadcasting (i.e., broadcasting for the purposes of propaganda or public diplomacy) and conceptualizations of the sensory experience in works of media criticism. While attention to the senses has long informed writings about sonic and audiovisual media, no such scrutiny has been applied to Cold War radio (which RFE frequently exemplifies) and its adversaries’ activities. Instead, Cold War radio has been treated as a political “tool for cultural diplomacy” in the West or an instrument of sabotage in the East.16 And yet its operations and effects were nowhere as straightforward as that. Proof of this is Solomon’s portrayal of the relationship between RFE and surveillance,

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where the station’s neglected perceptual dimension comes to the fore. As I will demonstrate, sight and hearing are the film’s most significant leitmotifs. This chapter identifies the tension between these two senses to contribute to a fuller understanding of the station’s diverse cultural and historical contexts and, hopefully, of the cultural and historical contexts of Cold War broadcasting more broadly. My argument rests on three main building blocks. First and foremost, contemporary filmic depictions of RFE under surveillance document the station’s special and insufficiently understood relationship over decades to the world of images, both physical and mental. Cold Waves stands out because it does more than document. It uniquely highlights the relationships between the visual and the sonic and fleshes out their roles on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Since RFE was the only largescale international Cold War broadcaster born in the American golden age of television, its transatlantic career pivoted on the aforementioned American pictures while simultaneously attempting to assert sound against them.17 With the help from the Crusade for Freedom, RFE was in plain sight on billboards and in newsreels across the United States. The nation’s leading advertising professionals mounted the broadcaster’s visual campaigns, populating magazine advertisements and TV screens with freedom-starved Eastern Europeans huddled around outmoded radio sets. In Eastern Europe, by contrast, the station thrived as “the theater of the mind,” a mechanism that, in Neil Verma’s analysis, triggered and mobilized mental images to fuse the sound medium with human imagination—independently from any conventional visuals.18 In Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, invisible listeners hearkened, as the witnesses in Solomon’s film recall, to faceless stars with impossibly iconic voices. More vividly than RFE’s other screen biographies, Solomon’s filmic portrayal of the station under surveillance throws this hitherto unexplored perceptual East–West asymmetry into sharp relief and captures its end following 1989, when radio gradually ceded its privileged position behind the dismantled Iron Curtain. The revolutions, to invoke a scholar’s paraphrase of a well-known popular-culture adage, would be televised.19 Second, Solomon’s documentary exposes rare points of convergence between two important representational vectors. The first is what Cristina Vatulescu, following the Russian poet Osip Mandelshtam, calls “police aesthetics”: the porous membrane through which culture and the state-sponsored intelligence-gathering machine communicated with one another under socialism. Secret police, Vatulescu argues, parasitized literary texts to “tur[n] them into incriminating evidence.”20 The second is the notoriously difficult-to-control aesthetics of radio listening. The advent of radio as a mass medium in the 1920s had already seen the beginnings of an enduring impulse to steer not just what was

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being broadcast or by whom, but how and to what end the listeners— frequently described as an indistinct and remote yet quantifiable mass— should receive the broadcast.21 Early on, the accompanying conundrum of control revolved around the role of the visual in radio’s reception; “the theater of the mind” had embattled beginnings. For some, like the influential Soviet filmmaker and propagandist Dziga Vertov, radio was an extension and amplification of the moving image, banding its publics together into a “single consciousness.”22 The eye, whether human or mechanical, served as a vehicle for the ear.23 But others, like Arnheim, insisted that audio broadcasts must exist in definitive opposition to and independence from anything pictorial. Even “the urge of the listener to imagine with the inner eye,” Arnheim wrote with radio drama in mind, “is not worth encouraging.”24 The sightless radio listener became a widespread trope with the medium’s rise in the 1920s and a gruesome reality by the late 1940s, as the Second World War left thousands blind.25 Solomon’s filmic biography of RFE under surveillance continues to probe these unresolved interdependencies between the eye and the ear. Third, the film offers a powerful reminder that the two organs have long competed for primacy in the world of observation and intelligence gathering. While variations on the proverbial wisdom that walls have ears and woods have eyes have long existed across cultures, vision and hearing have by no means carried equal weight where policing has been concerned.26 The eye and its technologies, from windows to binoculars and cameras, have been the privileged instruments of surveillance.27 Thus, Vertov famously compares his movie camera to “the agents of the GPU [a precursor to the Soviet NKVD and KGB] who don’t know what lies ahead but have a definite assignment: to separate and bring to light a particular issue.”28 And yet Solomon’s recapture of RFE under surveillance, as the coda of this chapter will show, cites Vertov’s iconic footage to recall the ear’s strengths: its “concentrated alertness” and its capacity to linger on a moment.29 To further question the eye’s preponderance, Cold Waves goes on to portray blindness as the human condition under socialism. However, instead of redeeming the ear, Solomon alerts us to the dangerous political and technological implications of having “learned to listen farther,” whether with surveillance or dissent in mind.30 He reminds us that radio itself has long been caught between repressive eavesdropping and the liberating release of sound for cross-border travels.31 In the following pages, I begin with the context in which Cold Waves was created and then move on to an analysis of the film. The latter zeroes in on the film’s biographic (occasionally, autobiographic) thrust in relation to surveillance; its use of experimental techniques; the role of these techniques in conveying the importance of sight and hearing; and, finally, the references that Solomon’s directorial interventions make to the aforesaid aesthetic of radio listening. The chapter concludes with a discussion

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of how exactly such a narrative of RFE under surveillance embeds the station in the history of twentieth-century sonic and audiovisual media.

Radio Free Europe’s Surveillance in Audiovisual Context RFE under surveillance is not solely the stuff of written sources such as police files, corporate documents, or personal correspondence, which have already been tapped by several historians and memoirists.32 Early on, images of agents and spies became the backbone of public campaigns for or against the station in East and West. The Soviet Union, for example, amassed documentary footage until it sufficed to produce the incriminating propaganda film Radio Saboteurs (Радиодиверсанты, 1973). The film profiled RFE and its USSR-focused counterpart RL as the CIA’s mouthpieces, their offices brimming with staffers in blatant denial of being de facto US government employees. True to the era’s slogans, the film’s narrator accused these employees of obstructing détente, spreading “lies and slander about the socialist world,” and promoting nationalism to undermine socialist unity and discredit the Russian people.33 RFE-themed propaganda, however, was not exclusive to the Soviets. In the United States between 1950 and 1967, RFE’s masterminds (among them, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lucius D. Clay, the former military governor of occupied Germany’s US zone) touted the station as the only nongovernmental voice reaching across the Iron Curtain. To give this claim a semblance of validity, RFE’s two parent organizations—the National Committee for Free Europe (NCFE, subsequently Free Europe Committee, FEC) and the Crusade for Freedom—rolled out the aforementioned fundraising campaigns on American mass media. These were not restricted to public service announcements or newsreels. From its very inception, RFE was the subject of fictional and semifictional plots, lending relevance to questions of form, genre, and style that such projections usually involve. Consequently, actors in the guise of various Soviet-bloc secret police forces appeared on primetime US mystery shows, including the well-known Suspense (CBS radio, 1942–62, and television, 1949–54) and Appointment with Adventure (CBS television, 1955–56). The Crusade for Freedom paid for the airtime and dispatched its officers to introduce each such episode to TV viewers from the desks at CBS studios, soliciting donations in conclusion. A brief mention of just a few of these plots suffices to give a general impression. In a 1952 episode of the Suspense TV series titled “The Moving Target,” a leather-clad communist party watchdog comes close to thwarting a Hungarian sharpshooter’s plan to defect at the Helsinki Olympics. In “Listen Young Lovers,” a 1954 episode of the Suspense

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radio series, the secret agents’ clicking heels sneak up on star-crossed lovers—“refugees from [Czechoslovak] terror” about to escape from behind the Iron Curtain. And in a 1956 episode of the same series (“The Security Agent,” titled to leave little to the imagination), two Polish engineers—one tasked with informing on the other—travel to a mechanical exhibit in Prague on a plane that is forced to land in Vienna. RFE provided the all-important backdrop for each of these plots: on screen, the station’s broadcasts inspired dissent, exposed communist denouncers, and celebrated successful escapes. Like most CBS productions, such episodes attracted sizeable US audiences. Decades later, these visuals shaped the memory of RFE and of the station’s relationship with secret police forces. They became indispensable for the broadcaster’s contemporary visual portrayals, which proliferated around its sixtieth anniversary in 2010, when several documentaries set out to make sense of the broadcaster’s troubled past. Thus, Umbrella Assassin (United States, 2006), Waves of Liberty (Spain, 2007), To Russia with Love: The Great Radio War (Germany, 2008), Silenced: The Writer Georgi Markov and the Umbrella Murder (Bulgaria/Germany, 2013), and, most recently, Listen (Bulgaria, 2014) weave together snippets of original visual propaganda, declassified archival materials, and eyewitness testimonies into narratives true to the canon of documentary filmmaking. It is a canon that, in John Grierson’s classic definition, relies on unstaged, “original” scenes captured outside the “shim-sham mechanics of the studio.”34 In these versions of RFE’s biography, Eastern and Western surveillance on both sides of the Iron Curtain appears not as a pretext for conceptual reconsideration or artistic experimentation but as a contextual backdrop to be taken for granted. The plots—inasmuch as one can speak of them—unfold in uninterrupted chronological sequences and usually zoom in on the most dramatic points in the broadcaster’s history. Solomon’s Cold Waves breaks with this pattern. What exactly constitutes Solomon’s unorthodoxy? His penchant for studio sets provides the most obvious answer to this question. To underscore the triangle between the Romanian secret police (known as the Securitate), RFE, and the station’s audience, the director-cum-narrator includes fourteen carefully staged tableaux vivants, reviving this popular nineteenth-century form to interrupt the flow of the documentary narrative at five- to twenty-minute intervals. With varied witness testimonies and archival footage being the expected backbone of the film, the tableaux vivants function as equivalents of the much less predictable Brechtian estrangement effects. They create pauses where reflection on and questioning of the sensory relationship between radio listenership and surveillance can take place. Their deliberately contrived mise-en-scène casts sight and hearing (or the frequently underscored lack thereof) as conspicuous abstractions. The studio spaces are replete with close-ups of people’s eyes,

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of their ears, and of them performing activities that require mobilizations of perception—surveillance and radio listening among them. At first blush, the tableaux stand in stylistic and thematic opposition to the manner in which the film’s documentary footage and eyewitness accounts tackle the concrete historical experiences related to sound and vision. The latter are scattered throughout the narrative: city dwellers and farmers describe their radio-listening habits, RFE announcers comment on being recognized by their voices upon returning to postsocialist Romania, and a blind dissident poet tells the story of her confrontations with the Securitate. However, it soon becomes obvious that there is a symbiotic relationship between the contrived studio sets and the unstaged takes. The repeated abstractions systematize, expose, and magnify the real-life issues that are otherwise fleetingly addressed throughout the film. Step by step, the mise-en-scène reveals the triangle between the Securitate, RFE, and listeners, and brings to light the sensory undercurrents of Cold War broadcasting and surveillance alike. A parallel process is underway in Solomon’s other departure from the documentary tradition: his use of whimsical studio still lifes in alternation with the tableaux vivants. In six different compositions, displayed on the same rotating table, the filmmaker lays out the goods—from chicken feet to passports and guns—that metonymically stand for Romania’s key social problems in the chronicled time span, the thirty years of “real socialism” under the country’s last communist ruler, Nicolae Ceaușescu. Each time, the table spins briskly toward the viewer, taunting him or her with the possibility of being able to grasp the displayed objects and, with them, the evasive historical truth that the documentary struggles to discern in the cacophony of the interviewees’ dissonant voices. But the table withdraws just as quickly, which casts doubt not only on the tangibility of the displayed wares; its prompt removal also sets clear limits on just how many senses the film addresses. In contrast to vision or hearing, the sense of touch, with which Solomon tantalizes us, is clearly situated beyond his purview as well as ours. In Cold Waves, perception is limited to the two most immaterial senses—those on which surveillance as well as RFE’s broadcast and reception subsisted. Touch, despite its long tradition of being “as potent a source of knowledge as vision,” is excluded as irrelevant to “police aesthetics” and the aesthetics of radio listening alike.35 This is in line with radio’s twentiethcentury trajectory, which diminished the prominence of the haptic in communication and expression. (For centuries, sculpture had served as the blind human’s primary gateway to the arts, but following the advent of sound broadcast, radio took that place.)36 So, let us take a closer look at the tableaux vivants and their treatment of sight and hearing. These directorial liberties, we will see, hold up a mirror to RFE’s transatlantic memory to reflect its flaws.

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Outside the Studio and Back Again Solomon’s film is clearly anything but an unadorned assemblage of testimonies, even if its use of eyewitness accounts as primary source material implies otherwise.37 But neither is the director’s break with the documentary tradition total. The geography of Cold Waves, for example, prevents any radical departure from the genre’s fundamentals. The filmmaker’s travels to real-life locations outside the studio are extensive. More frequently than directors in charge of RFE’s other filmic biographies, Solomon traverses Europe to track down his interviewees, whose roster includes veterans of RFE’s Romanian section (completely disbanded only in 2008); the broadcaster’s retired American executives; French and Belgian journalists who smuggled dissident stories out of the Eastern bloc late in the Cold War; German lawyers who investigated the station’s bombing in February 1981; Carlos the Jackal’s former wife Magdalena Kopp; as well as Romania’s onetime dissenters and born-again communists, fellow travelers and quiescent citizens; RFE’s urban and rural listeners; and at least one unrepentant Securitate agent. At the director’s side, we move through the streets of Munich, Paris, and Bucharest, take a peek at a high-security prison in the French town of Clairvaux, where Carlos the Jackal serves his sentence on the site of the famous medieval abbey, and visit farmers and herdsmen in villages on Romania’s bucolic periphery. But the film’s locations are not limited to these original sites. Solomon’s occasional retreats into his film studio have at least one pragmatic explanation: documentary genre conventions are far from absolute. As Siegfried Kracauer observed, documentaries only appear to “have a penchant for actuality” and to “rely on non-actors.” Yet, “[u]pon closer inspection [. . .] this bias in their favor turns out to be unwarranted,” he noted in his Theory of Film (1960).38 Concerned primarily with all films’ relationships to the “visible world,” Kracauer was especially disappointed with documentaries’ accomplishments in this regard. More than other cinema genres, these films claim proximity to the world’s material reality, he pointed out. But their makers’ overbearing aesthetic or intellectual preoccupations, already introduced earlier as “formal relations” and “mental realities,” systematically breach this promise. Instead of giving in to such fallacies or committing himself to unattainable objectivity, a documentary filmmaker, Kracauer believed, ought to “approach the locales before his lens with an irrepressible sense of participation.”39

Radio Free Europe’s Biography as Autobiography Solomon, of course, is no stranger to either “formal relations” or “mental realities.” Without a doubt, he is guilty of some invention. But he is also an invested participant in the world of Cold Waves—it is not by accident

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that the narration’s opening line states, “I grew up with these voices, without seeing their faces”—and a seeker of new gateways to making this world accessible in the postcommunist present. But despite the seemingly definitive choice of the first person, his film maintains an unstable rapport with autobiography. On the one hand, the autobiographical connection is overstated. Solomon’s rendition of RFE’s biography, told as a mosaic of its individual Romanian staffers’ fates and memories, turns out to be the filmmaker’s autobiography as well. Notably, the film shares its chronology—which begins with Ceaușescu’s rise in 1965—with the life of the director, born in 1966. It is, from Solomon’s viewpoint, a chronology of disappointment. We begin in the relatively liberal late 1960s, marked by Romania’s dissent from the Soviet Union on such significant issues as the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Then, we enter the trying 1970s, when the country flirted with the West and RFE played an important part in providing emotional support after the 1977 earthquake in and around the country’s capital, Bucharest. The disaster temporarily damaged Romania’s communications network and thus enabled the exile voices to fill in the resulting gap from abroad. Eventually, we reach the late 1980s, with the chronic food shortages that Ceaușescu’s personality cult and ossified leadership style exacerbated. On the other hand, Solomon’s narration systematically downplays the degree of his participation in the lived experience of the film’s three decades. His involvement in the carefully edited on-screen reality clashes with the professed lack thereof in the actual past. As early as his second sentence, the narrator’s voice makes clear that, while he had heard RFE’s voices throughout his childhood and adolescence, he “was not interested. Politics was disgusting.” The film thus continually puts to the test its maker’s simultaneous attraction to and withdrawal from the substance of RFE’s broadcasts. Solomon leaves few doubts about the source of his disgust, which is none other than surveillance. He also makes it quite clear that the latter was synonymous with the Securitate. Indeed, RFE’s CIA sponsorship is mentioned but dismissed as unknown to the young filmmaker and inconsequential in a war that called for propaganda as everyone’s “important weapon.” Similarly, the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi) makes a brief appearance, but mostly as a source of documents related to RFE’s bombing in 1981. The Securitate, in contrast, gets the limelight; after all, the film’s three decades mirror the organization’s thorough restructuring. Between 1965 and the early 1980s, Romania’s secret police was thoroughly nativized (i.e., made free of ethnic minorities), placed under Ceaușescu’s authority after the defection to the United States of three-star Securitate General Ion Mihai Pacepa in 1978, emancipated from its counterparts in neighboring countries

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(including the Soviet Union), and equipped with increasingly sophisticated surveillance technologies, some imported from the West.40 These changes, Solomon posits, not only impacted the lives of his countrymen but also had immediate repercussions for RFE’s Romanian section—in his assertion, the most popular one. “A war was waged,” the narrator announces, “[a] war against a radio station.” Facing enemy lines, RFE staffers responded by becoming “field marshals in this battle,” adds writer Dan Zamfirescu on camera. The filmmaker and several of his interviewees go to great lengths to counter the convention that the Cold War, on European soil, was a mere war of words: “In this war,” the narrator tells us, “bombs were used, and there were victims too.” Such pronouncements erase the usual distinction between the secret police and the military.41 Just like the military, Solomon suggests, the Securitate used weapons that destroyed lives and silenced voices. Given this strong stance, we may find it surprising that the documentary only portrays one single former Securitate officer, and for a limited amount of screen time. Let us linger on this most obvious embodiment of surveillance in the film, even if his fleeting appearances ultimately imply that the strength of the Securitate was precisely in its diffusion and ubiquity, and thus in its presence as an abstraction.42 Abstraction is the main link between a flesh-and-blood former agent and the central motifs of Solomon’s tableaux.

The Face of the Securitate We first meet Ilie Merce as a former Securitate colonel and onetime head of its Eterul (Ether) section, opened in the early 1980s specifically to observe and control RFE’s activities. Only in the film’s last ten minutes do we find out that in the film’s present (it was released in 2007), Merce’s political career is far from over; he is a member of the Romanian parliament. His entire interview, we realize belatedly, is filmed in his palatial government office, complete with high ceilings, white walls, and massive carved-wood Gothic Revival furnishings (fig. 8.1). “I haven’t changed after 1989 and I don’t think a man can fundamentally change overnight, or after one month,” Merce declares, as “the real man stays the same.” The Partidul România Mare (Greater Romania Party) to which he belongs is, he is convinced, the only one that is “not corrupted, [. . .] not involved in any fishy business [. . .], not the mob.” Merce’s presence, no matter how episodic in the course of the film, stands for the failures of postcommunist lustration. Nowhere in the interview does Merce strike a confessional chord; instead, he places the blame on the regime’s foreign and domestic opponents. “It was common knowledge that Radio Free Europe was the spying cell of the CIA,” and therefore the enemy, he insists—right through 1989. The former Securitate officer is just as

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Fig. 8.1. Former Securitate Colonel Ilie Merce in his government office, from Alexandru Solomon’s Cold Waves (Romania, 2007). © 2007 Alexandru Solomon. Reproduced with permission.

evasive about the numbers of his subordinates, claiming that Ether counted only fifteen people, rather than eight hundred, as his interviewer alleges. “Eight hundred what?” Merce ascertains, only to equivocate further: “Oh, all right, there were one or two extra officers in the territorial department in each county, who centralized the information.” A similar response follows Solomon’s anecdote about his colleague who, as a fourteen-year-old in 1980 or 1981, contacted RFE to request a song but was arrested and slapped by a Securitate officer. “Nobody ever did that,” Merce retorts. “I never heard about any of my colleagues slapping anybody, not to mention my subordinates.” Ether’s activities at the time were much more “formal,” he claims, focused on the big picture of “neutraliz[ing] the network” around RFE. But Merce proves just as reticent to complete this bigger jigsaw puzzle as he is to make confessions. His six appearances in the film, each about a minute long, extend the established pattern of denial, one step at a time. Eventually, this pattern gives him a chance to dismiss every question about suspected irradiation attempts against RFE announcer Vlad Georgescu and Romanian section director Noel Bernard, both of whom succumbed to cancer within months of receiving threats from the Securitate. Merce repeatedly turns the mirror away from himself and holds it up to his erstwhile adversaries, many now deceased. Even in an extreme close-up, he is inscrutable. “RFE people,” Merce claims as we look intently at (but not into) his eyes, “pretended to be brave,” but all they did was flee “and ca[ll] themselves dissidents.” The repeated use of his initial appearance in the five-minute prologue to each of the film’s

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three parts, where he names his unit and admits to having listened to RFE “because he had to,” underscores his entrenchment.

Inside the Tableaux Vivants Emphasized time and again, Merce’s opaqueness reduces him to a type. His mask-like front, repeatedly caught with eyes shut during the film’s final thirty minutes, cements his affinity to Solomon’s recurrent tableaux vivants, based on types and experimenting with forms of facelessness in ways that pit sight and hearing against each other. The combination of facelessness, invisibility, and audibility becomes the staple of Solomon’s storytelling early on. “This is a love and hate story,” the narrator explains in the prologue, “woven around invisible waves. It involves three collective characters. First, the stars on the radio, the kind of stars that have no faces. Then there were we, the listeners. But there was somebody else, somebody who listened and wished to silence all that.” This introduction—part of a prologue that opens each of the film’s three parts—outlines the spatial structure of the rooms that house the fourteen tableaux and describes their inhabitants in brief—without showing them yet. And indeed, in one long take the camera dollies from left to right past two adjacent spaces that are opened to the viewer’s line of sight. The camera is the ultimate all-seeing eye. In each space, the walls converge on each other to make a V-shape at the far end of the room, creating an impression of a sealed, claustrophobic environment straight out of Franz Kafka’s “Little Fable.” In the film’s second minute, the camera enters the first such space: a soundproof recording studio, padded in black, its white floor angled away from us. We see a pile of books in the studio’s far corner and an upholstered, green steel-frame chair in front of it, closer to us. The camera adjusts to eye level, and a wooden table with a large microphone suspended over it comes into view. Past a dividing wall follows the second space: an everyman’s kitchen, its tall, white-tiled surfaces reflecting the dim light of a naked light bulb (fig. 8.2). To our left, we spot an oilclothcovered kitchen table, where a large portable radio set, turned toward us, obscures a few bowls. Two stools stand empty next to the table, and a shelf with hanging utensils graces the opposite wall. The third space, reserved for that anonymous “somebody who listened and wished to silence all that,” is temporarily withheld from the viewer. For the moment, the narration is restricted to the two other groups, identified as listeners: first, Romanians like Solomon’s father, who “hung on some voices coming from far away,” and second, those very voices at RFE, who “were also listening [. . .] to what happened inside the country.” “But we,” the narrator reiterates, “could only imagine their faces.” At this early point in the film, sound takes precedence over sight, inaugurating the tension between the two as the documentary’s leitmotif.

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Fig. 8.2. Studio tableau with an RFE recording room abutting a Romanian kitchen, from Alexandru Solomon’s Cold Waves (Romania, 2007). © 2007 Alexandru Solomon. Reproduced with permission.

Fig. 8.3. Studio tableau with an RFE announcer in the recording room, from Alexandru Solomon’s Cold Waves (Romania, 2007). © 2007 Alexandru Solomon. Reproduced with permission.

The third space, one belonging to the Securitate, is revealed only in the prologue’s fifth minute. Before that happens, the already familiar rooms are populated with residents. In the recording studio, an announcer is ostensibly reading a script into the microphone over the table, although his eyes and lips are motionless (fig. 8.3). In the absence of any broadcaster’s acronyms, the voiceover invites us to accept the man as RFE’s

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personification, the first “collective character” of the tableaux: “Did you listen to Radio Free Europe?” Solomon asks his still invisible interviewee. In contrast to the station’s many flesh-and-blood staffers with whom Solomon meets, the character of the announcer projects neither emotions nor expressions. The illusion of his humanness is deliberately suspended, to conspicuously unrealistic effect. From a glimpse of his waxen complexion, facing us almost directly, the viewer is unsure whether the man is a living being or a mere dummy. His mouth is wide open, while his eyes appear glued shut—a motif that Merce’s expression will echo subsequently. Already this first impression suggests that sound, rather than sight, dominates Solomon’s reconstruction of the era. The camera arrests this “star with no face”—here, a star with a blank face—looking at the script, and yet clearly he cannot see. Here, Solomon’s invocation of blindness indicates a much bigger crisis of vision that unfolds in all three spaces and spills out, as I will explain further, into the documentary footage. Behind the wall, in the kitchen, a token listener sits right in front of the portable radio, his face turned away from the viewer. His posture enacts attention, captured on many American RFE publicity posters as well, even though the sound in the scene is strictly nondiegetic (limited to the narrator’s voiceover, a recorded interval signal of RFE’s Romanian section, and the offscreen white noise of a radio dial between stations). Vision, once again, is not part of the picture. The theme continues as the camera ushers us into the third and final room. There, a Securitate agent clad in a boxy gray costume listens to the goings-on in the adjacent kitchen through an oversize tin funnel pressed to the wall. In all likelihood, he is not the only agent who will pass through this room, but the invisibility of his features makes it impossible to tell him apart from his successors. His face is turned away from the light source, and his eyes appear as tightly sealed as the announcer’s earlier. Keeping its focus on the figure, the camera tracks past a table with paper, pen, telephone, a lamp, and two chairs right next to it, all gradually revealed in an extreme close-up and representative of the secret police bureaucrats’ typical accessories. On the opposite wall hangs a framed photograph of Ceaușescu. As the signal of RFE’s Romanian service fades out, Ilie Merce’s voice becomes audible for the first time, well before Solomon cuts to the interview shot. In this environment, again, listening prevails; the viewer is the only one watching. But even then, as we will come to understand, we cannot see everything; Solomon’s tableaux manipulate our vision as well. With astounding exactitude, the three adjacent rooms mirror the tripartite structure of Romania’s “layered relief of power,” as media historian Dana Mustaţă describes the map of interactions between the actors on the country’s political landscape. In the language of the Securitate files, Mustaţă points out, this structure is made up of the following: “the

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zone of anti-regime climate” (here, the recording studio); “the private domicile” (here, the kitchen); and “the state territory” (here, the Securitate office). The task of broadcasting media, Mustaţă suggests, is to forge political links between these segments and to render them visible—figuratively, in her case.43 Solomon’s profile of RFE’s behavior and the effects of surveillance on it goes deeper than the map metaphor. Not only is the above threepart structure made physically visible on film; not only is the unfathomable “relief of power” condensed to a comprehensible likeness of a shared dwelling separated only by walls. Through these walls, sound travels with utmost ease, to echo the filmmaker’s reminiscence that when his family turned their receiver off, “you could [still] hear the neighbors.’” The camera’s movement through the cross-section of the set strings together a deliberately simplistic causality of surveillance: RFE makes a broadcast, listeners tune in, and the Securitate eavesdrops on them. Each such tableau is an ironic model of Ceaușescu’s Romania as an acoustic residential community. Its physical structure and the listeners’ complicated position between two conflicting forces (RFE and the Securitate) here depend not on the effects of each specific broadcast—in contrast to the interview footage, the tableaux substitute recordings of RFE’s actual sound with Solomon’s narration—but on RFE’s overall impact as a “collective character.” More significant still is Solomon’s portrayal of radio’s ability to craft the “relief of power” by way of the senses, to graft sensorium onto territorium. Of course, the traditional definition of a sensorium describes it as an intersection between the “sensory mechanics of the human body” and “the intellectual and cognitive functions connected to it.”44 Solomon’s sensorium is, in contrast, not so much about perception itself as about using the tableaux as a continually expanding commentary on it. This commentary accrues thanks to the changes that take place within the tableaux’s mise-en-scène as the documentary moves along. While RFE’s studio remains virtually the same, shifts of various magnitudes occur in the two other rooms. Not only does furniture move—tables, in particular, constantly migrate from the rooms’ sides into their centers and back—but people are reshuffled as well. In the second room as shown in the third tableau, three family members are ensconced around the radio in the wake of the powerful earthquake of 1977, when “the National Radio and Television were silent all night long” and RFE picked up the baton. A water glass spills on the tablecloth to indicate the aftershocks, and in the empty next-door Securitate office, Ceaușescu’s lonely portrait hangs aslant. In the politician’s absence on a visit to Nigeria, the voiceover comments, “nobody cared to release an official communication.” In the fourth tableau, the camera changes directions. This time starting out in the Securitate office, it finally catches an agent in profile—and

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yet he is backlit to the point of unrecognizability. We see him put a file on the table and straighten it out as the camera circles around the face in an emphatically futile attempt to help us see more. Each and every face in the tableaux is turned precisely at an angle that ensures its inaccessibility to the viewer, who depends solely on sound—the voiceover—for clarification. “After the earthquake,” the narrator offers, “the political system seemed to be also shaking.” In response, the family across the wall gathers around their radio; personal anecdotes of dissent begin to mount in the subsequent interviews. The opacity of former Colonel Merce’s thoughts resonates with the opacity of the abstract characters’ physical visages. Eyes, in particular, remain systematically hidden; we are, indeed, confronted with “collective characters.” Like the RFE announcers to whom Solomon alludes, they are partially faceless. The subsequent tableaux play with the technical studio settings to similar effects. One after another, chiaroscuro lighting, soft focus, closeups of individuals’ torsos, and unexpected blackouts meddle with our vision, making the shots too dark, too blurred, or too disrupted. In the tableaux, our eyes are constantly forced to fail. As a result, perception defaults to our ears, so that watching Solomon’s contrived studio scenes mimics radio listening; dark settings and blackouts, we may recall, defined radio’s most popular forms (in particular, radio plays) from the medium’s heyday in the 1920s and 1930s.45 Only the end of the film indicates an exception. The late 1980s arrive, and with them, an important structural change in the set: the kitchen (the legendary locus of anticommunist dissent) is swapped for a living room. In a parallel move, a television set replaces the trusty radio receiver—and, eventually, RFE itself. Still, even in these shots, the figures sit with their backs to us, and the screen remains indiscernible. “Maybe Free Europe won the battle,” the narrator comments on the increasing presence of television, “but their victory was the beginning of the end.” This was not only because RFE’s “golden age” has ended—following 1989, several of its émigré staffers, the narrator notes, returned to Romania and “‘converted’ to TV hosts”—or because the revolutionaries of 1989 made their most fundamental impressions on small screens. “It was clear that television would defeat us, radio, because they could add images to the information,” remembers commentator Neculai Constantin Munteanu. “Images have a deeper impact than just words.” But above all, Solomon ventures, the tide began to turn because RFE’s victory was incomplete. One of the film’s documentary shots circa 2006 lingers on a window of an electronics store, where several TVs are set to the same show with former secret police agents holding court. Among them is the onetime head of the Securitate’s Foreign Intelligence Service, Nicolae Pleșiță. His only regret about the Securitate’s violent measures against RFE, he proclaims, is that “they were not on a larger scale.” In Solomon’s Romania after

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communism and after RFE, the rise of vision as television only breeds historical myopia.

Blindness as the Human Condition under Socialism The resurgence of vision, myopic as it may be, at the end of the film brings us to the second source of Solomon’s commentary on the film’s sensorium: the documentary footage. Indeed, the tableaux are not alone in displaying and assigning blindness or in playing down the relevance of vision to the narrative. The documentary shots also take up the theme, in two distinct ways: by establishing RFE as a “theater of the mind” and by following a physically blind former dissident—a poet and teacher in the Lyceum for the Blind in Cluj. Let us consider each of these paths. Due to the alleged facelessness of RFE’s stars, Solomon’s interviewees insinuate that the station had a profound impact on its listener’s imaginations. Like other radio broadcasters, RFE did not trade in “just words,” as Munteanu claims. Although these impressions are originally portrayed as mental, they intensify to a nearly physical point in the course of the film. Even in the introductory sequence of shots, we learn that under Ceaușescu, the station’s sounds—not only its interval signal (a pastoral flute melody) but also its announcers’ voices—became oddly iconic. Having returned to Romania after 1989, these radio professionals realized that people recognized them from hearing rather than seeing them. Their faces, along with other visual clues, turned out to be secondary. The same was true of the events they reported: “It was almost like I saw it, as if I watched it through my window,” recalls onetime RFE listener and wellknown dissident Vasile Paraschiv on camera. In the West, RFE staffers experienced something similar. Reminiscing about her possibly murdered commentator husband Vlad, Mary Georgescu found that she could “look at pictures of him but hearing his voice [was] too much.” His voice, in her expression, was “too real”—certainly more real than his photographs. Along similar lines, when broadcasting from the Munich studio, RFE’s announcer Edelina Stoian felt as if she had been “physically entering people’s houses in Romania.” Standing in front of a microphone was like a “romantic date with the millions of people who [she] knew were listening.” Despite such staggering numbers, the image inspired considerable intimacy: Stoian “used to imagine the people who were listening to RFE quietly while they were shaving, drinking their coffee, while they were looking in the mirror, trying to get up.” Such intimacy ties in with the second feature of this documentary that plays down the eye and accentuates the ear: blindness. One of the strongest testimonies to the intimacy between RFE commentators and their fans comes from the blind poet and teacher Ana Hompot. We encounter her at the very end of the familiar prologue, and then on

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two other occasions in parts 2 and 3 of the film. Along with several other Romanians, she makes an appearance after the prologue’s threepart tableau. “I had a strong feeling that these were the people I really met,” she volunteers. “It was a personal, direct relationship.” Hompot’s blindness, however, bears a relationship not only to the quality of her listenership but to surveillance as well. Under Ceaușescu, her condition irked the Securitate; a poet published in the West and heard on RFE, she dared to speak up and associate with the dissenting intellectual Doina Cornea. Having failed to recruit Hompot as an informer, the Securitate held blindness against her: “How could a blind person have ideas? A blind person should never have ideas,” she recalls their rage. Her story in Solomon’s film turns the Securitate’s assertion on its head: “I think that everybody was sightless then,” she says. “A certain degree of blindness existed. Limited sight. Because you could not know what was happening in the country. And you had no picture whatsoever, except the one imposed by the party. Radio Free Europe was an alternative to all that. It was reality.” Again, we hear that the voices were more real than any visual impressions and that blindness was a universal condition. Solomon’s editing techniques invite viewers to experience a version of this scenario. In part 2, the camera shows Hompot testifying about communism and RFE’s role in front of her class, as we stand by. Just as she is redefining the concept of witnessing, rejecting its frequently overstated link to vision (i.e., eyewitnessing), the film cuts to the school’s hallway. From there, we must look into Hompot’s classroom through a window. Yet a lace curtain blurs our view, and we can only hear Hompot’s voice and the rhythmic clicking of her students’ Braille typewriters (fig. 8.4). A similar reorientation of our senses recurs in a near-identical cut during Hompot’s last appearance, in part 3 of the film. We hear but cannot see her; we are ostensibly in her shoes—and, by extension, in the shoes of other RFE listeners. “Limited sight,” the film suggests, was not only a circumstance of life in communist Romania. It is a feature of the present-day memory of Radio Free Europe in Eastern Europe, on which I comment below.

Coda: Radio Free Europe’s Asymmetrical Memory in East and West The Eastern European accent of Cold Waves gains special significance thanks to Solomon’s distinctive directorial approach. In contrast to most other filmmakers who turned to RFE in their work, he rarely falls back on the footage from RFE’s American promotions—as I have mentioned, the richest (and frequently the only) source of historical visuals on the topic

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Fig. 8.4. Poet and teacher Ana Hompot inside the Cluj Lyceum for the Blind, from Alexandru Solomon’s Cold Waves (Romania, 2007). © 2007 Alexandru Solomon. Reproduced with permission.

and a powerful engine behind such films as Christian Bauer’s To Russia with Love: The Great Radio War, completed only a year after Cold Waves. For Solomon, only three snippets from RFE’s archive of moving images— a public service announcement featuring the very young Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan and two scenes from a distinct short feature film The Big Truth, featuring Reagan’s voiceover (both from 1951)—make the cut. Otherwise, Solomon installs his tableaux to articulate RFE’s asymmetrical audiovisual memory in East and West and to call into question the accompanying “sensory preponderance of the visual” in how the West has imagined the station from 1950 to this day.46 Tableaux vivants, to quote Brigitte Peucker, have historically displayed moments of “intensified intermediality.” Offscreen, they have been the interface between painting, sculpture, and theater, conferring “the impression of three-dimensionality upon the image” to be created or recreated.47 Intermediality certainly serves Solomon’s ends, although not in the way that we would expect. On screen, contrasted with the surrounding moving images, the frozen appearance of the tableaux extends this far-reaching tradition into the world of listening. For this purpose, Solomon revises the pictorial focus and advances an aural, ear-focused sensorium instead. Intermediality, in his case, is not a form of consensus between the three visual mediums mentioned by Peucker but rather an audiovisual tug of war between the eye and the ear. Solomon’s intermediality thus obscures more than it reveals; it recreates conditions for blindness rather than seeing; and it therefore casts a critical glance both at

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life under socialism and at the lopsided memory of Radio Free Europe— visual in the West and, prior to his film, aural in the East. This twofold critical reassessment is most forcefully manifest in the film’s very first shot, an extreme close-up rather than a panoramic establishing shot, which opens the prologue in each of the film’s three parts. Amid white noise and muffled voices interrupted by the turning of an invisible radio dial—the sonic environments that RFE’s American publicity campaigns conjured up in pictures48—the Romanian section’s interval signal emerges. Just as a male announcer’s voice identifies the station (“This is Radio Free Europe”), the black screen fades into a close-up of an ear framed by short black hair (fig. 8.5). After the signal resumes, the head turns toward the viewer. In the following extreme close-up, a pair of eyes looks straight into the camera. And just in that moment, the narrator’s voice comes on for the first time: “I grew up with these voices, without seeing them.” This autobiographical announcement not only sets up the ear/eye antinomy for the rest of the film but also undercuts the eye’s still lingering presence on screen. And indeed, some nine minutes later, the ear’s presence is reinforced in a shot of a surprisingly similar close-up not fabricated by Solomon. On a tour of RFE’s former Munich headquarters, now home to the Ludwig Maximilian University’s psychology department, the camera registers and zooms in on an oversized poster portrait of an ear (fig. 8.6). “New sounds for the city,” it reads. This allusion to sonic novelty points to Solomon’s citation of a much earlier and better known on-screen eye–ear switch. It takes us all the way back to the early history of the socialist project and its aesthetic propagation: Vertov’s Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass (1931). The first Soviet sound film, Enthusiasm is both a bold audiovisual experiment in recording live industrial noises and an agitprop tool for the first Five-Year Plan (1928–32). In this tour de force, cinema’s new age of sound goes hand in hand with the new age of Soviet industrialization and the accompanying forced secularization. Its unscripted first shot—the second minute of the film, in particular—establishes this emergent world’s sensory parameters.49 This is the shot that resonates in the important second minute of Solomon’s film. In the words of film scholar Lucy Fischer, Vertov’s shot opens with “an ambiguous image of a young woman who puts on headphones and sits in some kind of switchboard.”50 Diegetically, we are made privy to what is audible only to her: a sound montage of white noise, street organ, folk and experimental music, and, finally, church bells. At this point, the camera zooms in on a close-up of her headphone-covered ear and maintains its focus and distance while the woman turns to face us. The film then segues into a succession of quick cuts between an imperial crown, presumably on a church gate—two symbols of the old regime that were about to be dismembered in front of the camera—and alternating

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Fig. 8.5. Allegorical figure of RFE listener, from Alexandru Solomon’s Cold Waves (Romania, 2007). © 2007 Alexandru Solomon. Reproduced with permission.

Fig. 8.6. Poster inside the Psychology Department of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, formerly RFE headquarters, from Alexandru Solomon’s Cold Waves (Romania, 2007). © 2007 Alexandru Solomon. Reproduced with permission.

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close-ups of the woman’s eyes and headphone-covered ears. In Fischer’s mind, we are looking at “the film listener,” ambivalently designated as either a film production crew member or a member of the audience with whom we would identify. In Oksana Bulgakova’s words, “the film starts by broadcasting the sound track, but we, the spectators, see what the girl-mediator is hearing, as if the circuit of perception was incorrectly connected.”51 The young woman’s listenership is a harbinger of novelty; the character’s appearance belongs to the part of the film that is titled “The Birth of the Radio-Ear.” This technologically mediated and enhanced “Radio-Ear” is clearly more than a human organ. It is an abstract parallel to Vertov’s earlier concept of the “Kino-Eye,” which he defined in 1924 as “the microscope and telescope of time” capable of “making the invisible visible, the hidden manifest.”52 However, its presumed novelty turns out to be incomplete: many scenes in “The Birth of the Radio-Ear” are filmed in silent mode. Moreover, Enthusiasm’s pursuit of studio-free documentary sound still submits to the rules of a classical symphony, with the speed of live-recorded sound manipulated in postproduction.53 A similar tension between novelty and tradition resonates in Solomon’s recourse to the tableaux vivants—an old-fashioned form resuscitated for the sake of twenty-first-century intermediality. But the most important meaning of Solomon’s citation from Vertov lies elsewhere. To be sure, the maker of Cold Waves adopts Vertov’s “semantic oppositions and confrontations” between the eye and the ear. Indeed, both filmmakers validate “not—[simply] visual but [also] aural impressions.”54 And yet, their two sets of impressions, when considered historically, diverge in their content and purpose. Surely, the films stage the eye–ear conflict to dismantle the old order (political or sensory) and assemble its replacements—socialist in one case and auditory in the other. Yet these orders’ historical timelines do not overlap; on the contrary, they are staggered. This means that the order that Vertov cocreates—the one that lends the secret police a solid footing and equips it with “Kino-Eyes” and “Radio-Ears”—is precisely the order that Solomon helps undo. It is then small wonder that the headphones worn by Enthusiasm’s subject— for Vertov, a vehicle for the sound track of socialism under construction, and for the secret police, an instrument of eavesdropping—disappear in Solomon’s quotations of Vertov’s imagery in Cold Waves. In Solomon, the ear appears uncovered. The headphones’ implicit removal leaves behind an awareness of technological mediation of listening and its pitfalls. Radio Free Europe’s tangled history—one that helps shape a more balanced East–West memory of the station—takes root in this awareness.

Notes My thanks to the editors for their helpful feedback and to Alexandru Solomon for his permission to reproduce the stills from Cold Waves.

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1

I refer to RFE as a Western (rather than American) station because its operations would have been unthinkable without the facilities, labor, and technical support in West Germany and Portugal (as well as Spain, in the case of USSR-focused Radio Liberty, or RL). In 1976, RFE and RL were merged after their congressional investigation (1971) and placed, as a result, under oversight by the new Board for International Broadcasting (1973). At this point, neither station could advertise itself as private, and the CIA sponsorship stopped. RFE/RL discontinued its original Eastern European broadcasts between 1993 and 2008. Currently, the station focuses on Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Northern Caucasus while providing online news in a wide variety of languages. A brief chronology appears on the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty website, accessed April 12, 2014, http:// www.rferl.org/info/chronology/538.html. 2

Cummings, Cold War Radio, 34.

Koutská and Žáček, “Radio Free Europe.” The government-sponsored Czech Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes provided the data. 3

4

le Carré, Secret Pilgrim, 125. On the documented and alleged conspiracies, see Johnson, Radio Free Europe, 194–98. 5

Kracauer, Theory of Film, 207. Examples of such perspectives include Machcewicz, Poland’s War, 34, and Johnson, Radio Free Europe, 43–44. 6

Nolan, Transatlantic Century, 231.

7

Lefait, Surveillance on Screen, vi. Examples of the “reflection-of-society perspective” include such studies as Cummings, Cold War Radio, Johnson, Radio Free Europe, and Machcewicz, Poland’s War. I use the term “tangled history” to echo Werner and Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison,” 31–32. 8

I examine these intersections in my manuscript in progress, Transcontinental and Transatlantic: Radio Free Europe in the Golden Age of Television. Because its findings are beyond the purview of this volume’s focus on surveillance, they are not included here.

9

Komska, “Sight Radio,” 55–75.

10

Other contemporary documentaries on the subject include Umbrella Assassin (United States, 2006), Waves of Liberty (Spain, 2007), To Russia with Love: The Great Radio War (Germany, 2008), and Silenced: Georgi Markov und the Umbrella Murder (Bulgaria/Germany, 2012). In Eastern Europe, Diana Ivanova’s Listen (Bulgaria, 2014) has followed in Solomon’s steps while abiding by the conventions of documentary filmmaking. 11

An overview of such campaigns is the subject of Cummings, Radio Free Europe’s “Crusade.” Additional information appears on his blog, http:// coldwarradios.blogspot.com/. 12

Kracauer, Theory of Film, 207.

13

Arnheim, Radio, 136.

14

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 200–202; Fickers, “Visibly Audible,” 413–15.

15

Verdery, Secrets and Truth, 26; Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics, 2; Verma, Theater of the Mind, 9; Fickers, “Visibly Audible,” 415.

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225

16

Nolan, Transatlantic Century, 233; Machcewicz, 146–47. Friederike KindKovács discusses RFE’s other functions, especially its role in the traffic of unsanctioned samizdat literature. However, her findings downplay RFE as an audiovisial phenomenon. See Written Here, 219–47.

17

Other important stations, such as BBC, VOA, or RIAS, were founded prior to the early 1950s, when the Federal Communications Commission lifted the restriction on granting new television licenses and thus, by most accounts, ushered in the golden age of television in the United States. I develop this argument in “Sight Radio.” The differences between American and European media periodicities are outlined in my “Introduction,” 3–4. 18

Verma, Theater of the Mind, 9, 14.

19

Mustaţă, “‘Revolution,’” 76–97.

20

Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics, 6, 9.

21

Razlogova, Listener’s Voice, 4; Hagen, “Calling out to Tune In,” 123–48; Nietzel, “Culture, Entertainment and Listening Habits,” 20–21, 22–24.

22

Vertov, “Essence of Kino-Eye,” in Kino-Eye, 49.

23

Fischer, “Enthusiasm,” 26.

24

Arnheim, Radio, 137.

25

Ryan, “Fritz Lang’s Radio Aesthetic,” 268; Fetscher, “Blindness and ‘Showside,’” 247–49. In Germany, among other countries, the blind soldier lobby was a prominent proponent of the country’s second golden age of radio in the 1950s. 26

Zbikowski, “Listening Ear,” 45–46.

27

Schmidt-Burkhardt, “All-Seer,” 18.

28

Vertov, “Provisional Instructions to Kino-Eye Groups,” in Kino-Eye, 69. See also Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics, 77–103.

29

Schmidt-Burkhardt, “Listening Ear,” 18.

30

Ihde, quoted in Sobchak, “When the Ear Dreams,” 113.

31

Bijsterveld, “Eavesdropping on Europe,” 102.

32

See, among others, Cummings Cold War Radio and Radio Free Europe’s “Crusade”; Johnson, Radio Free Europe; and Nelson, War of the Black Heavens. 33

The film is available online at YouTube.com, accessed April 28, 2016, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=471XRFBk9TM. 34

Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary,” 21.

35

Jay, Downcast Eyes, 100.

36

Fetscher, “Blindness and ‘Showside,’” 247–48.

Mustaţă, for example, mines Cold Waves for testimony without ever mentioning the film’s aesthetic or narrative peculiarities. See her “Geographies of Power,” 165–72.

37

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38

Kracauer, Theory of Film, 201.

39

Ibid., 203.

40

Verdery, Secrets and Truths, 13–17.

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41

Ibid., 22.

42

Ibid., 24–15.

43

Mustaţă, “Geographies of Power,” 150–51.

44

Ndalianis, Horror Sensorium, 1.

45

Fetscher, “Blindness and ‘Showside,’” 246–47.

46

Arnheim, Radio, 136.

47

Peucker, Material Image, 26.

48

Magazine Service Bulletin, January–March 1964, No. 15, Record Series 13/2/207, Box 114 mag, University of Illinois Archives, Advertising Council Archives, Historical File. 49

Vertov’s draft of the script appears as “Symphony of the Donbas (Enthusiasm)” in Kino-Eye, 293–96. 50

Fischer, “Enthusiasm,” 29. The still is reproduced in Bulgakowa, “The Ear against the Eye,” 226. 51

Ibid., 227–28.

52

Vertov, “Birth of Kino-Eye,” in Kino-Eye, 41.

53

Bulgakowa, “The Ear against the Eye,” 222.

54

Ibid., 226.

Bibliography Arnheim, Rudolf. Radio. London: Faber & Faber, 1936. Badenoch, Alexander, Andreas Fickers, and Christian Henrich-Franke, eds. Airy Curtains in the European Ether: Broadcasting and the Cold War. Berlin: Nomos, 2013. Bijsterveld, Karin. “Eavesdropping on Europe: The Tape Recorder and East–West Relations among European Recording Amateurs in the Cold War Era.” In Badenoch, Fickers, and Henrich-Franke, Airy Curtains, 101–22. Bulgakowa, Oksana. “The Ear against the Eye: Vertov’s Symphony.” Monatshefte 98, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 219–43. Cummings, Richard H. Cold War Radio: The Dangerous History of American Broadcasting in Europe, 1950–1989. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009. ———. Radio Free Europe’s “Crusade for Freedom”: Rallying Americans behind Cold War Broadcasting, 1950–1960. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. Fetscher, Justus. “Blindness and ‘Showside’: Non-Visual Aspects of German Radio and Radio Plays in the 1950s.” Monatshefte 98, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 244–66. Fickers, Andreas. “Visibly Audible: The Radio Dial as Mediating Interface.” In The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, edited by Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, 411–40. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Fischer, Lucy. “Enthusiasm: From Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye.” Film Quarterly 31, no. 2 (Winter 1977/78): 25–34. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

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Grierson, John. “First Principles of Documentary.” In Nonfiction Film: Theory and Criticism, edited by Richard Meran Barsam, 19–30. New York: Dutton, 1973. Hagen, Trever. “Calling out to Tune In: Radio Free Europe in Czechoslovakia.” In Badenoch, Fickers, and Henrich-Franke, Airy Curtains, 123–48. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Johnson, A. Ross. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty: The CIA Years and Beyond. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Kind-Kovács, Friederike, Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014. Komska, Yuliya. “Introduction. West Germany’s Cold War Radio: A Crucible of the Transatlantic Century.” German Politics and Society 32, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 1–14. ———. “Sight Radio: Radio Free Europe on Screen, 1951–1965.” In Voices of Freedom—Western Interference? 60 Years of Radio Free Europe in Munich and Prague, edited by Anna Bischof and Zuzanna Jürgens, 55–75. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015. Koutská, Ivana, and Pavel Žáček. “Radio Free Europe through the Eyes of the State Security Service.” Accessed March 10, 2014. http://www.ustrcr.cz/ data/pdf/publikace/bic/bic0212/153-161.pdf. Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. le Carré, John. The Secret Pilgrim. London: Coronet, 1991. Lefait, Sébastien. Surveillance on Screen: Monitoring Contemporary Films and Television Programs. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012. Levin, Thomas Y., Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel, eds. CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Machcewicz, Paweł. Poland’s War on Radio Free Europe, 1950–1989. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Mustaţă, Dana. “Geographies of Power: The Case of Foreign Broadcasting in Dictatorial Romania.” In Badenoch, Fickers, and Henrich-Franke, Airy Curtains, 149–78. ———. “‘The Revolution Has Been Televised . . . ’: Television as Historical Agent in the Romanian Revolution.” Journal of Modern European History 10, no. 1 (2011): 76–97. Ndalianis, Angela. The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012. Nelson, Michael. War of the Black Heavens: The Battles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997. Nietzel, Benno. “Culture, Entertainment and Listening Habits of the West German Discourse on Radio during the 1950s.” German Politics and Society 32, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 15–29. Nolan, Mary. The Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890–2010. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

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Peucker, Brigitte. The Material Image: Art and the Real in the Film. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. Razlogova, Elena. The Listener’s Voice: Early Radio and the American Public. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Ryan, Michael P. “Fritz Lang’s Radio Aesthetic: M. Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder.” German Studies Review 36, no. 2 (May 2013): 259–79. Schmidt-Burkhardt, Astrit. “The All-Seer: God’s Eye as Proto-Surveillance.” In Levin, Frohne, and Weibel, CTRL [SPACE], 16–31. Sobchak, Vivian. “When the Ear Dreams: Dolby Digital and the Imagination of Sound.” In Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media, edited by Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell, 112–36. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Vatulescu, Cristina. Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Verdery, Katherine. Secrets and Truth: Ethnography in the Archive of Romania’s Secret Police. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014. Verma, Neil. Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Vertov, Dziga. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Translated by Kevin O’Brien. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Werner, Michael and Bénédicte Zimmermann. “Beyond Comparison: Histoire croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity.” History and Theory 45 (February 2006): 30–50. Zbikowski, Dörte. “The Listening Ear: Phenomena of Acoustic Surveillance.” In Levin, Frohne, and Weibel, CTRL [SPACE], 32–49.

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Contributors CAROL ANNE COSTABILE-HEMING is professor of German in the Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of North Texas. She received her PhD in German from Washington University in St. Louis and has distinguished herself as a scholar of twentieth- and twenty-first-century German literature and culture. She has published widely on Wende literature and post-Wende Berlin, including (with Rachel Halverson and Kristie Foell) Textual Responses to German Unification: Processing Historical and Social Change in Literature and Film (de Gruyter, 2001) and Berlin. The Symphony Continues: Orchestrating Architectural, Social and Artistic Change in Germany’s New Capital (de Gruyter, 2004). She has also published essays and book chapters on Volker Braun, F. C. Delius, Jürgen Fuchs, Günter Grass, Günter Kunert, Erich Loest, Peter Schneider, and Christa Wolf. Most recently, she coedited (with Rachel Halverson) the volume Taking Stock of German Studies in the United States: The New Millennium (Camden House, 2015). In 2012, the American Association of Teachers of German named her Outstanding German Educator for the Post-Secondary level. ULRIKE GARDE is associate professor in German studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Her research interests include intercultural German studies, German literature and the performing arts, and audience and reception studies. She is the author of Brecht & Co: German-Speaking Playwrights on the Australian Stage (2007), coeditor of Belonging and Exclusion: Case Studies in Recent Australian and German Literature, Film and Theatre (2009) and of Rimini Protokoll Close-Up: Lektüren (2015). Her latest book, coauthored with Meg Mumford, is Theatre of Real People: Diverse Encounters at Berlin’s Hebbel am Ufer and Beyond (Bloomsbury, 2016). VALENTINA GLAJAR is professor of German at Texas State University. She is the author of The German Legacy in East Central Europe (Camden House, 2004), coeditor (with Jeanine Teodorescu) of Local History, Transnational Memory in the Romanian Holocaust (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), and (with Domnica Radulescu) of “Gypsies” in European Literature and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and Vampirettes, Wretches, and Amazons: Western Representations of East European Women (East European Monographs; Columbia University Press, 2004). Glajar has

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also translated (with André Lefevere) Herta Müller’s Traveling on One Leg (Northwestern University Press, 1998; 2010). Her latest book, coedited with Bettina Brandt, is Herta Müller: Politics and Aesthetics (University of Nebraska Press, 2013). The article in this volume is part of her current project on German-Romanians and their secret police files. She is also working with Bettina Brandt on a special issue of Seminar that examines the politics of archives. YULIYA KOMSKA is associate professor of German studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of The Icon Curtain: The Cold War’s Quiet Border (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Her work has appeared in German Life & Letters, New German Critique, German Politics and Society, and German Studies Review. She is the editor of a special issue of German Politics and Society titled West Germany’s Cold War Radio: The Crucible of the Transatlantic Century. The article in this volume relates to her ongoing book project, Transatlantic and Transcontinental: Radio Free Europe in the Golden Age of Television. ALISON LEWIS is professor of German in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She has published extensively in the areas of modern German literature and German studies—mainly on gender, literature, and politics; the German Democratic Republic; German unification; and the history of intellectuals and the East German secret police. She is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters, as well as three monographs: Subverting Patriarchy: Feminism and Fantasy in the Works of Irmtraud Morgner (Berg, 1995), Die Kunst des Verrats: der Prenzlauer Berg und die Staatssicherheit (Königshausen & Neumann, 2003), and Eine schwierige Ehe: Liebe, Geschlecht und die Geschichte der Wiedervereinigung im Spiegel der Literatur (Rombach, 2009). She is coeditor of the Australian yearbook for German studies Limbus (Rombach) and the monograph series Transpositionen with Röhrig-Universitätsverlag. She is coauthor (with Birgit Lang and Joy Damousi) of a forthcoming monograph with Manchester University Press, titled Making the Case: The Case Study Genre in Sexology, Psychoanalysis and Literature. CORINA L. PETRESCU is associate professor of German at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of Against All Odds: Subversive Spaces in National Socialist Germany (Lang, 2010). She has published articles and book chapters on resistance to Nazi Germany, 1968, in the Romanian imaginary, Volker Braun, Eginald Schlattner, and the Yiddish theater in Romania. She is currently working on a cultural history of the Jewish State Theater in Bucharest from its establishment in 1948 to the present.

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231

ANNIE RING is lecturer in German at University College London. Her monograph After the Stasi: Collaboration and the Struggle for Sovereign Subjectivity in the Writing of German Unification was published by Bloomsbury in October 2015. Her other recent publications include essays on Harun Farocki’s critical use of film archives (Edinburgh German Yearbook 9, 2015), and on the (w)hole in the archive in theories by Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari (Paragraph 37. 3). ANIKO SZUCS is an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Drama and the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, and in the Department of English and the Department of Communication and Theatre Arts at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She completed her dissertation “Entrapped in the Archive: State Security Documents Recontextualized in the Hungarian Art World” in 2015. Szucs holds an MA in English and in Communication, as well as an MFA in Theatre Studies and Dramaturgy. She was the resident dramaturge of the prestigious theater Vígszínház in Budapest between 2000 and 2005 and has worked as a production dramaturge for other theaters both in Hungary and the United States. In 2009, she cocurated the exhibition “Revolutionary Voices: Performing Arts in Central & Eastern Europe in the 1980s” at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center. Her academic work focuses on political performance, the politics of memory and performance, and Eastern European theater.

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Index “affective facts,” 161, 163, 172n22 Aichelburg, Wolf von, 84, 88, 91, 94–97, 98–99, 100n5, 102n25 Aktenkundig (ed. Shädlich), 115 Államvédelmi Hatóság (ÁVO/ÁVH): characteristics and tactics of, 2; employees and informants statistics, 4; language of, 154, 160, 174n27 Althusser, Louis, 175n30 Anderson, Sascha, 7–8, 12, 31, 37–42, 46, 47–49, 49n18, 52n69, 52n79, 138; Wiens and, 35, 51n41 Apaches on the Danube (Kovács and Bereményi), 15, 153–70, 172n22, 173n24, 176n43, 176n46 Appointment with Adventure, 206 Aranici, Pavel, 72, 81n71 Arendt, Hannah, 1 Arnheim, Rudolf, 203, 205 Assheuer, Thomas, 120 “autofiction,” 116, 122, 127, 130–31 Babiac, Heinz, 65 Bălăceanu-Stolnici, Constantin, 21n69 Barnett, David, 196n83 Barthes, Roland, 174n29 Barton, Brian, 185 Becher, Johannes R., 32, 33 Bechtel, Clemens, 15, 178, 180–81, 187, 190 Bechtel, Roger, 15, 154, 161, 164, 174–75nn28–30 Bereményi, Géza, 15, 153, 159–60, 173n24, 176n46 Berg, Jochen, 41 Bergel, Hans, 84–85, 88–89, 91–92, 96, 100n5, 105n55 Bernard, Noel, 212 Biermann, Wolf, 7, 10, 31, 36

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Big Truth, The (Friedman), 220 Birkner, Andreas, 84, 87, 88, 91, 92–97, 100n5, 102n25, 106n60 Black Church Trial, 12, 13, 64–65, 74, 77n30, 85–86, 88–90, 92, 97 Blue Lily Group, 59–61 Bohley, Bärbel, 45, 121, 134n24 Borsányi, László, 157–58, 171n13 Borvendég Deszkáss, Sándor, 157–58, 173n24 Bourdieu, Pierre, 30 Brecht, Bertolt, 187, 195n58 Bridzki, Bella, 186 Brünger, Sebastian, 182 Buckley-Zistel, Susanne, 166–67 Bulgakova, Oksana, 223 Butler, Judith, 14, 124–25, 132 Capp, Fiona, 10 Cărbunariu, Gianina, 171n17 Carlos the Jackal (Ilich Ramírez Sánchez), 201, 209 Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 208, 210, 215–16 “chosen amnesia,” 166–67, 176n41 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 201–2, 206, 210, 211, 224n1 Clay, Lucius D., 206 Cold Waves (Solomon), 16, 202–5, 207–23 collaborators: post–Cold War treatment of, 5–7, 19n29, 99, 115 Collett, Emily, 182, 193n21 Cornea, Doina, 219 Crusade for Freedom, 206 Cummings, Richard H., 201 Dávid, József, 157, 158, 171n13

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INDEX

declassified files: access to, 4–8, 17n7, 18n20, 115; media use of, 7–8, 131; reactions to, 13–14, 52n60, 115 defamiliarization, 187, 195n58 Deitel, Ernest, 62, 69, 77n30 Dennis, Mike, and Norman LaPorte, 32 Departamentul Securităţii Statului. See Securitate Depner, Cristl, 75n12 Depner, Horst, 61, 63–64, 67, 75n13, 86, 103n43 Depner/Volkmer Group, 59, 61, 63, 64–65, 67, 69, 71–72, 74, 75n13, 86, 90–91, 98, 103n38, 104n49 Derrida, Jacques, 129 Deutschland 83, 16 Dietschreit, Frank, 185 “document-affect,” 15, 154, 161, 164 Döhring, Jana, 14, 17, 137–45 Döring, Stefan, 41 Doubrovsky, Serge, 122 Eakins, John Paul, 11 East German Writers’ Union, 32–33, 35, 37, 40–42, 44, 125 Edel, Lutz, 119 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 206 Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass (Vertov), 16, 221, 223 Eppelmann, Rainer, 7 Erll, Astrid, 186, 190 Faktor, Jan, 39 Fall Janke, Der (Altaras and Hanke), 184, 194n35 Faţă în faţă (Barna), 16 Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub, 189 “Fink Susanne.” See Siegmund, Marianne Fischer, Lucy, 221, 223 Foucault, Michel, 84, 203 Freeman, Mark, and Jens Brockmeier, 185–86 Fuchs, Jürgen, 137 Funder, Anna, 145n6

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50 Aktenkilometer (Rimini Protokoll), 15–16, 178–86, 190–91; production credits, 192nn2–3 Furian, Gilbert, 187–90 Gallagher, Kaleen, 127 Garton Ash, Timothy, 145n1 Gauck, Joachim, 130–31 Geertz, Clifford, 36 Georgescu, Mary, 218 Georgescu, Vlad, 212, 218 German Writers’ Trial, 12, 13, 21n66, 77n77, 84–86, 88–90, 93–98 Gheorghiu-Dej, Gheorghe, 13, 72, 76nn20–21 Gillenberg, Natascha, 180, 182, 185 Gilson, Elke, 131–32 Göllner, Carl, 91, 104n46 Grass, Günter, 36; Wolf and, 125, 130–31 Grierson, John, 207 Grigore, Costică, 61 Group 47, 36 Gündisch, Gustav, 91 Günther, Thomas, 41 habitus, defined, 12, 30 Hahn, Heinz, 12–13, 58, 59–65, 67–74, 77n30, 78nn43–44, 80n60, 81n67, 82n78, 90 Hang, Helgard, 15 Heddon, Deirdre, 182 Hermlin, Stephan, 32, 36 Heym, Stefan, 32, 36 “history-effect,” 15, 154, 161, 164, 174n29 Hodor, Mădălin, 84 Hohenschönhausen prison, 15, 43, 53n86, 178, 182, 183, 187, 189 Hompot, Ana, 218–19, 220 Hungarian Revolution, 59–60, 78n38, 85, 89, 93, 157; amnesty after, 176n47 Ioanid, Radu, 84 Ionaşcu, Adrian, 60–61, 76nn19–20, 78n44

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INDEX Iordănescu, Octavian, 62–63, 65, 68–69, 71–73, 79n44 Jákfalvi, Magdolna, 176n43 Jickeli, Fritz, 95 Johnson, A. Ross, 202 Johnson, Uwe, 36 Jones, Sara, 10 Kaegi, Stefan, 15 Kafka, Franz, 213 Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Erster Band (Rimini Protokoll), 194n32 Kastner, Manfred, 53n85 Kaufman, Walter, 125 Kienlechner, Sabina, 82n76 Kind-Kovács, Friederike, 225n16 Kittner, Alfred, 93, 106n61 Kjellman-Chapin, Monica, 122 Klein, Karl Kurt, 91 Klier, Freya, 37 Klöess, Gyorg, 95 Kolbe, Uwe, 49n15 Kopelew, Lew, 34 Kopp, Magdalena, 209 Korth, Werner, Ferdinand Jonak, and Karl-Otto Scharbert, 119–20 Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve, 160, 172nn19–20 Kovács, Krisztina, 15, 153, 157, 159– 60, 173n24 Kovács, Peter. See Dávid, József Kracauer, Siegfried, 203, 209 Krasser, Harald, 87, 91, 93, 96, 102n24, 105n56 Kunert, Günter, 36, 137 Kunze, Reiner, 33, 36, 137 Kunze, Rudolf, 43–47, 53n85 Lamm, Herbert, 92 Lange, Erika, 33 Lautenschlager, Erika, 33, 42, 53n80 Laza, Laura Gabriela, 99 le Carré, John, 201 Leben der Anderen, Das (von Donnersmarck), 16, 137 Lewis, Alison, 130, 137, 145n4, 147n29, 179, 182

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235

Lillins, Andreas A., 102n25 Listen (Ivanova), 207, 224n10 Loest, Erich, 126, 137 Lorek, Leonhard, 41 lustration, 5, 8, 19n29, 211 Macrakis, Kristie, 11 Malzacher, Florian, 184 Mandelshtam, Osip, 204 Mann, Thomas, 92 Margul-Sperber, Alfred, 90 Maron, Karl, 123, 126 Maron, Monika, 14, 116–17, 120–24, 126, 129–32 Maron, Monika, works by: Ach Glück, 131; Endmoränen, 131; “Fettaugen auf der Brühe,” 131; Flugasche, 121; Pawels Briefe, 122–24, 128, 129, 132; Quer über die Gleise, 122; Stille Zeile Sechs, 129–30, 134n24 Martin, Carol, 161, 186, 191–92 Massumi, Brian, 161, 163, 172nn21– 22 May, Karl, 153, 158 Meine Akte und ich (Bechtel), 180, 190 Merce, Ilie, 211–13, 215, 217 Mielke, Erich, 115, 117–19 Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. See Stasi Möckel, Konrad, 64–65, 67, 79n48, 92 Moldovan-Sponer, Teodor, 91, 104n47 Morgner, Irmtraud, 33–34, 50n33 Motzan, Peter, 98 Müller, Günther, 95 Müller, Heiner, 120–21 Müller, Herta, 17 Müller-Enbergs, Helmut, 116 Mumford, Meg, 179 Munteanu, Neculai Constantin, 217, 218 Mustaţă, Dana, 215–16, 225n37 National Committee for Free Europe (aka Free Europe Committee), 206

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236

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INDEX

National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archive, 4 Nowotnick, Michaela, 89 Nünning, Ansgar, 186 Nüssbacher, Gernot, 89–90 Opitz, Detlef, 41 Pacepa, Ion Mihai, 210 Papenfuß, Bert, 41, 52n69 Paraschiv, Vasile, 218 Parker, Stephen, and Matthew Philpotts, 30 Petöfi-Circle, 89, 103n36 Peucker, Brigitte, 220 Pintilescu, Corneliu, 86, 87–88 Plaumann, Eberhard, 44–45 Pleşiţă, Nicolae, 217 Plog, Ursula, 144 Pönig, Rolf, 35 Popescu, Emil, 67 Poppe, Ulrike, 45 Prenzlauer Berg group, 38–39, 40, 41, 47 radio: aesthetics of, 204–5, 208, 216– 19; blindness and, 205, 218–19, 225n25; series, 206–7 Radio Free Europe (RFE), 16, 60, 201–23, 224n1 Radio Saboteurs, 206 Rancière, Jacques, 192n6, 196n80 Rathenow, Lutz, 39, 41, 52n69 Reagan, Ronald, 220 Rechtien, Renate, 128–29 Reinelt, Janelle, 174n27 Reise, Lieutenant, 44 Ricoeur, Paul, 27 Rigney, Ann, 186, 190 Rimini Protokoll, 14–16, 178–80, 186, 190–91, 192n2 Rosenberg, Alfred, 92 Roth, Herman, 96, 102n24 Saunders, Max, 189 Schädlich, Hans Joachim, 37, 51n38 Schäuble, Wolfgang, 7

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Scherg, Georg, 84–85, 89, 91, 94–97, 99n4, 100n5 Schiferdecker, C., 61–62 Schiller, Lieutenant, 33 Schirrmacher, Frank, 52 Schlattner, Eginald, 12, 13, 58, 60, 63–64, 68–69, 74, 78n44, 84–86, 89–99, 100n5, 103n36, 104n47, 105nn56–57, 108n95 Schlattner, Eginald, works by: “Gediegenes Erz,” 86, 90, 100n11, 103n40; Rote Handschuhe, 13, 17, 21n67, 77n30, 99 Schlattner, Kurt-Felix, 108n95 Schlesinger, Klaus, 44 Schuschnig, Hans, 95 Schuster, Paul, 90, 93 Scribner, Charity, 126 secret police files: as “file stories,” 9, 27–28, 42, 56; genres and stylistics, 9–11, 28–30, 57, 86–87; as “life writing,” 9, 14, 27; performative approaches to, 14–17, 171n17, 178–92; self-invention in, 29–30; Treffberichte (meeting reports), 29 Securitate (Departamentul Securităţii Statului): characteristics and tactics of, 2, 13, 19n22, 20n65, 56, 58, 62, 70, 81n67, 87–90, 99, 210–11; employees and informants, 3–4, 18n11; language of, 10, 86–87; post–Cold War revelations, 8; Radio Free Europe and, 16, 207–8, 210–11 Seghers, Anna, 32 “shadow documents,” 14, 115 Shakespeare, William, 184 Siegmund, Harald, 73, 77n30, 84–85, 88–89, 94, 96–97, 98 Siegmund, Marianne (“Fink Susanne”), 12–13, 57–74, 77n30, 78–79nn44–46, 80n57, 81n76, 82n78, 90 Sienerth, Stefan, 105nn55–56 Silenced: The Writer Georgi Markov and the Umbrella Murder, 207 Slevogt, Esther, 181, 186–87

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INDEX Solomon, Alexandru, 16, 202–5, 207–23 Spengler, Oswald, 92 Spreng, Eberhard, 184–85 Staats-Sicherheiten (Bechtel), 15, 178– 91; production credits, 192n1 Stalin, Joseph, 4 Stan, Lavinia, 2, 7, 10 Stasi (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit): characteristics and tactics of, 2, 27–30, 46–48, 116–20, 182, 196n78; employees and informants statistics, 3, 4; Herrschaftswissen metanarrative, 29 Stasi Documents Agency, 7–8 Stephanowa, Barbara, 182, 196n78 Stoian, Edelina, 218 Stoppard, Tom, 171n10 Suspense, 206–7 Szcypiorski, Andrzej, 8 Székely, Gisela, 91, 95 Taute, Heinz, 61, 63, 77–78nn37–38 “Theatre of Real People,” 179, 185 Thompson, James, 172n19 To Russia with Love: The Great Radio War (Bauer), 207, 220 Török, Ferenc, 153 Tudoran, Dorin, 84, 171n17



237

Waves of Liberty, 207 Wegner, Bettina, 44, 45 Weißensee, 16 Wetzel, Daniel, 15 Wiens, Maja, 12, 31–32, 42–49, 53n80, 54n104 Wiens, Paul, 12, 31, 32–37, 40, 42, 47, 48, 50n29, 51n46 Wiesenmayer, Astrid, 87, 88, 91, 94–95, 96, 100n25, 106n70 Wietersheim, Annegret von, 33, 37, 49n17 Wilke, Manfred, and Michael Kubina, 131 Wittstock, Erwin, 91, 96 Wolf, Christa, 13, 116–17, 125–29, 137–38; literary style, 126 Wolf, Christa, works by: Kassandra, 127; Kindheitsmuster, 127; Nachdenken über Christa T., 126; Stadt der Engel, 116, 126–28, 131, 132; Was bleibt, 116, 126, 128, 129 Wollenberger, Vera, 12 women in secret police forces, 4, 18n19. See also Siegmund, Marianne writers: as “engineers of human souls,” 4; secret police obsession with, 4 Yoder, Jennifer, 8

Umbrella Assassin, 207 Vaterlandsverräter (Hendel), 16 Vatulescu, Cristina, 9–10, 43, 56, 86, 204 Verma, Neil, 204 Vertov, Dziga, 16, 205, 221, 223 Vilceleanu, Gheorghe, 73

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Zahn, Hans-Eberhard, 184, 196n79 Zamfirescu, Dan, 211 10 Aktenkilometer (Rimini Protokoll), 180, 190–91 Zillich, Heinrich, 91, 96 Zipser, Richard, 145n1 Žižek, Slavoj, 183

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Europe kept detailed records not only of their victims but also of the vast networks of informants and collaborators upon whom their totalitarian systems depended. These records, now open to the public in many former Eastern Bloc countries, reflect a textually mediated reality that has defined and shaped the lives of former victims and informers, creating a tension between official records and personal memories. Exploring this tension between a textually and technically mediated past and the subject/victim’s reclaiming and retrospective interpretation of that past in biography is the goal of this volume. While victims’ secret police files have often been examined as a type of unauthorized archival life writing, the contributors to this volume are among the first to analyze the fragmentary and sometimes remedial nature of these biographies and to examine the subject/victims’ rewriting and remediation of them in various creative forms. Essays focus, variously, on the files of the East German Stasi, the Romanian Securitate (in relation to Transylvanian Saxons), and the Hungarian State Security Agency. Contributors: Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Ulrike Garde, Valentina Glajar, Yuliya Komska, Alison Lewis, Corina L. Petrescu, Annie Ring, Aniko Szucs. Valentina Glajar is Professor of German at Texas State University, San Marcos. Alison Lewis is Professor of German in the School of Languages and Linguistics, the University of Melbourne, Australia. Corina L. Petrescu is Associate Professor of German at the University of Mississippi.

Edited by

Glajar, Lewis, Petrescu

Cover design: Frank Gutbrod

and

Cover image: Document and film negatives from the Romanian secret police file ACNSAS (National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives), FI, file 1264512, Bucharest.

Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc

he communist secret police services of Central and Eastern

Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc

Between Surveillance and Life Writing Edited by

Valentina Glajar, Alison Lewis, and Corina L. Petrescu