Jürgen Fuchs: Documenting Life, Death and the Stasi

Abstract

The voice in Jürgen Fuchs’s poem belongs to a Stasi interrogator, a voice that the poet (1950–1999) carried inside him, and one that he was unable to silence during his life. This was also the driving force behind Fuchs’s quest to come to terms with the legacy of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. Fuchs suffered at the hands of the Stasi while he was in Untersuchungshaft in Hohenschönhausen. In addition, the Stasi subjected him and his family to ‘quiet forms of terror’: the sudden appearance of locksmiths during the night, the delivery of pornographic material, and anonymous telephone calls. Such tactics, however, are relatively trivial when compared to the explosive devices set off in front of his house that almost injured his daughter.² It is therefore completely understandable that Fuchs became active in the citizens’ committees set up in regional Stasi offices as early as 1989. Fuchs had a very specific agenda for dealing with the Stasi, asserting that it is very important ‘daß wir uns sehr genau erinnern müssen. Daß es keinen Ausweg, keine Demokratisierung, kein Überwinden des Stalinismus gibt ohne Erinnern, ohne die ganze Wahrheit über all die Jahre’.³ He also saw it as a ‘historische Aufgabe’ to remember: ‘das Erinnern brauchen wir. Wir brauchen es in Bezug auf die Nazizeit, und wir brauchen es in Bezug auf den Stalinismus. Beides wird jetzt fast nochmal vermischt und kommt zusammen’.⁴

Kommse

Schlüssel

Hörnse auf mit dem Gesinge

Zwei zum Vernehmer

Jürgen Fuchs, ‘Immer noch’¹