Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on the Text Introduction Collaboration and the Problem of Sovereign Subjectivity Chapter 1 The Psychic Life of Collaboration: Monika Maron’s Stille Zeile Sechs Chapter 2 Mapping the Topography of Surveillance in Wolfgang Hilbig’s “Ich” and Kerstin Hensel’s Tanz Am Kanal Chapter 3 Collaboration as Collapse in the Stasi Files and Life Writing of Monika Maron and Christa Wolf Chapter 4 Prison/Writing: The Subject of the Stasi Archive Chapter 5 Animals and the Limits of Sovereignty in the Writing of Unified Germany Chapter 6 Capitalist Complicity in Wolfgang Hilbig’s Last Prose Works Conclusion After the Stasi: Complicity and Cooperation Bibliography Index

Promotional Information

Draws on previously unexamined Stasi files to explore the responses of modern East German writers to the culture of collaboration in the former socialist state and in its aftermath.

About the Author

Annie Ring is Lecturer in German at University College London, UK.

Reviews

In addition to suturing the GDR experience of collaborative subjectivity to the ongoing present, Ring also links this literature to its earlier incarnations in the history of literary modernism. Reaching as far back as Faust, Penthesilea, and “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” which harken forward to the protagonists of “Ich,” animal triste, and Stille Zeile sechs, Ring implicitly reconstructs one tentacle of the sprawling Modernism Monster that is often overlooked by its many researchers. She achieves this most effectively by tracing some of her authors, chiefly Hensel and Hilbig, back to Kafka, that master of liminal subjectivity whose works were not always welcome and available behind the Iron Curtain. The “complex of agency and vulnerability” (83) shared by the work of these three authors gives needed intertextual literary nuance to a body of GDR fiction that is often otherwise read for its political and historical interest.
*Seminar*

Overall, it is an excellent introduction to the difficulties faced by the authors of the GDR and their transition to a new reality. After the Stasi is a work that one would recommend to those who have more than a passing understanding of the intricacies of Germany’s reunification and the contemporary literary scene in Germany.
*The European Legacy*