School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications

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    The Stasi, the Confession and Performing Difference: Brigitte Burmeister's Unter dem Namen Norma
    LEWIS, A ; PLOWMAN, AP ; COOKE, PC (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
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    En-gendering remembrance: Memory, gender and informers for the Stasi
    Lewis, A (TELOS PRESS LTD, 2002)
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    Germany's Metamorphosis: Memory and the Holocaust in the Berlin Repulic
    Lewis, A (University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), 2003)
    I want to focus on two recent debates in Germany from the same inaugural period of Germany’s SPD–Green government, which both have as their focus the contestation of memory in relation to the Holocaust. In both debates the Holocaust serves as a negative myth of origin and a primal phantasmatic scene of guilt and shame around which German national identifications are organised. The first is the Walser–Bubis debate and the second the much more protracted but no less fierce debate about the building of a Holocaust memorial in Berlin, which peaked around the same time. Both debates are important in the German context because they come at the end of a long period of Christian Democratic (CDU) rule and at the beginning of a new SPD era in German politics. They are significant, moreover, because they appear to send contradictory messages about German self- understanding to the international community.
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    Reading and Writing the Stasi File: on the Uses and Abuses of The File as (auto)biography
    Lewis, A (Wiley, 2003-10)
    Abstract The opening of the Stasi files in 1992, made possible by the Stasi Documents Legislation, was an important symbolic act of reconciliation between victims and perpetrators. For victims, reading their file provided a means of re‐appropriating stolen aspects of their lives and rewriting their life histories. This article argues that the Stasi file itself can be viewed as a form of hostile biography, authored by an oppressive state apparatus, that constituted in GDR times an all‐powerful written ‘technology of power’. The analogy of secret police files to literary genres enables us to pose a number of questions about the current uses to which the files are being put by victims and perpetrators. Are victims and perpetrators making similar use of their Stasi file in the writing of their autobiographies? What happens when the secret police file is removed from its original bureaucratic context and ‘regime of truth’ and starts to circulate as literary artefact in new contexts, for instance, as part of victims’ and perpetrators’ autobiographies? How is the value of the Stasi file now being judged? Is the file being used principally in the services of truth and reconciliation, as originally intended in the legislation, or does it now circulate in ‘regimes of value’ that place a higher premium on accounts of perpetrators, as can be witnessed in the publication of the fictitious ‘autobiography’ of the notorious secret police informer, Sascha Anderson?