German Writers and the Politics of Culture

PAUL COOKE is a Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Speaking the Taboo: A Study of the Work of Wolfgang Hilbig and The Pocket Essential to German Expressionist Film. He publishes on German literature, film, politics and cultural studies. ANDREW PLOWMAN teaches German language, literature and film studies in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of The Radical Subject: Social Change and the Self in Recent German Autobiography, and of essays on autobiographical writing and on contemporary

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall many East German writers were praised in the Western world as dissident voices of truth, bravely struggling with the draconian constraints of living under the GDR's communist regime.Before the fall of the Berlin Wall many East German writers were praised in the Western world as dissident voices of truth, bravely struggling with the draconian constraints of living under the GDR's communist regime. However, since unification, Germany has been rocked by scandals showing the level to which the Stasi, the East German Secret Police, controlled these same writers. This is the first study in English to systematically explore how the writers have responded to the challenge of dealing with the Stasi from the 1950s to the present day.