A State of Secrecy: Stasi Informers and the Culture of Surveillance by Alison Lewis

Author:Alison Lewis [Lewis, Alison]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Europe, Modern, 20th Century, History, Germany
ISBN: 9781640124851
Google: MkY6EAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 57527316
Publisher: Potomac Books
Published: 2021-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Paul Wiens: Monitoring the Writers’ Guild

Around the time of the Biermann affair Paul Wiens increased the intensity of his surveillance of his professional circles. The brush fire that the Biermann incident had ignited, which was threatening to explode, burned to the heart of literary life in East Germany. The Writers’ Guild, the regime’s official mouthpiece on literature, was urgently required to take a leadership role. Yet the guild was riven by internal divisions and fractures that could no longer be papered over, split between those who supported Stephan Hermlin, the initiator of the petition that protested Biermann’s exile, and those who did not. Once the signatories’ names had been published by the Reuters news agency, there was a new faction—those who supported Hermlin but subsequently withdrew their support under pressure. Wiens clearly sided with those who condemned Biermann outright, which was the official line. The problem for Wiens was that most of his colleagues in the guild were deeply shocked at the regime’s handling of the affair.

Despite sensing that he was in a minority among his colleagues, Wiens fell in behind the regime on this issue. He intensified his efforts within the guild to neutralize the impact of the Biermann affair. Wiens continued throughout 1977 to provide the Stasi with good-quality information from deep inside the guild. This was the year in which East Germany shed itself of the most outspoken elements of its intelligentsia, losing, in the process, debilitating amounts of intellectual and cultural capital.138 Wiens proved a key cultural agent in facilitating the departure of many of the nation’s most talented writers, actors, and poets. Although he saw his role otherwise, he wittingly contributed to this cultural crisis. Many of the poets who left the GDR proceeded to win prestigious literary prizes in the West, while others became acclaimed television and film actors. The East’s losses were the West’s gains.

Wiens seems to have been happy to document the crisis from his position close to the action. In one report he related to the Stasi that there was much disunity among writers in the wake of the open protest letter. In December 1976, for instance, Wiens reported that those who withdrew their support for the letter—largely because of political interference, either from the Stasi or directly from the SED’s politburo—were isolated from the others. He mentioned the beleaguered Günter Kunert, who was allegedly no longer talking to some of his friends.139 Moreover, Wiens reported that Sarah Kirsch and Irmtraud Morgner were no longer talking to one another.140 The strategy of divide and conquer among Biermann’s supporters that the Stasi pursued was bearing fruit, and Wiens was playing a key role.

In an entry concerning Morgner, Wiens’s file offers a clue as to how he justified his surveillance of those close to him. As previously discussed, the file contains no explicit tasks allocated to him in relation to his wife. However, he was incapable of separating his wife from the messiness of other events he was required to report on, and eventually, as discussed above, he did include references to Morgner in his reports.

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