Stasiland

Chapter 1: Berlin, Winter 1996

Funder opens Stasiland in the first person and places herself in the midst of a bleak description of Alexanderplatz Station, a grey and dirty environment only countered by the smell of antiseptic in the toilet block. In this way, she announces three things: that she was a significant part of the stories that she will be telling; that the East was still an austere place even after the fall of the wall; and that like the disinfectant had a purpose ‘to mask the smells of human bodies’, Germany had a façade that may be hiding something unpleasant. Funder lightly discusses the Wall with the toilet attendant and then reveals that it ‘was one of the longest structures ever built to keep people separate from one another’. Having visited West Berlin prior to the wall coming down, Funder is not new to Germany, but she notes the drab, sterile atmosphere of old East Berlin by comparison.

Funder feels hung over from a pub session the previous night, and is now on her way to Leipzig to visit the Stasi museum, formerly the offices of the Stasi (State Security Service; Staatssicherheitsdienst, SSD, commonly known as the Stasi). She hoped to see the workings of the GDR, officially the German Democratic Republic. Funder observes the offices, left just as they were on 4 December, 1989. There are displays of photographs, details of the Stasi observation methods, smell sample jars and ‘frighteningly neat’ desks. Frau Hollitzer, the guide, mentions Miriam Weber, whose husband died in a nearby cell. Funder is subsequently not able to get Miriam out of her mind and decides to look ‘for some of the stories from this land gone wrong’.

Chapter 1: Berlin, Winter 1996 Quotes

It occurs to me that the purpose of disinfectant globules was to mask the smells of human bodies with something worse. Chapter 1

… it was one of the longest structures ever built to keep people separate from one another. (About the wall) Chapter 1

But I liked the sticklebrick nature of it, building long supple words by putting short ones together. (Funder about the German language) Chapter 1

The Stasi was the internal army by which the government kept control. Its job was to know everything about everyone, using any means it chose. Chapter 1

In its forty years, ‘the Firm’ generated the equivalent of all records in German history since the middle ages. Chapter 1

The Stasi had developed a quasi-scientific method, ‘smell sampling’, as a way to find criminals. Chapter 1

Later, Frau Hollitzer told me about Miriam, a young woman whose husband had died in a Stasi remand cell nearby. Chapter 1

Chapter 2: Miriam

Funder works at an overseas television service that was set up by the government after the war to represent a more likeable Germany around the world. Her job is to answer letters from viewers. An American letter writer angrily responds that history is made of personal stories, a response that further encourages Funder’s search for stories. Funder meets Miriam, who had never told her story to a stranger before, in Leipzig for the first time.

Funder notes that in Miriam’s apartment ‘you could see anyone coming’. This comment becomes increasingly significant as we learn more about Miriam’s past experiences. In 1968, aged sixteen, Miriam and a friend, inspired by protesters in Leipzig, distributed homemade leaflets around the town that stated, ‘Consultation, not water cannons’ and ‘People of the People’s Republic speak up!’ Funder observes that this action seems so harmless but Miriam reminds her that it was a crime of treason at a time when the government wanted to control all information. Miriam and her friend, Ursula, were caught by the Stasi after a search of Miriam’s house and, after an extended period of interrogation, sleep deprivation and mind games, Miriam had confessed.

Chapter 2: Miriam Quotes

Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to be German. (Funder) Chapter 2

Uwe had a similar amount of TV-journo energy to Scheller, only Uwe’s was sexual not chemical. Uwe’s girlfriends are always leaving him and he is, therefore, at most times of day and in almost any company, deeply distracted by desire. (About Uwe Schmidt) Chapter 2

As the government controlled the newspapers, magazines and television, training as a journalist was effectively training as a government spokesperson. Chapter 2

‘But eventually,’ Miriam says, ‘they break you.’ Chapter 2

Chapter 3: Bornholmer Bridge

Miriam had decided to go over the Wall and escape to the West. Her story of attempted escape becomes a suspenseful narrative as Miriam sought a way to the other side. From the train, she noticed Bornholmer Bridge, a place where the wire wall comes very close to the railway line with garden beds in front. When Funder compares her antics to those of Peter Rabbit in Mr McGregor’s garden, they share a laugh but the reality is that Miriam still has scars from the barbed wire fence on her hands today. These are symbolic of the impact of a past life on Miriam from an early age. Miriam had an unexpected amount of success, including a dog that seemingly ignored her, however, she was eventually caught out by a trip wire and captured.

After a further bout of sleep deprivation and torture that lasted eleven days, in which ‘The Stasi let her have it’, a desperate Miriam concocted an illogical story that the Stasi seemed to believe. It took two weeks for the Stasi to see through her fiction but in the meantime, Miriam had been able to sleep. She was then sentenced to eighteen months in Hohenschönhausen prison.

Chapter 3: Bornholmer Bridge Quotes

‘I don’t know why it didn’t attack me. I don’t know how dogs see, but maybe it had been trained to attack moving targets, people running across, and I’d gone on all fours. Maybe it thought I was another dog.’ (Miriam) Chapter 3

‘Relations between people were conditioned by the fact that one or other of you could be one of them. Everyone suspected everyone else, and the mistrust this bred was the foundation of social existence.’ (Miriam explains why her story was unbelievable) Chapter 3

Chapter 4: Charlie

Miriam endures brutal treatment in prison and tells Funder: ‘When I got out of prison, I was basically no longer human’. Miriam met Charlie after her release from jail. When shown a photo of him, Funder has to restrain herself from asking why Miriam had cut herself out of the photo. This resembles a redacted file that one might find in the Stasi file rooms.

Charlie and Miriam lived together but were subjected to regular Stasi scrutiny and control of their lives. Miriam was not allowed to study and she couldn’t get a job. In 1979, Charlie was placed under formal suspicion of helping Miriam’s sister and her husband escape in a car boot, and he and Miriam applied to leave the GDR. Charlie was arrested on 26 August 1980 and held in a remand cell. Miriam gained authorisation to visit him but on 15 October, a policeman matter-of-factly informed her that Charlie was dead. The official story was that he hanged himself but Miriam’s constant inquiries drew a range of differing stories and she was not permitted to see his body in the morgue. Funder observes: ‘For Miriam, the past stopped when Charlie died’. Miriam placed hope in the puzzle women of Nuremberg finding out something about Charlie amid all the shredded and torn pieces of files that were being rebuilt there.

Miriam continued calling the Stasi every month with questions about Charlie’s death and burial. The Stasi seemed excessively concerned with the coffin, and Miriam saw that as an admission of their guilt but knew that she would never get truth under the Stasi regime. Eventually, after a longstanding struggle, in May 1989, Miriam had her identity papers taken from her and was deported to West Germany. However, her deportation was eleven years too late, and only six months before the fall of the Wall.

Chapter 4: Charlie Quotes

‘When I got out of prison, I was basically no longer human.’ (Miriam) Chapter 4

‘It was silly. I stopped thinking I’d ever get out. They were playing with me like a mouse.’ (Miriam) Chapter 4

‘Essentially, the deportation came eleven years too late,’ she says, ‘and six months too early.’ (Miriam) Chapter 4

For Miriam, the past stopped when Charlie died. Chapter 4

Chapter 5: The Linoleum Palace

Funder arrives home and finds Julia, her landlord, removing bookshelves. She had from time to time picked over the apartment as she had nothing herself. The apartment seems to be a metaphor for life in the GDR where resources were scarce and things were bare and functional, with little trace of excess or beauty. Funder doesn’t mind, but reflects on the buildings of East Germany that are neglected and old. The government and population seem divided on what to do with the physical remains of the old regime. Street names had been changed and modern fresh Western trams run along worn out old Eastern streets. Hitler’s bunker, which was discovered near where Funder was staying, forced people to decide about how they will deal with the past. Should the bunker be opened for people to see, at the risk of it becoming a shrine, or buried as if it never happened, at the risk of repeating the past? The predicament underpins Funders question: ‘To remember or forget—which was healthier?’ It also prompted further curiosity about ‘what it must have been like to be on the inside of the Firm, and then to have that world and your place in it disappear’. She decided to place an advertisement in the Potsdam newspaper to try and meet former Stasi workers and unofficial collaborators who may be willing to discuss this with her.

Chapter 5: The Linoleum Palace Quotes

And it was furnished if, as Julia warned me, ‘only sparsely’. This was even truer now. (About the apartment, a metaphor of GDR) Chapter 5

What surprises me about living here was that, no matter how much was 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. (Funder) Chapter 5

I am curious about what it must have been like to be on the inside of the Firm, and then to have that world and your place in it disappear. (Funder) Chapter 5

To remember or forget-which was healthier? To demolish it or to fence it off? To dig it up, or leave it lie in the ground? (About Hitler’s bunker – Funder’s thoughts about the past) Chapter 5

Chapter 6: Stasi HQ

Among the first to respond to Funder’s advertisement was an informer who tried to negotiate money for information. He was sure capitalism had arrived and with it, the opportunity to trade information for money. Funder rejects the deal but organises meetings with others who have made contact. First, Funder heads to the Stasi Headquarters, now a museum, but once home to Erich Mielke, the Minister for State Security. People go there to read their ‘unauthorised biographies’: the secret files kept about them by the Stasi.
Funder outlines Mielke’s background and provides details about his early membership of the Communist Party, his flight to Moscow, and subsequent training by Stalin’s secret police. The post-World War II GDR regime enabled his return to East Germany, and with his friend, Erich Honecker, Mielke rose to a position of great power. Funder calls Mielke and Honecker ‘ossified’ (turn into bone or bony tissue) elderly men with no interest in reform, who alienated many of the East German people demanding reform in the late 1980s. The leaders remained stagnant and stuck in their ways, even after contrary advice by the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Funder describes the candlelight protest of 70,000 East Germans outside Stasi HQ on October 9 1989 and the subsequent fall of the Wall on October 17: ‘It was all over, and people from East and West were climbing, crying, and dancing on the Wall.’

Chapter 6: Stasi HQ Quotes

‘You must understand that it was very hard for some of us now to get jobs in this new Germany. We are discriminated against and ripped off blind from one minute to another, in this-this Kapitalismus. But we learn fast: so I ask you, how much you are prepared to pay for my story?’ (A potential interview for Funder) Chapter 6

‘We are not immune from villains among us,’ he told a gathering of high-ranking Stasi officers in 1982. ‘If I knew of any already, they wouldn’t live past tomorrow.’ (Recalling of Mielke to the Stasi) Chapter 6

But the men running the GDR were ossified. They were not interested in reform. Chapter 6

… it was all over, and people from east and west were climbing, crying, and dancing on the Wall. Chapter 6

Chapter 7: The Smell of Old Men

Funder continues the inquest into remembering or forgetting by adding an extra element: the idea that a person may want to remember, or know, but part of their past is erased, or shredded. This chapter focuses on the rush in the Normanstrasse HQ when the Stasi needed to shred as many documents and files as possible. Funder’s observation includes the ironic detail that Stasi men headed into West Berlin to buy more shredders as their own collapsed through overuse. Once the shredders gave out completely, files were torn by hand and placed in bags, the same ones now being pieced together by the puzzle women. Details of the past, once hidden from citizens, were now being pieced together slowly in the aftermath of the regime.

Funder meets a cleaner at the HQ who says she conformed but suggests that it’s wrong to say that everyone was a part of the machine as only a few were actually informing and the rest were actually controlled. A video that Funder watches showed a cemetery worker who explained he was just doing his job by leaving ovens on for Stasi to secretly use after hours. Funder left with the phone number of Frau Paul, given to her by the guide when she explained she wanted to talk to people confronted by the regime. The cleaner also mentioned the lack of women’s facilities as the regime had been a men’s club, a ‘Mannerlub’, noting that the smell of the museum when it first opened: ‘It was the smell … of old men’. Funder often remarks on smells and fragrance in conjunction with the description of buildings and people.

Chapter 7: The Smell of Old Men Quotes

But this was done in such an orderly fashion – whole drawers of documents put into the same bag-that now, in Nuremberg, it was possible for the puzzle women to piece them back together. Chapter 7

Germany was the only Eastern Bloc country in the end that so bravely, so conscientiously, opened its files on its people to its people. Chapter 7

The man looks uncomfortable, but he also shrugs as if to say, ‘it was just my job’. (Cemetery worker on video admits to leaving ovens on for Stasi to cremate bodies) Chapter 7

‘I conformed, just like everybody else. But it’s not true to say the GDR was a nation of seventeen million informers. They were only two in a hundred.’ (Cleaning lady at Stasi HQ) Chapter 7

‘Women couldn’t get past colonel rank and there were just three of them anyway. This was a ‘Mannerlub.’ (Cleaning lady at Stasi HQ) Chapter 7

‘It was the smell,’ she says, ‘of old men.’ (Cleaning lady at Stasi HQ) Chapter 7

Chapter 8: Telephone Calls

Miriam calls and suggests she is a bit wary to meet Funder again. Funder sympathises, noting that Miriam has just told her a painful story which would make it uneasy for her.

Funder meets the first of several people who responded to her advertisement. Herr Winz meets her at a hotel to tell his Stasi story. He indicated that Funder would recognise him due to the rolled-up magazine under his arm. This seemed to be like non-verbal communication employed by the Stasi, indicating that he is still into spy games. In addition to this, Winz wants to see Funder’s ID card and is shocked to hear that Australians do not possess them. Winz belongs to a club of ex-Stasi men, the ‘Society for the Protection of Civil Rights and the Dignity of Man’, who supposedly aim to present an objective view of history in order to combat the lies and misrepresentation they feel has been spread about the Stasi and the GDR. He is still propagandising and, seemingly, stuck in the past. He is adamant that people miss the safety of the GDR and are eagerly awaiting the second coming of socialism.

Klaus calls in the middle of the night but Funder doesn’t go out with him. Klaus was a well-known musician in his time, and it was with Klaus that Funder had been drinking when she experienced the hangover mentioned at the start of the text. Funder continues to call Miriam but there is no reply. Later, it is revealed that this was because she deliberately avoids routine and expectation in order to keep free from a controlled and predictable lifestyle.

Chapter 8: Telephone Calls Quotes

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. (Funder) Chapter 8

Does telling your story mean you are free of it? Or that you go, unfettered, into your future. (Funder considering Miriam) Chapter 8

Klaus Renft was the legendary ‘Mik Jegger’ of the Eastern Bloc. Chapter 8

But in Potsdam people come up and say – he puts on a small sorry voice – ‘You were right. Capitalism was even worse than you told us it would be’. (Herr Winz) Chapter 8

Chapter 9: Julia Has No Story

The title of the chapter suggests that like all Eastern Germans after the wall collapsed, Julia has a story. However, after being trained by the social restraints to keep everything private to avoid informers and punishment, she is reluctant to admit she has a story. Julia has let herself into Funder’s apartment again to water the plants and find some old love letters. Julia tells her story. Funder and Julia were born in the same year, 1966, which Funder notices creates ‘parallel universes, possible and immediate’.

Despite Julia’s insistence of having ‘no story’, her story is important and her saying ‘no story’ actually means a long, sad story. Julia’s goal as an adolescent was to be an interpreter, her fascination with foreign languages leading her to write letters to the outside world in Russian, French and English. She wanted to show that life in the GDR was not so bad, without the drugs, homelessness and prostitution of the West. Funder had noticed, in her recent travel around Germany, the drinking and homelessness as she passed those sleeping in parks and stations. These were not an issue before the wall came down. Julia’s story shows her hopeful start to life was thwarted when she met an Italian who became her boyfriend. The Stasi had been watching them and, ultimately, she had to decide between love or a future.

Chapter 9: Julia Has No Story Quotes

‘There were no drunks before the Wall came down,’ Julia says. ‘I mean,’ she corrects herself, ‘in the park. No-one was homeless as they are now.’ Chapter 9

‘Long story,’ she says again. I am realising this was code for ‘no story’. Chapter 9

Like her father, Julia believed in East Germany as an alternative to the west. Chapter 9

Chapter 10: The Italian Boyfriend

Julia met her boyfriend at the Leipzig Fair when she was sixteen. He was thirty and working for a computer company. They maintained a long-distance relationship for over two years with regular phone calls and occasional holidays. She was approached from time to time with warnings about her relationship with the ‘outsider’. Then, despite graduating with exceptional grades, she was unable to gain entry into university or get a job of any kind. She explains to Funder: ‘That was when it got hard for me’. She had been loyal to the state, but now was being edged out of the reality because of her relationship with a westerner. ‘By no fault of her own, Julia Behrend had fallen into the gap between the GDR’s fiction and its reality’. She was unemployed and she encountered a blatant lack of sympathy at the Employment Office where she was told ‘there is no unemployment in the GDR’.

Eventually, Julia told her boyfriend that the relationship was finished after a holiday when the relentless GDR surveillance and the Italian’s controlling personality had become too much for her. Julia then withdrew, without hope, into a private exile.

Chapter 10: The Italian Boyfriend Quotes

‘I lived with this sort of scrutiny as a fact,’ she says. ‘I didn’t like it but I thought: I live in a dictatorship, so that’s just how it is. It was clear to me as a simple act of GDR-logic: I am with a western foreigner; now I will be under observation.’ (Julia) Chapter 10

‘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) Chapter 10

‘That was when it got hard for me.’ (Julia) Chapter 10

‘I said, you are not unemployed! You are seeking work!’ and then, almost hysterically, ‘There is no unemployment in the German Democratic Republic!’ (Julia, recounting Woman at employment office) Chapter 10