Escaping the Autobiographical Trap? Monika Maron, the Stasi and Pawels Briefe

Abstract

The question of autobiography is linked to the East German Staatssicherheit in an arc that spans the whole of Monika Maron’s literary career. On the one hand, MfS files discovered by Der Spiegel in 1995, which reveal that Maron, under the codename ‘Mitsu’, briefly acted during the late 1970s as a ‘Kontaktperson’ (KP) for the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HV A), the foreign-intelligence branch of the Stasi, have shed startling light on the gestation of her first novel.¹ Whilst writing Flugasche (1981), in which the treatment of censorship, the catastrophe of East German industry and the stifling conformism of life in the GDR proved too critical to be published there, Maron had, the files suggest, sought the HV A’s assistance in travelling to West Berlin to visit ‘die Stätten ihrer Kindheit’ and conduct ‘Milieustudien’ for what is described as her ‘autobiografische[r] Roman’.² Using a passport provided by the HV A and under an alias, Maron made eleven journeys to the West between January and June 1977; she also, it seems, offered her HV A contact the ‘Exposè [sic] ihres Buches’ to read.³