Abstract

The opening of the archives in the former Eastern European bloc has led to heated political debates in the ex-communist countries, lustration, and the reassessment of the Cold War experience, both east and west. This essay focuses on the significance of accessing the secret police files in life writing produced by the 1.5 generation of communist surveillance. I read Carmen Bugan’s Burying the Typewriter and Kati Marton’s Enemies of the People to consider what happens to communist life narratives of an oppressive state apparatus when taken up by children of communist dissidents, how transnational identities and life stories emerging from post-Cold War Eastern Europe impact the genre, and what the implications of this new autobiographical form are for life writing from and about Eastern Europe within the post-communist and global contexts. By mapping the range of relationships between such autobiographical writing and the secret police files it incorporates, I show the numerous changes life narratives undergo in the aftermath of communism in Eastern Europe, illustrate the ever increasing complexity of life writing in global contexts, and point to new routes of memory with regard to communist oppression.

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