Please join us for our next research seminar in German Studies at King’s College London on Wednesday 25th March!
Wednesday 25th March: 12.30-2pm (Virginia Woolf Building, Room 6.06)
After the Stasi
Dr Annie Ring, University of Cambridge
Annie Ring will present a chapter from her book After the Stasi, which offers an answer to the question: why did so many East Germans agree to collaborate with the Stasi? It does so by introducing an archetypal character in literary fiction and life writing by East German authors publishing after German unification. This is a character not self-defined and sovereign, but instead subjected to the power of others, in ways that both allow and complicate the collaborations that she or he carries out. Reading works by GDR-born writers who encountered the Stasi as collaborators or victims alongside documents from the Stasi’s archives, works of literary modernism from other eras and places and relevant cultural theories of the self, the book makes the case for the continuing importance of the concerns raised by the writing of German unification – importance not only for tracking the history of Stasi collaboration, but also for considering its legacy in capitalism.
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/german/eventrecords/2014-15/researchsem8.aspx
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