New essays exploring the tension between the versions of the past in secret police files and the subjects' own personal memories-and creative workings-through-of events. The communist secret police services of Central and Eastern Europe kept detailed records not only of their victims but also of the vast networks of informants and collaborators upon whom their totalitarian systems depended. Theserecords, now open to the public in many former Eastern Bloc countries, reflect a textually mediated reality that has defined and shaped the lives of former victims and informers, creating a tension between official records and personal memories. Exploring this tension between a textually and technically mediated past and the subject/victim's reclaiming and retrospective interpretation of that past in biography is the goal of this volume. While victims' secret police files have often been examined as a type of unauthorized archival life writing, the contributors to this volume are among the first to analyze the fragmentary and sometimes remedial nature of these biographies and to examine the subject/victims' rewriting and remediation of them in various creative forms. Essays focus, variously, on the files of the East German Stasi, the Romanian Securitate (in relation to Transylvanian Germans in Romania), andthe Hungarian State Security Agency. Contributors: Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Ulrike Garde, Valentina Glajar, Yuliya Komska, Alison Lewis, Corina L. Petrescu, Annie Ring, Aniko Szucs. Valentina Glajar is Professor of German at Texas State University, San Marcos. Alison Lewis is Professor of German in the School of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Melbourne, Australia. Corina L. Petrescu is Associate Professor of Germanat the University of Mississippi.

An in-depth investigation of the Romanian secret police's file on Muller, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature, re-creating a "file story" of her surveillance. "Herta Muller should share her Nobel with the Securitate." This comment by a former officer in the Romanian secret police, or Securitate, was in reaction to hearing that Muller, a German writer originally from Romania, had won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature. Communist Romania's infamous secret police was indeed a protagonist in Muller's work, though an undesired and dreaded one: most of her writings are deeply and explicitly anchored in Ceausescu's Romania and her own traumatic experiences with the Securitate. Muller's file traces her surveillance from 1983 until after she emigrated to West Germany in 1987. She has written extensively in reaction to reading her file, but primarily addresses its gaps, begging the question what information the file does in fact contain. This book is an in-depth investigation of Muller's file, and engages with other related files, including that of her then-husband, the writer Richard Wagner. Valentina Glajar treats the files as primary sources in order to re-create the story of Muller's surveillance by the Securitate. In such an intrusive culture of surveillance, surviving the system often meant a certain degree of entanglement: for victims, collaborators, and implicated subjects alike. Veiled in secrecy for decades, these compelling and complex documents shed light on a boundary between victims and perpetrators as porous as the Iron Curtain itself.

The legacy of the 20th-c. German and Austrian political/cultural presence in East Central Europe, as shown in recent literature. This study focuses on the complex legacy of the German and Austrian political and cultural presence in East Central Europe in the twentieth century. It contributes to the discussion of "German" identity in eastern Europe, and hasimportant implications for German, Austrian, and East European studies. It addresses the specific situations of the former Habsburg regions of Bukovina (the Ukraine/Romania), Moravia (the Czech Republic), and Banat (Romania) as illustrated in contemporary literature by German-speaking authors, such as Herta Müller, Erica Pedretti, Gregor von Rezzori, and Edgar Hilsenrath. The works of these authors constitute contrastive historiographic narratives of the multiethnic regions of East-Central Europe under a series of oppressive regimes: first Austrian imperialism, and then German and Romanian fascism in Bukovina; National Socialism in Moravia, and Communism in Romania. Valentina Glajar investigates these narratives as representations of multicultural East Central Europe in German-language literature that show the political and ethnic tensions between Germans and local peoples that marked these regions throughout the 20th century, often with tragic consequences. The study thus expands and diversifies the understanding of German literature and challenges the concept of a homogeneous German identity reaching far beyond the borders of theGerman-speaking countries. Valentina Glajar is assistant professor of German at Southwest Texas State University.