The Tender Gaze: Compassionate Encounters on the German Screen, Page, and Stage. Edited by Muriel Cormican and Jennifer Marston William. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2021. 234 pages + 15 b/w images. $99.00 hardcover, $24.99 eBook.

Abstract

famous to this day. In the end, one is left with the sense of a tremendous waste of talent and effort, all to little or no real purpose. The case of Helga M. Novak blurs the lines between victim and perpetrator, since her work for the Stasi happened under duress, was of short duration, and was followed by many years of harassment and vindictiveness on the part of the Stasi. Among other things, the Stasi was clearly a male chauvinist, sexist organization that sometimes behaved in abominable ways to women—for instance by trying to use Novak as a “honey trap” for western men. One comes away from the book feeling a good deal of sympathy with Novak. The case of Maja Wiens is more complicated and problematic, since she clearly harmed some of the people she was spying on and showed little remorse about it before she ultimately turned against the Stasi, and the East German regime itself. The book is well written and quite readable—in fact, it is a bit of a page turner. One wishes that the copy editor had been more careful, as there are occasional typos and lapses. For instance, one important anthology of innovative East German literature that appeared in the mid-1980s, co-edited by Sascha Anderson and Elke Erb, receives different titles: Berührung war eine Randerscheinung (163) and Berührung ist eine Randerscheinung (181). In fact the correct title is Berührung ist nur eine Randerscheinung: Neue Literatur aus der DDR. Occasionally one wishes that the author would take a step back from her case studies and ask larger questions about the role of literature in East Germany and its relationship to the Stasi or about the effectiveness of secret organizations in modern societies more generally. But that is not really what the book is about—it is primarily about the case studies, and these are eminently worth reading.