2024 Triebel Lecture: Secret police files as life writing, or how the Stasi made writers into ‘enemies of the state’.
Australian Academy of the Humanities 2024-09-02
Event details
Triebel Lecture: Emerita Professor Alison Lewis FAHA, University of Melbourne Lecture Date: 5.30pm, 28 November 2024 Venue: Abercrombie Building (H70), Darlington Ln & Abercrombie St Darlington, NSW 2008 Registration: This event is free but bookings are essential. Book here
The 2024 Triebel Lecture is being held in association with the LCNAU Eighth Biennial Colloquium, ‘Trans/Formation: research and education in languages and cultures’ in Sydney on 27–29 November 2024.
“Secret police files as life writing, or how the Stasi made writers into ‘enemies of the state’”
With the collapse of Eastern European communism an unlikely new resource emerged from the archives of the Cold War: the classified secret police file. Unlike in Australia where ASIO files are declassified after several decades, in Eastern Europe the secret police files of the defunct communist regimes were opened to select members of the public almost immediately. In reunified Germany the files of the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) of its communist twin state, the German Democratic Republic, have been key instruments for lustration and transitional justice as well as personal memory. Above all, they are crucial to truth-telling, indispensable for exposing collaborators and hearing the stories of victims, many of whom were writers and cultural producers. In light of this, researchers have for some time argued for reading secret police files as forms of life writing, as “arresting biographies” (Vatulescu) compiled to arrest suspects or as “hostile biographies” (Lewis). In this lecture I expand on this idea of the files as life writing by exploring dominant technologies of surveillance used by the Stasi against intellectuals such as photographic and human-to-human surveillance. Using a range of examples, I argue that Stasi files were a unique kind of secret political-bureaucratic life writing that not only captured masses of raw data on suspects but also turned the latter, mostly against their will, into likely enemies of the state. The Stasi mobilised cultural techniques of biography and portraiture in their blanket gathering of intelligence but also in their hybristic efforts to “play God” in people’s lives (Wolf Biermann). This is most in evidence in the Stasi’s efforts to script major life events ranging from marital breakdown, heart attacks, professional failure and forced exile. In addition, I undercover how these portraits of state enemies acquired a life of their own through the Stasi’s elaborate administrative procedures, guidelines and record-keeping processes that are testament to the ministry’s quest to be a modern bureaucracy.
Hosted by the Academy of the Humanities and the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sydney as part of the Langugages and Cultures Network for Australian Universities (LCNAU) Colloquium.
About Emerita Professor Alison Lewis FAHA
Alison Lewis is Professor Emerita in German Studies at The University of Melbourne, Australia. She has published extensively on German literature, culture, film and intelligence history.
Her most recent books are A State of Secrecy: Stasi Informers and the Surveillance of Culture (Potomac Books 2021), Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing (with V. Glajar/C. Petrescu) (Camden House 2016) and Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe (with V. Glajar/C. Petrescu) (Potomac Books 2019).
For her contribution to promoting German abroad she was awarded the prestigious Friedrich-Gundolf Prize of the German Academy for Language and Literature in 2022.
About the Triebel Lecture
The Academy is dedicated to supporting and celebrating emerging leaders in the humanities. Named in honour of Louis A. Triebel, one of the Academy’s Foundation Fellows, the Triebel Lecture celebrates research related to modern European languages..
Louis A. Triebel FAHA (1890–1985) was one of the Academy’s Foundation Fellows. This lecture is made possible by a bequest from the estate of Louis Triebel. The first Triebel Lecture was given by Professor Keith V. Sinclair in 1986.
Since 1986 we’ve hosted the lecture every three years.
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