Die volkseigene opposition? The stasi and alternative culture in the GDR
This article examines the character of oppositional movements in the GDR in the light of post‐Wende revelations of Stasi infiltration. We look at responses by members of the alternative culture to accusations that their work during the GDR was rendered ineffective by the Stasi and is consequently of little importance to a historical reappraisal of the GDR. Whilst they were clearly aware of the Stasi, whose influence did have an effect, our evidence suggests that this influence was not total. Current debates about the Stasi are creating an unbalanced view of the actual situation in the GDR before 1989 in that the Stasi is being portrayed as an organisation of almost Orwellian Big Brother proportions. Our article attempts to deconstruct this paradigm and argues that the complicity of the few with the MfS should not invalidate the activities of the majority of those involved in the alternative culture.
Tracing the Stasi in the Televised German Krimi: Tatort and Polizeiruf 110 Episodes as Precursors to the Post-Reunification Stasi Debate
abstract:The feature film The Lives of Others (2006) is commonly credited with initiating a post-reunification debate on the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Stasi) in the mass media. This article examines select episodes of the German Tatort and Polizeiruf 110 crime series, demonstrating that fictional television productions also addressed the Stasi, and did so much earlier than 2006. In either a subliminal way, as in the Polizeiruf episode "Der Fall Lisa Murnau" and the Tatort episode "Taxi nach Leipzig," or as an open Stasi discourse in "Unter Brüdern," episodes from both series can be read as precursors to the Stasi debate.
"The Plain Round Tale of Faithful Thady": Castle Rackrent as Slave Narrative
Critics of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent tend to focus on textual elements—gender issues, the symbolism of the Big House, colonial hegemony— or contextual readings by placing Edgeworth in the Anglo-Irish history and tradition. While such criticism usually in some way examines the main theme of the text, the appropriation of power and authority, little of it accomplishes both the textual and contextual analysis that Castle Rackrent deserves. Exploring Thady’s “plain round tale” as a slave narrative in content and form sheds new light on the work both textually and contextually; in Thady Quirk, Edgeworth has created a typical slave narrator who recounts a history of oppression which is ultimately mediated by an outside editor. As John Cronin writes of Castle Rackrent, “What Maria Edgeworth has given us . . . is a magnificently realised slave, a terrifying vision of the results of colonial misrule. There must have been a moment of clearly deliberate artistic decision in which she realised that what needed to be said must be said through one of the submerged people.”1 The three main textual elements of the narrative indicate its likeness to typical slave narratives: its presentation of a conflicted slave narrator, its use of the framing device of the outside editor, and its narrative structure of episodic anecdotes that utilizes memory, description, and didacticism.