I I70 Reviews and the 'Voraussetzungen' do not make it clear that these are nearly, but not quite, co-terminous. An over-liberal use of inverted commas and italics sometimes leaves itunclear whether or not we are reading quotations from Wolf's texts.The authors' assertion that, in fleeing Troy, Aineias carries with him to a new destination the utopian possibilities of theSkamander community (pp. 53, 63) would seem to ignore his mythical role in the founding of a new patriarchal society,Rome (knowledge of which Wolf surely assumes). Finally, while the authors maintain some minimal dis tance from Wolf's views (hinting, for instance, that one need not shareWolf's belief thatpatriarchy and capitalism are leading humanity to disaster), theyoffercharacter studies rather than a study ofWolf's methods of characterization. Only in the final chapter do they turn their attention to extra-literary events. This leads them to the sensible ifunsurprising conclusion that there is a linkbetween Wolf's bruising expe rience of theWende and the retrenching of her utopian aspirations. UNIVERSITY OF EXETER CHLOE PAVER Stasi-Zensur -Machtdiskurse: Publikationsgeschichten undMaterialien zu Jurek Beckers Werk. By BEATEMULLER. Tiibingen: Niemeyer. 2oo6. 424 pp. E62. ISBN 978-3-484-35 I I0-3. It is hard to escape the conclusion that this is a book about a form of insanity.The insanity in question is the sheer volume of effort,often uncoordinated, thatwas in vested by theStasi, and ultimately, therefore, theSED and theGDR state, in tracking individuals who were unlikely ever to attempt tobring down the state. JurekBecker was a good writer with a criticalmind who took issuewith aspects of the politics of the society inwhich he lived, but in all this time he identifiedmore with it thanwith any other state, the Federal Republic included. When he left theGDR in I977 he remained a citizen, a temporary exile on firsta two-year then a ten-year visa, not an outcast likeWolf Biermann or Reiner Kunze, with whom he had publicly sympa thizedwhen theywere still inwhat Biermann called 'das bessere Deutschland'. Beate Muller has taken on amassive task in deciding to evaluate all the available papers relating toBecker and to construct a narrative around this. In her introduc tion she considers, albeit briefly,elements of censorship theories, including US 'New Censorship' and Holger Brohm's suggestion thatPierre Bourdieu's theories on cen sorship might usefully be applied to theGDR. She deems these theories to have limited applicability, inparticular Bourdieu's definitions of field in a non-democratic society. In constructing thisbook theauthor also had toengage with issues around the appropriate use of Stasi files. A given is,of course, familiaritywith Becker's works and their reception inboth Germanies, and in this respect she accuses conservative West German critics who put political considerations before aesthetic ones when reading GDR literature of adopting the Stalinist approach of seeing writers as 'Ingenieure dermenschlichen Seele' (p. 17). Muller debunks many of themyths around Becker's biography, some propagated by Becker himself and many adopted uncritically by his literary critics and biogra phers. His relegation from theHumboldt University in I960, for example, was not initiated by anyone in theSED leadership but by his comrades in the SED student organization-his tutormerely wanted him tobe reprimanded over a dispute atwork. His attempt, togetherwith Frank Beyer, toproduce a filmentitled Jakob der Luigner in themid-ig6os, before the novel of the same name appeared, did not fail because of SED opposition to the theme or to Beyer, who had been criticized forhis I966 filmSpur der Steine, but because of a lack of co-operation fromauthorities inPoland, where the filmwas to be shot, possibly because of a degree of anti-Semitism there. MLR, 103.4, 2oo8 117I When the filmwas eventually made in the I970s, continued Polish obstructionism meant itwas shot in Czechoslovakia. And even the one novel by Becker thatwas banned in theGDR, Schlaflose Tage, received amixed reception from his readers, with Dieter Schlenstedt recommending itspublication. The Stasi,Muller shows, not only played no significantpart inpublishing decisions but seemed largelyuninterested in them unless action was required. Itsmain opera tionagainst Becker, unimaginatively entitled 'OV Liigner', began in I976 afterhe had been one of the firstsignatories of thepetition against theexpulsion ofBiermann. The...