Katie Trumpener: Against State Information Monopoly: The Media Experiments of East German...

Katie Trumpener (Yale University): Against State Information Monopoly: The Media Experiments of East German Dissident Writers

Link to Wolf Biermann - Das Barlach-Lied:    • Wolf Biermann - Das Barlach-Lied  

Link to Wolf Biermann - Enfant perdu:    • Enfant perdu  

East Germany held an official “monopoly” on media and information, from controlling the press, radio and television waves, to owning virtually every photocopier in the country. Their secret police (or Stasi), likewise, was famous (or infamous) for opening letters and surveilling mailboxes, bugging apartments, and using hidden tape-recorders to incriminate dissenting citizens. During the 1960s and 70s, however, a number of key East German writers gradually became dissidents, who attempted to critique or expose these inherently oppressive conditions, or even (in Brechtian fashion) conduct their own instructive media experiments. This talk will consider Rainer Kunze’s lyric poetry about such taboo subjects as East German media pedagogy, postal censorship and radio jamming (including a 1972 volume significantly entitled, “With the Volume Turned Down”/Zimmerlautstärke); Sarah Kirsch’s pioneering 1975 feminist oral history, The Panther Woman: Five Tales from the Cassette Recorder; Hans Joachim Schädlich’s 1977 story about the Stasi’s use of secret tape recorders and punative media analysis; and perhaps most resourcefully, Wolf Biermann’s use of his own Stasi-bugged Berlin apartment as an improvised recording studio (whose ambient street noises became part of the particular, illicit frisson of his records). In our own age of Alexei Navalny and Hong Kong pro-democracy protestors, it is worth reconsidering an earlier generation of principled dissidents, who not only critiqued a closed, government controlled media circuit, but bent it to critical ends.