'I'

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The prose piece entitled ‘I ’ (I envision a novel-length work of 150–200 pages) is the attempt to find a literary form for the ‘inner biography’ of a so-called IM (Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter). An IM — the abbreviation has become almost universally familiar, at least since the collapse of the GDR — that is, an Unofficial Collaborator of the State Security Service of the GDR, reflecting on his existence as such in the first person, is the protagonist of the first part of the story. — Am I playing a role? the author asks himself.

As the public debates, mainly journalistic, on the subject of the ‘Stasi’ seem to have brought to light little of substance about such figures, who must have existed by the hundreds of thousands, it seems possible to me that what best suits the subject is a literary form — that is, a form that eschews the attempt to ‘clarify’. Indeed, so far we have had little illumination regarding the nature of IMs: this seems to be explained by the very so-called conspirative element surrounding such figures, who, after all, conduct their ‘clarification’ in the dark. — Reflecting on the conceptualization of such a protagonist, I asked myself a rather disturbing question: To what extent can the work of an informer be compared with the literary work of a writer? Immediately I told myself that the results are different. . but that posed the question of the extent to which a secret service, too, is dealing ‘only’ with a fiction of reality; and is this not in fact its intent? — I asked myself to what degree reality, in an IM’s reports for his superior, must be a fiction approaching a literary fiction. Isn’t an IM report also supposed to contain the greatest possible authenticity?

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