Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Importance and Diversity of Cultural Memory in the GDR Context
- Part I Media Constructions of 1989 and the Elusiveness of the Historical GDR
- Part II Challenges to the Dominant Discourse of the Wende
- Part III Textual Memory
- Part IV Literary Generations — Competing Perspectives
- Part V Afterlives
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
3 - “Das waren wir nicht!”: The Image of East Germans and the GDR as a Narrative Problem after 1989 in Klaus Schlesinger’s Die Sache mit Randow
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 February 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Importance and Diversity of Cultural Memory in the GDR Context
- Part I Media Constructions of 1989 and the Elusiveness of the Historical GDR
- Part II Challenges to the Dominant Discourse of the Wende
- Part III Textual Memory
- Part IV Literary Generations — Competing Perspectives
- Part V Afterlives
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
In 1998 The German Author Klaus Schlesinger recalled the phase of suspicion against East Germans that marked unified Germany’s public life in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall:
Mit einemmal standen alle, die bis zum Ende im Ländchen geblieben waren, im Verdacht der Kollaboration mit einem verbrecherischen System, es sei denn, sie hätten nachweislich Widerstand geleistet …, und als die Archive in der Normannenstraße geöffnet wurden, begann so etwas wie eine Neuerschaffung der DDR. Es entstand nichts weniger als eine Welt aus Aktennotizen des Geheimdienstes. Und nun wurden die Leute aufgefordert, ihre Geschichten zu erzählen, und wenn sie es dann taten, kehrten diese in einer Gestalt zurück, daß die Erzähler sich mit Grausen abwandten: Das sollen wir gewesen sein? Das waren wir nicht!
Schlesinger didn’t stay in the GDR until the end: he moved to West Berlin in 1980, in the wake of the Biermann affair and of his own exclusion from the Writers’ Union in 1979. For a couple of months in the winter of 1991–92, however, public rumors alleged that he had collaborated with the Stasi as an Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter (IM), and Schlesinger was not able to refute these accusations officially until he gained access to his file at the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. This was a time of intense retrospective self-examination as is clear from his entire collection of essays of 1998, Von der Schwierigkeit, Westler zu werden. In “Macht, Literatur und Staatssicherheit” and “Das Gerücht,” for example, he blames himself for not having dealt with his Stasi visitors right there at his door as they sought to recruit him in the mid-1960s, and for having instead bided his time for three years and waited for their third visit before putting an end to their recruitment drive. The opening quotation, however, refers not only to collaboration with the Stasi, but interprets the entire post-Wende period as a time when East Germans had to prove their personal and collective moral integrity. For the former citizens of the GDR the question was now which image of themselves and of their country would become established in the public sphere and whether there was any chance that East German perspectives would be considered and taken into account in an undistorted way.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Twenty Years OnCompeting Memories of the GDR in Postunification German Culture, pp. 57 - 68Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2011