After the Stasi

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

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsNotes on the TextIntroduction Collaboration and the Problem of Sovereign SubjectivityChapter 1 The Psychic Life of Collaboration: Monika Maron’s Stille Zeile SechsChapter 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 ArchiveChapter 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 CooperationBibliographyIndex

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.