The Stasi, the Confession and Performing Difference: Brigitte Burmeister’s Unter dem Namen Norma

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See ‘On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing’ in Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times, trans. by Clara and Richard Winston (Ringwood: Penguin, 1968), pp. 11–38 (p. 29).Google Scholar

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Irena Kukutz and Katja Havemann, Geschutzte Quelle: Gesprache mit Monika H. alias Karin Lenz (Berlin: BasisDruck, 1990); Annette Maennel, Aufsie war Verlass: Frauen und Stasi (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1995); Helga Schubert, Judasfrauen: Zehn Fallgeschichten weiblicher Denunziation im Dritten Reich (Frankfurt/M.: Luchterhand, 1990).Google Scholar

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‘The element which holds together a given community cannot be reduced to the point of symbolic identification: the bond linking together its members always implies a shared relationship towards a Thing, towards Enjoyment incarnated. This relationship towards the Thing, structured by means of fantasies, is what is at stake when we speak of the menace to our “way of life” presented by the Other […] National identification is by definition sustained by a relationship towards the Nation qua Thing. […] Nationalism thus presents a privileged domain of the eruption of enjoyment into the social field. […] We always impute to the “other” an excess of enjoyment: he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or he has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment.’ Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 201–3; and Slavoj Zizek, ‘Eastern Europe’s Republic of Gilead’, New Left Review, 183 (1990), 50–63.Google Scholar

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