Gesperrte Ablage

The fear of what is tangible also includes the chronicle of emergency shelters for endangered manuscripts, as the purely physical nature of the texts could indeed pose a danger to the writers. It creates a unique narrative about the dilemma of hiding written works in the most unlikely places. In the early GDR, authors had to manage almost entirely without paper in prison and establish their own form of oral memorization from this forced situation. In contrast, resistant authors of the developed GDR dictatorship repeatedly reported on carefully considered text storage locations, such as in the muck pit, in the potato cellar, two meters deep under the birch tree in the garden, in hiding places in lockers at train stations, sewn into pillows, in their children's toys, or under floorboards. While resistant authors lived with the constant fear that what they thought and felt could become tangible as text, the apparatus and intelligence services were in a perpetual delusion that they could not grasp this placeless text, which established a unique phenomenology of text hiding places.