Watch, Follow, Sabotage: Themes of Stasi Surveillance in the Queer East German Films Coming Out and Die andere Liebe

The Ministerium für Staatsicherheit, Stasi, conducted constant and relentless surveillance on the citizens of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), whom it perceived as political threats to the regime’s stability. After organizing and pushing for public visibility, gay East Germans quickly attracted the attention of the Stasi. Even though the East German state regarded homosexuality as a taboo topic, it became the subject of a 1988 documentary, Die andere Liebe, and a 1989 full-length feature film, Coming Out. These films focus on the hardships that gay East Germans faced in a society of compulsory heterosexuality. Existing scholarship on the two films critiques the homogenous, monogamous presentation of gay men, analyzes East Germany’s ambivalent relationship to its gay citizens, and describes the use of shame as a method of self-policing. Offering a new reading of these two films, this thesis unites both the cinematic presentation and real-life experiences of gay East Germans to argue that these films allude to the omnipresent Stasi surveillance apparatus through their cinematic techniques and narrative structures. While any direct criticism of the Stasi would have faced immediate censorship, the films use subtle tactics, such as camera positioning and tracking shots, to evoke a sense of surveillance. Using Michel Foucault’s theory of Panopticism, I examine prominent sequences and narrative elements from the films. This new reading demonstrates how the films utilize Brechtian alienation effects to draw attention to their presentation of the “normal.” This cinematic reflexivity encourages audiences to question not simply what the films show but how. The films construct the gay body as an object of surveillance; this thesis argues that the gay East German figure has become a subject of visual curiosity both on the streets and on the screens.