The works of Jurek Becker are paradigmatic for the study of socialist control over literary life in the GDR. The censorship-based administration of this area of social reality was effectively thrown out of joint by the ersatz publicity in the Federal Republic. Discourse and textual analysis of a wealth of unpublished archive material indicates that cooperation, conflict settlement, and power struggles between authors, publishers, the political leadership, and the State Security Service followed the same pattern. All the participants availed themselves of the core discourses on opposition and publicity to define and assert their respective stances.