Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc

Valentina Glajar, Alison Lewis, Corina L. Petrescu

The communist secret police services of Central and Eastern 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. Theserecords, 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 Germans inRomania), 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 in the School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne, Australia. Corina L. Petrescu is Associate Professor of Germanat the University of Mississippi.

Introduction - Valentina N. Glajar and Corina L. Petrescu and Alison LewisThe Secret Lives and Files of Stasi Collaborators: Reading the Files for Identity and Habitus - Alison Lewis"You'll Never Make a Spy Out of Me": The File Story of "Fink Susanne" - Valentina N. GlajarWitness for the Prosecution: Eginald Schlattner in the Files of the Securitate - Corina L. PetrescuCollaboration as Collapse in the Life Writing and Stasi Shadow-Documents of Monica Maron and Christa Wolf - Annie RingPerpetrator as Victim in Jana Dohring's Stasiratte - Carol Anne Costabile-HemingBefore "It Gets All Wiped Out": Document-Affect and History-Effect in the Hungarian Performance Apaches on the Danube - Aniko SzucsThe Stasi Files on Center Stage: Life Writinig, Witnessing, and Memory in Recent Performance - Ulrike GardeSurveillance and the Senses in a Documentary Portrait of Radio Free Europe - Yuliya Komska