A Postmodernized Brecht?

Abstract

ion by shifting attention away from the individuals who exercised it and the mentality that tolerated it, in the West the Stasi has become a fetish that implicates every GDR citizen in a web of culpability. The Stasi's power as the instrument of the State's bureaucratic terror is slowly being revealed as the systematic functionalization of personal and social trust for political ends, best described from the perspective of an East German perhaps in Christa Wolf's novel Cassandra.20 Although in the East these disclosures have elicited spontaneous expressions of disbelief, anger and vengeance at the scope of surveillance, in fact, the large majority of former GDR citizens who had no direct contact with the Stasi seem to consider its deeds to have been simply one more instance of the dependency relations that permeated their daily existence. Personal loyalties and institutional pressures defined the limits of social equality, and in this system these limits became more and more arbitrary with time, distorted by privilege and access. GDR society was based on a kind of paternalistic social in which the State maintained its power monopoly by promising efficient management in the socioeconomic sphere, while the citizens protected their individual autonomy in apparently unpolitical free spaces made possible by a rising standard of (family, home, hobbies, vacation). This mutual arrangement was not only a survival strategy but also the basis for constituting a GDR identity, at least as long as the State could make good on its promise. As social and economic differentiation grew during the eighties, new forms of passive and active resistance led to the dissolution of the contract and ultimately to the end of the GDR. Not unlike the typical middle class West German citizen, the GDR citizen's self-image was apolitical and to a large extent defined by the family rather than within any larger political or social collective. Brecht's consensual model and his utopian living together degenerated into accommodation, so that conformity came to be regarded as a talent rather than a liability. The Ministry for State Security (known as the Stasi) was crucial in guaranteeing the state monopoly on power but also the apolitical character of individual autonomy. No wonder, then, that many GDR citizens did not and still do not in retrospect perceive the Stasi as having been a constant threat or terror apparatus, while for many West Germans it has taken on the aura of a cancer that invaded the entire body politic. The virtue of conformity has been redefined suddenly as complicity in a criminal system. Such public recriminations by West Germans have been directed especially against intellectuals and artists from the GDR. Yet, the parameters of intellectual life were fundamentally different in the East than in the West. In the GDR intellectual and artistic contributions moved between the poles of loyalty (support of the existing power structure) and critical loyalty (its reform), whereas those who dared radical critique were marginalized or expelled with all the power of the State. Survival strategies were schizophrenic: private reservations and public pronouncements; critical rationality and prudent accommodation; utopian insight and intentional blindness. Indeed, talent in the GDR could be measured in direct relation to the distance between the terms of contradiction that an individual could abide, and express, 20 Christa Wolf, Cassandra, tr. Jan Van Heurck (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984). This content downloaded from 157.55.39.177 on Fri, 18 Nov 2016 04:12:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms