Title: The Stasi, the Confession and Performing Difference: Brigitte Burmeister’s Unter dem Namen Norma
Abstract: According to Michel Foucault, the confession is one of the West’s ‘most highly valued techniques for producing truth’.1 At the end of the nineteenth century, sexual confessions produced the truth about perversions, much in the same way that religious confessions produced the truth about sin. At the end of the twentieth century too, a confession of involvement with the Stasi was generally seen to speak the truth about life in the GDR. Unless, of course, the confession was revised by a new confession, as was the case with Sascha Anderson, whose confessions to the truth were only ever half the truth.2 But in most other instances, a confession wrung from a former secret police informer seemed to reveal all that was once hidden from the truth about life in the other Germany.
Publication Year: 2003
Publication Date: 2003-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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