Maureen Fielding
Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies
Penn State Brandywine
23 Yearsley Mill Road
Media, PA 19063
mdf6@psu.edu
(484) 988-0374
Paper Proposal for International Conference on New Narratives of the Cold War
Revisiting the Cold War: Transforming My Past Into a Healing Fiction
I served in the U.S. Army from 1976 to 1980. I was trained as a Russian Voice Intercept
Operator, given a top-secret security clearance, and stationed in West Berlin to monitor
Russian transmissions. As a twenty-year old enlisting in the military, I thought only of
the opportunity to learn a language and travel. When I received orders for West Berlin, I
was overjoyed. The joy quickly turned to something else as I realized that the world I had
entered was a far cry from the carefree life I had led as an American teenager living in
Europe in the early seventies. It was an oppressive and repressive world where we were
the targets of East block agents attempting to turn us, Criminal Investigation Division
undercover narcotic agents planted in the barracks, and our own Military Intelligence
agents who monitored our activities.
Ultimately, my life was turned upside down when an East German agent posing as a
plumber came to my off post apartment. When I finally got out of the army, I wrote a
novel about my experiences for an M.A. thesis in Creative Writing. Then I put the novel
away and got on with life. I lost contact with everyone from that time. A few years ago, I
came back to the novel, and I was swept up in those events again. I made contact with
another friend who was also affected by those events, and he said that he felt that he had
been traumatized by those events. As I began revisiting the novel and revising, I was
drawn into the emotional maelstrom and realized that despite the lack of a hot war, the
Cold War had been deeply traumatic for me and others. Watching The Lives of
Others was a catalyst to further research. I applied for and received a grant to return to
Berlin for the first time since I left on the duty train to cross through East Germany into
West Germany.
As I have been writing and revising, I have found that much of what I've learned in the
last twenty years of specializing in trauma, testimony, and literature apply to my current
project. Writing about these events has been very therapeutic for me. I've transformed
the original memoir into a work of fiction and planned not just one book, but also a
trilogy taking the protagonists from the traumatic event, through the aftermath, and up to
their healing.