Alfred Kurella (1895–1975): one of the GDR’s leading cultural functionaries. [Back to Text]
In the summer of 1989, increasing numbers of GDR citizens sought asylum in embassies (notably, the West German Embassy in Prague) or West Germany’s Permanent Mission in East Berlin. [Back to Text]
In 1976, the GDR expatriated dissident singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann, demonstrating a new hard line and disillusioning broad circles of East German intellectuals, whose attempt to pro- test Biermann’s expulsion was squelched. In the following years, increasing numbers of intellectuals left the country. [Back to Text]
The East German state profited when GDR writers published work in the West, as the hard currency which they received flowed into the state coffers. Beginning in 1979, GDR citizens were required to convert any hard currency they owned into ‘Forum cheques’ at state banks; these cheques could be spent only at ‘Intershops’, state-run retail shops which offered Western goods. These measures ensured a flow of much-needed hard currency. [Back to Text]
Walter Ulbricht (1893–1973): GDR leader from 1950 to 1973. [Back to Text]
A common greeting in the Catholic regions of Southern Germany. [Back to Text]
Pensioners were permitted to travel abroad. [Back to Text]
Rührung ist nur eine Randerscheinung: Allusion to the anthology Berührung ist nur eine Randerscheinung (Connection Is Just a Fringe Phenomenon). See Afterword. [Back to Text]
The official East German term for West Berlin, which the GDR did not recognize as part of West Germany. [Back to Text]
Lavrentiy Beria (1899–1953): chief of the NKVD (Soviet secret police) under Stalin. [Back to Text]
Yuri Andropov (1914–84): general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1982 to 1984. [Back to Text]
Samuel Beckett, How It Is (1961). [Back to Text]
Giles Deleuze, ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’ in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974 (David Lapoujade ed., Mike Taormina, trans.) (Paris: Semiotext(e), 2004), p. 171. [Back to Text]
On his visit to East Berlin in early October 1989 to mark the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the GDR, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev warned GDR leader Erich Honecker to undertake reforms in response to the massive citizens’ protests. Gorbachev is popularly quoted as saying: ‘Life will punish those who come too late.’ [Back to Text]
Rosa Luxemburg’s best-known saying: ‘Freedom is always the freedom for dissenters.’ [Back to Text]
Hungary was a popular tourist destination for East Germans. In summer 1989, Hungary tolerated, then officially permitted travel across its border to Austria; hence, many East Germans used their Hungarian holidays to escape to the West. [Back to Text]
Afterword by Isabel Fargo Cole
‘I’: Historical Background
The years following German reunification in 1990 were a wrenching time in the ‘new German states’. The East German dissidents and civil rights activists who had brought down the Berlin Wall were overwhelmed by the rapid reunification, unable to navigate the new political system and assert their visions and concerns. Meanwhile, the opening of the Stasi files brought a long series of painful disclosures about some of East Germany’s most respected political and cultural figures — most spectacularly in the literary scene.
When ‘I’ first appeared in 1993, it was praised as the first serious literary exploration of the East German surveillance state and its demise — and its portrait of an underground writer turned informer caused a stir. That January, the playwright Heiner Müller and the novelist Christa Wolf had been exposed as ‘Unofficial Collaborators’ (Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, IMs) for the Stasi.1 The shock waves were immense: Müller and Wolf were internationally respected for their artistry and their critical stances.
Still, Müller and Wolf were establishment figures who identified with socialist ideals and chose to work within the system. More shocking were the revelations about the ‘underground scene’, long lionized as a hotbed of opposition. Its chief impresario was the charismatic poet Sascha Anderson (b. 1953) from Dresden. In the 1980s he dominated the Scene in Berlin — Prenzlauer Berg and beyond, organizing events and editing samizdat and officially sanctioned publications in East and West. He co-edited a landmark anthology of young, ‘unofficial’ literature Berührung ist nur eine Randerscheinung. Neue Literatur der DDR (Connection Is Just a Fringe Phenomenon: New GDR Literature) published in West Germany in 1985. In 1986, Anderson moved to West Berlin but played an active role in the literary scenes on both sides of the Wall. 2
In 1991, singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann accused Anderson (‘Sascha Arsehole’) of having worked for the Stasi. It emerged that Anderson had worked as an IM since 1975, sent to Berlin for the express purpose of gaining control of the Scene:
By 1984 he had reached his goal [. .] he pulled all the strings [. .]. His verdicts held sway in East and West alike [. .]. Anderson’s main task was to depoliticize the Prenzlauer Berg Scene. That meant that he committed the younger poets and painters in his circle to an aesthetic master plan and systematically marginalized and vilified the older, politically engaged or active authors. .3
Anderson was not the only writer to straddle the line between the ‘unofficial literary scene’ and ‘unofficial collaboration’, but his central role made his betrayal truly devastating. Among his peers, anger mingled with defensiveness, with some critics going so far as to call the entire Scene a ‘simulation’ of the Stasi.
Simulation, a favourite term of Jean Baudrillard, points to the sort of hip postmodern attitudes which Hilbig takes to task, and which Anderson embodied. Anderson propagated an experimental, ironically anti-political literature which many in the GDR found liberating. In a dogma-dominated society like that of the GDR, the eschewal of ideology could count as an ideological statement, the apolitical as political. Drawing upon Western poststructuralist thinkers, this literature focused on ‘language as such’: ‘a response to [. .] an increasingly mechanical public and official language of administration and declamation. This new tendency supersedes a more “content”-oriented literary culture created over the past decades by the generation of established [. .] GDR writers [. . such as] Christa Wolf.’4
Anderson gradually admitted his IM activities. His theoretical and psychological explanations for his behaviour were widely regarded as self-serving, even pathological obfuscation. ‘Betrayal is the right word,’ he told Stern magazine in 2001, ‘. . It was also a betrayal of my own “I”, an “I” that I still reject.’5 Still active in the Berlin literary scene, Anderson remains a figure of morbid fascination. In 2002, Anderson published a lyrical recollection (‘not an autobiography in the usual sense’): Sascha Anderson.
The story of Sascha Anderson, who was his own postmodern fictional creation, or the fictional creation of the Stasi, or the purveyor of fictions to the Stasi, or about the Stasi, or all of the above, clearly resonates with Hilbig’s novel. However, ‘I’ is not ‘Sascha Anderson’, nor indeed any other specific IM. Appearing at the height of the scandals, uncannily prescient about the Stasi’s modus operandi and the psychology of collaboration, ‘I’ was widely read as a roman-à-clef, but Hilbig felt misunderstood by this reading. He always emphasized that he had little knowledge of the inner workings of the Stasi (or, for that matter, of the Berlin Scene), and did not view his own Stasi files until after completing the manuscript.