WRITING AGAINST THE CRITICISMS of autobiography as a genre put forward by the deconstructionists and following the theoretical reflections of Philip Lejeune and John Sturrock, Reinhard Andress argues that the writing and reading of an autobiography must necessarily be bound with an “Erkenntnisgewinn […] sonst würden sich Autoren und Leser nicht immer wieder dieser Form zuwenden” (a gain in insight […] otherwise authors and readers would not repeatedly turn to this form). Andress argues that the critical East German writer Günter de Bruyn (1926–) achieves this “(Selbst-)erkenntnis” (self-insight) in his two-volume autobiography, Zwischenbilanz (Interim Report, 1992) and Vierzig Jahre (Forty Years, 1996), through a combination of a distanced overview of an epoch with a view that encompasses the atmosphere of an era and communicates historical events, focuses on a range of individuals and employs a self-critical first-person narrative. Andress's response to de Bruyn's autobiography reflects, in this regard, the “almost unanimously positive ‘Western German’ reception of his work,” a reception that, as Dennis Tate argues, might suggest that the “rigour of his [de Bruyn’s] ‘Abrechnung,’” (reckoning) with himself and with the SED dictatorship “is deemed to be politically correct.” In the context of the united Germany, de Bruyn's apparently honest description of his naivety in the face of power has contributed to him being viewed as a great political author and even an all-German figure of consensus. In this essay, I aim to interrogate further this critical reckoning with the self and the past, focusing on de Bruyn's description in Vierzig Jahre of his brief involvement with the Stasi as Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter (unofficial coworker, IM) in the mid-1970s. I read this self-analysis in conjunction with other sources on this part of de Bruyn's past that have become available since the collapse of the GDR, notably the Stasi files opened to individuals and researchers after the passing of the Stasi-Unterlagen-Gesetz (Stasi Files Act) in December 1991. With this comparison, I do not seek to prove that de Bruyn is lying or to demonstrate which material is more valuable or reliable, but to highlight the tensions and inconsistencies between these sources that point, in turn, toward the complexity of life in the GDR and the difficulty of giving narrative form to this complexity in the political climate of the 1990s.