Stasiland

“It took twenty years after the war, he said, for the Nazi regime even to begin to be discussed in Germany, and that process is repeating itself now. ‘Will it be 2010 or 2020 before what happened there is remembered?’ he wrote. And, ‘Why are some things easier to remember the more time has passed since they occurred?’”

The writing of this book is, in a sense, Funder’s rebuttal to this assertion. Stasiland was written soon after the fall of the Communist regime. Additionally, this sort of amnesia is not limited to any one group; we see it even within East Germany, in the way they absolved themselves of Nazism.

“The German Democratic Republic paid lip service to the institutions of democracy. There were district attorneys, whose job it was to administer justice, and lawyers, whose job it was to represent clients, and judges, whose job it was to pass judgment. There were, at least on paper, political parties other than the ruling Socialist Unity Party. But really there was just the Party, and its instrument, the Stasi.”

A concise reference to the insidious way the Stasi ran their government: it was a dictatorship dressed up to resemble a democracy, and we see it most potently in the book in Miriam Weber’s search for the truth about her husband’s death, and in her sensing that the defense lawyers and judges are taking orders from the Stasi.

“Some people are comfortable talking about their lives, as if they can make sense of the progression of random events that made them what they are. This involves a kind of forward-looking faith in life; a conviction that cause and effect are linked, and that they are themselves more than the sum of their past.”

Most, if not all, of the people Funder interviews have this “forward-looking faith”; the book seems to be making the statement that such faith and conviction in reshaping the past in one’s own mind can be used to either good or ill effect. Frau Paul would do well to realize that she should not be ashamed for her criminal acts.

“‘It is amazing,’ Miriam says, ‘what a revolution can do to people’s memories.’”

Miriam says this in reference to Major Maler, a Stasi man who signed a report about the surveillance to be carried out at Charlie’s funeral. Miriam meets up with him and he claims to not know the name Weber at all. His motivations for meeting her are mysterious, and it’s unclear if he’s telling the truth.

“What surprises me about living here is that, no matter how much is taken out, this linoleum palace continues to contain all the necessities for life, at the same time as it refuses to admit a single thing, either accidentally or arranged, of beauty or joy. In this, I think, it is much like East Germany itself.”

This comes after Julia has removed a bookshelf from Funder’s apartment. It’s interesting that she can tolerate items being taken progressively out of her apartment, just as liberties were progressively taken from East Germans during the regime.

“To remember or forget—which is healthier? To demolish it or to fence it off? To dig it up, or leave it lie in the ground?”

If one had to articulate the one question this book seems to be interrogating, it would be this one, and the answer is not necessarily as obvious as it would seem at first glance. There are legitimate reasons for leaving the past buried, but it is always a question that must be decided intentionally, rather than casually.

“After the Wall fell the German media called East Germany ‘the most perfected surveillance state of all time.’”

At one point, Herr Bock compares the Stasi to all other secret services, and Funder tells the reader that it is different, that not many secret services have informers everywhere, spying on kindergarten activities and dinner parties.

“In Hitler’s Third Reich it is estimated that there was one Gestapo agent for every 2000 citizens, and in Stalin’s USSR there was one KGB agent for every 5830 people. In the GDR, there was one Stasi officer or informant for every sixty-three people. If part-time informers are included, some estimates have the ratio as high as one informer for every 6.5 citizens.”

This gives frightening perspective to the ‘most perfected surveillance state of all time’ quote. It also clarifies the paranoia that some like Miriam Weber felt: why, for instance, it was so absurd to her that her fabricated story would include her telling of her escape plans to a stranger. If one in every 6.5 people is an informer, such a thing would be unthinkable.

“Perhaps there is something healing about ridicule. It is a relief, anyway, from terror and anger.”

This is a repeated idea throughout the book: there are many moments of levity, where Funder and her interview subject will laugh at something the Stasi did. It’s a sentiment she repeats with Klaus, who says that you can’t let this stuff make you bitter, that you have to laugh where you can.

“If I were Miriam and had told the most painful and formative parts of my life to someone, I’m not sure I’d want to see that person again either. Especially if my life had already been written down by other people, stolen and steered.”

This is an interesting and complicated quote that gestures toward comparing Funder’s own account with Stasi files. Both, after all, are accounts of a person constructed by someone else, and are representations that the subject has no control over.

“There is an art, a deeply political art, of taking circumstances as they arise and attributing them to your side or the opposition, in a constant tallying of reality towards ends of which it is innocent.”

Herr Winz is ranting about the dangers of capitalism in a long monologue that he refuses to let Funder interrupt, as if he’s convincing himself of what he’s saying as much as her. This is right before he passes her a copy of The Communist Manifesto.

“Does telling your story mean you are free of it? Or that you go, fettered, into your future?”

This is perhaps the most pertinent question in the book: does telling your story free you, or lock you into a single interpretation? It’s a question posed by the book and answered in a dozen ways by the dozens of people Funder interviews.

“In the GDR people were required to acknowledge an assortment of fictions as fact. Some of these fictions were fundamental, such as the idea that human nature is a work-in-progress which can be improved upon, and that Communism is the way to do it. Others were more specific: that East Germans were not the Germans responsible (even in part) for the Holocaust; that the GDR was a multi-party democracy; that socialism was peace-loving; that there were no former Nazis left in the country; and that, under socialism, prostitution did not exist.”

We see many of the lasting effects of this system of belief lingering in many of the people Funder interviews: the nostalgia for the east and the belief that things were better off then, and that all you had to do was follow the law and no harm would come to you. These are perhaps artifacts of the ‘GDR-logic’ that was ubiquitous during the Communist regime.

“It was a condition of sanity both to accept ‘GDR-logic’ and to ignore it. ‘If you took things as seriously as people in the west think we must have, we would have all killed ourselves!’ Julia laughs, but I am feeling agitated. The fluorescent light in the kitchen has started to vibrate. ‘I mean you’d go mad,’ she says, ‘if you thought about it all the time.’”

This passage speaks to why the regime was able to last for so long and why there was a smaller culture of opposition to it: for average, law-abiding citizens to carry on, they had to compartmentalize the tyranny of the government and their own personal lives.

“‘I mean you might have your doubts about the west—I sure did—but we also felt that our own country was feeding us lies and that our futures depended on seeming to agree with it all.’”

It’s important to note that the citizens of East Germany were not completely brainwashed: many hated or mocked the propaganda programs. But of course, the seeds of doubt about the west were planted regardless, and they had to pretend fall in line when the time came, or risk being arrested.

“‘There is no unemployment in the German Democratic Republic!’”

This is where the Orwellian fantasies of the GDR come into clearest focus. The woman at the Employment Office says this to Julia when she is trying to get a job. It is demonstrably false, and Julia even laughs, but she must go along with the GDR’s inane fantasy anyway, because the state has the power.

“‘At the time I criticised [sic] other things—not being allowed to study or have a career. But looking back on it, it’s the total surveillance that damaged me the worst. I know how far people will transgress over your boundaries—until you have no private sphere left at all. And I think that is a terrible knowledge to have.’”

Julia says this after she recounts her experience with the Stasi opening and reading the letters to her boyfriend. The fact that the surveillance aspect of the regime was overlooked by the citizens, or considered so entrenched in daily life that it felt inevitable, should not be overlooked.

“I look at the box in her arms and know that you cannot destroy your past, nor what it does to you. It’s not ever, really, over.”

This is an interesting statement in the context of both one’s personal past and the history of a nation. We see remnants of every person’s past weighing on them in some way. On a more sociological scale, we see the scar that the Wall left on Germany playing out in similar ways: whether one acknowledges it or not, it is there, and so forgetting completely can be dangerous because then those remnants lose their context.

“History was so quickly remade, and so successfully, that it can truly be said that the easterners did not feel then, and do not feel now, that they were the same Germans as those responsible for Hitler’s regime. This sleight-of-history [sic] must rank as one of the most extraordinary innocence manoeuvres [sic] of the century.”

This passage offers perhaps the most startling real-life example of why forgetting is such a dangerous endeavor: East Germans fell from one oppressive regime (Nazism) into another (Communism).

“I want to see what it looked like to her; I want to place these pictures over what’s there now, as if to bring the past into some kind of focus.”

Funder says this when she is searching for the place where Miriam tried to scale the Wall, when Miriam was sixteen. This is Funder’s way of interacting with the past in order to bring it closer to her. She is becoming a disciple of remembering in this way, someone for whom hearing the stories isn’t enough. She must experience the past in a more sensory-laden manner.

“Memory, like so much else, is unreliable. Not only for what it hides and what it alters, but also for what it reveals.”

Funder writes this in the context of Frau Paul. Paul reveals how deeply the regime’s laws were instilled in her, as even now, after the fall and widespread denouncement of the regime, she feels shame for breaking these laws.

“‘If there is one thing my life has taught me, it is that one must not see things just from one side! People don’t like me for it, but it must be done!’ Herr Koch is a lone crusader against forgetting.”

Koch is perhaps the one and only ex-Stasi man who gets some redemption in the text. He is educating the masses, often tourists, about what life on the eastern side of the Wall was like.

“I understand perfectly the impulse not to file him away under plastic in an album, or in a frame. And, suddenly, it is clear to me why the new museum was so irritating. Things have been put behind glass, but they are not yet over.”

This is specifically in reference to a photograph of Charlie, which Miriam keeps loose in a box. Funder draws the connection between this and the new museum, the latter of which feels to her like a sanitized version of history. To do keep history behind glass can lead to the belief that history is an alien thing, even when it weighs on the present.