'Eine Bindung Durch Hass': Double-Agency, Mimesis and the Role of Hands In Monika Maron's Stille Zeile Sechs (original) (raw)

2010, German Life and Letters

"This article deals with the case of collaboration portrayed in Monika Maron’s novel Stille Zeile Sechs. Her protagonist, Rosalind Polkowski, has been celebrated as resisting the disciplinary state structures represented by her employer, former SED Party functionary Herbert Beerenbaum. Meanwhile the text’s narrative structure and a curious mimetic function in the heroine’s behaviour appear to encourage a psychoanalytical reading: Polkowski as traumatised victim of Communism. But her role transcribing Beerenbaum’s memoirs positions her as a more problematic double-agent, a handmaid of power. Polkowski’s double-agency has an interesting historical counterpart in the author’s own brief affair as a Kontaktperson (code-name ‘Mitsu’) for the foreign intelligence service of the East German secret police. Maron’s involvement in ‘Stasi’ operations worked in contradiction to her oppositional stance, and reflected a ‘hateful bind’ that she felt in relation to the GDR. To read the double-agency that the fictional and historical cases share in terms of guilt or victimhood is insufficient. Placed alongside the ‘Mitsu’ case, Polkowski’s fictional double-bind brings to light what we might call a ‘security complex’, a network of subjective and state securities in which collaboration and resistance are matters of constant negotiation between power and the subject."