Telling Tales: Moral Responsibility and the Stasi in Uwe Saeger’s Die Nacht danach und der Morgen

Abstract

Uwe Saeger’s Die Nacht danach und der Morgen (1991) is a genuine oddity of a text that resists simple categorisation.¹ For no less a luminary than Wolfgang Emmerich it represents a ‘Merkwürdigkeit ersten Ranges’, and after an initial reading it is hard to disagree with that assessment.² Is it a novel or an autobiography? The text would seem to comprise elements of both, but contains much more besides: a screenplay, a poem, an Erzählung, diary extracts, a transcript of a cassette monologue, as well as extended quotations from Thomas Mann, Elias Canetti and Willy Brandt. Whilst the text might be a ’Merkwürdigkeit’, it is not an essay in postmodern literary affectation; rather it is document of GDR life before and around the period of the Wende. It was begun at the time that Christa Wolf was completing work on Was bleibt (1990), a text with which it shares some thematic elements. As the text bears no definitive genre description, however, even though some catalogues list it as a ‘Bericht’, it is perhaps more akin to Reiner Kunze’s Deckname “Lyrik”, published in December 1990 as the full extent of the Stasi’s infiltration of GDR society was beginning to come to light.³ Kunze’s book is created almost exclusively from extracts he was able to recover from his Stasi file, even including photographs and transcripts of telephone conversations.