With Deutschland 83 we got a first impression about life in East and West Germany in the 1980s. Christa Wolf’s What Remains gives us a more detailed picture of the experience of living under Stasi Surveillance. The well-established former East German writer and literary critique Wolf wrote What Remains in 1979, but published it after the German reunification in 1990. Wolf, who briefly worked as an informant “Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter” for the Stasi was watched closely for almost 30 years.

Please use this Blog Entry to start a conversation with your classmates. Respond to your classmates’ comments and grapple with at least one of the following questions in your Blog Entry:

1. How is the life under the Stasi portrayed in Wolf’s What Remains and Deutschland 83? Please compare the overall narrative.
2. Wolf gives us an insight into the experience of watching and being watched in the GDR. How does this oscillation between the two modes of observation impact individual behavior, thinking process, and overall life condition?
3. Which dimensions of privacy are infringed by the Stasi (have a look at Roessler’s text). How? What is the purpose of it?
4. In which ways does What Remains offer us a reflection upon the ways to break through the imposed control by the Stasi and to develop individual agency?

Last week we discussed the work of Franz Kafka together with Michel Foucault’s idea of panopticism as a symbol for disciplinary societies. Although criticism was raised against the adaption of panopticism in contemporary times, I would like you to focus once more on the connection of power and knowledge that can be used to modify individual behavior. While in Kafka’s short stories the artistic characters internalized the disciplined mechanisms of their “masters” and society, the protagonist of Stefan Zweig‘s Fear oscillates between acts of obedience and liberation from the disciplinary techniques implemented by the bourgeois society.

The relationship between Irene and Eduard visualizes more clearly the oscillation between the two different worlds in which diverging values, rules, and morals collide. Please investigate with your blog entry how the power relationship between Eduard and Irene changes in the first half of the novella. In which ways is Irene a disciplined character or a controlled character? How does she exercise power over others? How do knowledge, shame, and fear enhance but also hinder her “liberation” process and ultimately change her individual behavior?