"Before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, many East German writers were praised in the Western world as dissident voices of truth, bravely struggling with the draconian constraints of living under the GDR's communist regime. Since unification, however, Germany has been rocked by scandals revealing the extent to which the East German Secret Police, the Stasi, had many of these writers in its pocket. Throughout the 1990s a number of studies examined how the Stasi manipulated writers during the GDR's 40 year history. However, this is the first study in English to systematically explore how the writers themselves have responded to the challenge of dealing with the Stasi from the 1950s to the present day."--Jacket.