Abstract
Since the Wende and with the benefit of hindsight, eyewitness accounts and access to his own Stasi files, Erich Loest has written extensively about the East German Ministry of State Security. In 1990 he embellished his second autobiography, Der Zorn des Schafes, with his personal Stasi files; Zorn and Die Stasi war mein Eckermann (1991) were among the first published texts to include such documents. These texts, along with others like Reiner Kunze’s Deckname “Lyrik” (1990), acquainted his readership with the practices of the secret police through its own documents and prepared the way for Loest’s most commercially successful novel to date, Nikolaikirche (1995).
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Notes
Erich Loest, Fallhohe (Kiinzelsau: Linden-Verlag, 1989). Hereafter F.
Loest recalls in his memoir, Der Zorn des Schafes (Leipzig: Linden-Verlag, 1990) that Thomas, his elder son and current publisher, warned his father that he might be under surveillance. Loest senior responded with blustery denial: ‘Ich quatsche bigchen rum, na schon, deshalb soilte der Staat solchen Aufwand treiben?’ (p. 148). When one considers that Loest had already spent time in Bautzen’s infamous prison, one might argue that his disingenuous insistence that he was indifferent to the threat of surveillance was an attempt to preserve some semblance of a normal life; after all, there was little else he could do.
Loest includes himself along with Sascha Anderson, Wolf Biermann, Walter Kempowski, Gunter Kunert, Reiner Kunze and Gerhard Zwerenz as possible converts to a new GDR. It appears a great leap of faith that these dissident authors would be expected to conspire with a Stasi operative in order to be welcomed back. Indeed, after reading Hans Joachim Schadlich’s account of German spying through the ages, Kohler deems its author a lost cause: ‘Mit Tallover [sic] habe der Mann alien Geheimdienstgebaren eine solch vehemente Abfuhr erteilt, dag es undenkbar sei, mit ihm ein konspiratives Ubereinkommen zu erzielen’ (F, 267).
Mary Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR 1949–1989 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 51.
Hans Bellstedt, ‘Die Sehnsucht ist geschwunden’, General-Anzeiger, 11 March 1989.
William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York: Knopf, 1970), p. 25.
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 33.
Barbara Foley, Telling the Truth: the Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 185–6.
Stephen Brockmann, Literature and German Reunification (Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 82.
Bernd Lenz, Factifiction: Agentenspiele wie in der Realitat (Heidelberg: Winter, 1987), p. 268.
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Evans, S.J. (2003). ‘Könnte man sagen, du seist ein Spiönchen?’: Erich Loest’s Fallhöhe . In: Cooke, P., Plowman, A. (eds) German Writers and the Politics of Culture. New Perspectives in German Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403938756_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403938756_7
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