The Stasi as Panopticon: Wolfgang Hilbig’s »Ich«

Abstract

One of the first novels to put the genre of the Stasiroman on the post-Wende literary map was Wolfgang Hilbig’s »Ich« (1993).¹ The novel takes as its starting point the scandal which engulfed the Prenzlauer Berg underground literary scene in the early 1990s when two of its leading lights, Sascha Anderson and Rainer Schedlinski, were unmasked as MfS informants.² The book was widely praised by critics, largely being read as the quintessential ‘Schlüsselroman über die Künstlerszene vom Prenzlauer Berg’, as Rainer Schmitz put it.³ Or, as Roland Mischke suggested:

Wer wissen will, wie das System der DDR-Staatssicherheit funktioniert hat, kann es aus Hilbigs Roman erfahren. Der ehemalige DDR-Bürger ist mit seinem fiktiven Roman näher an der Realität als der scheinbar auf Fakten basierende Magazin-Journalismus.⁴

On the other hand, those few critics who dismissed the novel tended to attack the writer for jumping on a Stasi ‘bandwagon’, accusing him of giving an inaccurate account of life in the Prenzlauer Berg scene in an attempt to capitalise on the topicality of the subject-matter.