Chapter 11: Major N.

There is a noticeable pain that Julia shows while remembering her story. ‘There are some things’ — she stops. ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to remember this. I haven’t remembered this’. However, Julia continues her story, detailing how she was summoned to the police station to renew her ID, but sent to Room 118, where she found Major N., the Minister of State Security. Her fear escalated as he questioned her as to why she was not working. He had in front of him all the letters written by Julia to the Italian boyfriend. Julia was confronted by the results of the Stasi’s secret surveillance.

Despite the thorough file, Major N. didn’t seem to know that Julia had broken up with the Italian. When he suggested that Julia help provide the Stasi with information about her ‘friend’, she was honest: ‘He wanted to own me. I knew if I stayed with him I would not be able to determine my own life’ (p. 112). Once again, the irony of these words resonates with the reader. Julia would be ‘owned’ and was unable to determine her own life anyway.

Julia spoke with her parents and sister, realising that at only twenty years of age, her best option was to leave for the West. The alternative was to become an informer. Julia is one of many characters who was forced to make severe choices, often between love, marriage, a family, a future or informing. Encouraged by her parents, Julia phoned Major N. to refuse his offer and tell him they would be complaining to Honecker. This was calling Major N’s bluff and the strategy worked. There were other instances of resistance that showed the power of the Stasi was through fear. This showed that Julia was not afraid but also revealed that Major N was afraid of a bad report with Honecker. The next week Julia had a job. The narrative shifts back to the present as Julia admits she wants the box of letters to aid her visits to a psychotherapist.

Chapter 11: Major N. Quotes

She was remembering as I watch, summoning presences more real than mine. ‘There are some things-‘ she stops. ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to remember this. I haven’t remembered this.’ (Julia) Chapter 11

I want nothing more to do with him. He wanted to own me. I knew if I stayed with him I would not be able to determine my own life.’ She added, ‘I never want to see him again, even as a friend.’ (Julia to Major N. about Italian boyfriend but ironically suits the Stasi too) Chapter 11

… Julia rides back to her barricaded tower, full of things she can’t leave, but can’t look at either. Chapter 11

Chapter 12: The Lipsi

Funder continues her investigation of life behind the wall but notices that ‘Everyone, always, was claiming innocence here’. This is difficult to understand as there was obviously some horrible things committed under the GDR powers. The only explanation is that people were changing their perception of the past or justifying their position and actions. Chief among these was Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, the chief propagandist of the regime. Funder is assisted by Uwe, her workmate, to track down details about von Schnitzler’s work on ‘The Black Channel’, a channel decidedly set up to answer back to all incoming media and to poke holes in Western ideology. The station was so obviously biased and blatantly state-run that it was mocked and not enjoyed by most reluctant participants in the state’s ideology.

Funder visits the TV archive building, another grey, inhospitable, concrete pragmatic construction. Frau Anderson, who shows her around the archive, and who is clearly still loyal to the state, nostalgically laments the loss of the Wall. Funder reveals the new term for this nostalgia as ‘Ostalgie’, that is, nostalgia for the East. There were some who Funder met who clearly missed the old days. Perhaps it was because they held the power to avoid the worst of outcomes individually or because they were true believers in the communist ideal. For others, it was because they were remembering the past from a distance, focusing on the positives and missing the larger picture.

Funder spends several hours watching tapes from The Black Channel of a ‘hygiene operation’ to cleanse the impact of West German television, showing people being shot trying to escape over the Wall. Funder wonders at this man, von Schnitzler, who ‘turned inhumanity into humanity, these deaths into symbols of salvation’. Another tape reveals the Lipsi dance, a dance invented by a committee, supposedly to draw East Germans away from the immoral dance moves of the West. The dance is obviously constructed by members who have little understanding of youth, who were seen as absurdist and ridiculous, a clear intention to manufacture something trendy. Emotions are further heightened when Funder wrongly thinks she has been locked in the building for the night. The panic she feels is a taste of having her freedom threatened. Later, she is locked in a prison van to help her understand the feeling. A week later, Herr Winz provides Funder with von Schnitzler’s phone number and she arranges to meet the man behind the Black Channel.

Chapter 12: The Lipsi Quotes

Everyone, always, was claiming innocence here. Chapter 12

‘The Black Channel’ was broadcast in the east from 1960. It was intended as a countermeasure to the western program ‘Das Rote Optik’ (The Red View), a critique of socialism being broadcast into the east from West Germany. Chapter 12

‘Lipsi’ was colloquial for ‘Leipzig’ but it wasn’t just the regime’s overt attempt to manufacture a trend for the masses, as if it had come from that hip city. (About the Lipsi dance seen on the Black Channel) Chapter 12

Chapter 13: Von Schni-

Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler’s shortened name in the title refers to when Julia said, ‘everyone called him “Karl-Eduard von Schni-” because that was how long it took before one of us could jump up and change the channel’. This underscores his lack of popularity among many in the GDR. Von Schnitler meets with Funder in a home that is a part-shrine to the old days and communism, revealing he is still a passionate communist. He is still an entertainer and passionate communicator, and outlines his past and present views which have not changed over time.

Von Schnitzler is insistent that Funder hears his whole life story, becoming angry when she tries to fast-forward to ‘The Black Channel’. He justifies his role as part of the Cold War controlling the Western influence over communist-held lands but Funder sees him as a ‘bully’. He is still angry at the quality and content of Western television, and in his tirade against it he creates an ironic moment when he mentions the TV show Big Brother, conveniently forgetting that the GDR carried out constant surveillance of its population. Funder’s Australian citizenship doesn’t excuse her from criticism as Von Schnitzler references Rupert Murdoch, who was condemned as a ‘global imperialist’, a point Funder doesn’t resist. In his fluctuation between calmness and shouting, Von Schnitzler shouts ‘It was absolutely necessary! It was an historical necessity. It was the most useful construction in all of Germany’s history!’ when Funder asked him about the Wall. He saw Mielke, who most consider a horrible tyrant, as the most ‘humane human’. Funder’s final gesture was to give him a pin of the Australian and German flags, however, it was the wrong flag for von Schnitzler: it was not the flag of the GDR.

Chapter 13: Von Schni- Quotes

‘What makes me sorry,’ he says in a withering tone, ‘was what was dished up to people today on that piece-of-filth television. For instance that, that idiotic program-whatsit called?’ (Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler ironically referencing the Big Brother TV) Chapter 13

‘More! Than! Ever!’ He brings his fist down. … ‘I did not “consider” it necessary. It was absolutely necessary! It was an historical necessity. It was the most useful construction in all of German history! In European history!’ Von Schnitzler answering Funder about the Wall.’ Chapter 13

‘… And there was Erich Mielke at the top, a living example of the most humane human being.’ (Von Schnitzler on Mielke) Chapter 13

Chapter 14: The Worse You Feel

Julia continues her story and reveals how she thought she experienced it ‘intensely’ because of all she went through, not only the time spent under Stasi control, but Julia also discloses that she was raped soon after the Wall came down, suspecting that it was by a criminal released during the reunification process. The trauma of the dual hardship explains, in her therapist’s opinion, why she is unable to now submit to authority or make clear plans. She tells funder: ‘I just can’t have structure imposed on me’. This depressing story is told in parallel with description of the apartment as grey, brown and simple. Once again, Funder draws parallels between sad and bleak stories and the equally depressing architecture.

The police were unsympathetic and disinterested and offered Julia no protection, a relevant comparison to the Stasi before the Wall collapsed that indicated not everything had fully changed. Julia stopped eating and says ‘I could not see how I could go on and live a life in this world, let alone a normal life’. Julia’s experiences remind Funder just how important it is to tell the stories of seemingly ordinary people. Julia encourages Funder to tell these stories.

Funder visits the local pool but is unable to swim laps due to the many rules she encounters. She also is unable to sit in the diving pool unless she is diving. These appear as leftover attitudes; ‘So this was orderly chaos’, reflects Funder as she alludes to the pool as the ‘subconscious of the country: the mess that gives rise to all that order’. It was a country of too many rules and a city standing on the old fault-line of East and West.

Chapter 14: The Worse You Feel Quotes

‘Lots of things, personal things. I think that the whole Wende in 1989 and everything I went through around it-I think that I experienced it more intensely than others.’ (Julia) Chapter 14

‘It has to do with how I can’t subject myself to any sort of authority. It’s now to the point where I can’t commit myself to coming anywhere on time.’ (Julia) Chapter 14

Shortly after the Wall came down, prisoners held in the GDR, mostly political prisoners, were amnestied…. The man was huge. He bashed Julia and held his hands over her face. …. He threatened to kill her if she screamed, to kill her if she called the police…… The next day she managed to get herself to the police station. She received no counselling, no medical care, and no sympathetic treatment there. (Julia’s rape) Chapter 14

‘For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers.’ (Julia encourages Funder) Chapter 14

I’m making portraits of people. East Germans, of whom there will be none left in a generation. And I’m painting a picture of a city on the old fault-line of east and west. This was working against forgetting, and against time. Chapter 14

Chapter 15: Herr Christian

Funder heads by train to Potsdam to meet Herr Christian, a former Stasi man. He takes her, in his black BMW, on a tour of sites he had once operated. He maintains a sense of humour that contradicts the seriousness of what he did with the Stasi. He shows Funder the Coding Villa where phone transcripts from car phones and police walkie-talkies in the West were intercepted and a bunker where leading Stasi would have hidden in case of nuclear war. Herr Christian tells Funder he worked for the Stasi because of an acute sense of duty to obey the law. He worked as a covert security officer on Stasi buildings and hunted out cars that might have stowaway East German passengers organised by smugglers. Funder has fun with his admission that he enjoyed wearing disguises, particularly as a blind man: ‘Yes, being a blind man was the best way to observe people’. The extended meaning of this would be the blind obedience needed to follow GDR and Stasi policy to spy on innocent people.

Chapter 15: Herr Christian Quotes

‘I’ve always had an acute sense of duty to obey the law,’ he says, ‘and I thought it was the right thing to do.’ (Herr Christian) Chapter 15

‘Yes, being a blind man was the best way to observe people.’ (Herr Christian) Chapter 15

Chapter 16: Socialist Man

Hagen Koch’s apartment holds memorabilia of his past, like other Stasi men Funder has met. Koch was a new Stasi recruit in 1961 when he painted the line where the Wall was to go. He was only twenty-one and worked as Erich Honecker’s personal cartographer. Koch compares his upbringing in the GDR to being raised in a religion, making Funder wonder if a closed system of belief ultimately creates its own reality. She reflects back to her Catholic school days and her own struggle to make sense of Catholicism and notes, ironically, that the Stasi ‘had a lot more sons on earth to help’ see inside your life than God.

Koch continues to explain, or perhaps justify, his life in terms of his background. His father, Heinz Koch, was retrained as a teacher and then became involved in local politics. After the Communists intervened in his bid for the position of Mayor, he was labelled a ‘fascist imperialist army soldier’, which meant he was sentenced to seven years prison. Koch outlines a now all-too-familiar story of blackmail tactics involving ultimatums. Koch’s father’s choice was to join the Socialist Unity Party and see his wife and family again or stay with the Liberal Democrats and expect life in prison.

Heinz Koch was also forced by the party to have his own son, Hagan, join the youth section of the party. Hagan Koch explains to Funder that this was how he became the first child in the area to wear the kerchief and to go on to become ‘… a Musterknabe, a poster boy for the new regime.’ Koch relates a story of GDR children collecting beetles in return for ration cards, at a time when the regime was feeding its people with the propaganda that American and British planes dropping supplies to West Berlin were supposedly spraying potatoes with beetles in East Germany. Cut off from the outside world and having nothing else to believe, Koch saw ‘This story—of insects and sweets and the making of an enemy—was the story of the making of a patriot’.

Chapter 16: Socialist Man Quotes

‘No, no, no, no. It didn’t work like that. You had to be chosen.’
Apparently this was one of the fundamentals of the system: don’t call us, we’ll call you. (Hagan Koch to Funder) Chapter 16

‘My upbringing was so…’ he searches for the words, ‘so… GDR.’ (Hagan Koch) Chapter 16

‘You have to understand,’ he says, ‘in the context of my father, and of the propaganda of the Cold War-the GDR was like a religion. It was something I was brought up to believe in…’ (Hagan Koch) Chapter 16

To start a new country, with new values and newly minted socialist citizens, it was necessary to begin at the beginning: with children. Chapter 16

Chapter 17: Drawing the Line

Hagan Koch’s tale continues and is entwined with historical events including the construction of the Wall. Herr Koch started his career with the Ministry of State Security in 1960 before he was selected by Erich Mielke to work in the Drafting Office for Cartographics and Topography. However, his promising Stasi career was not without obstacles when his girlfriend was deemed ‘inappropriate’ by authorities. History repeats itself as Stasi interfere in matters of the heart for the Koch family.

At this time, the GDR was losing 2000 people a day in the general labour force, including skilled and professional workers. Koch’s story, as the twenty-one-year-old cartographer who drew the white chalk line across the street with Honecker beside him, weaves into Funder’s narrative of the events that took place on the night of Sunday August 12, 1961. The barbed wire had been rolled out and people awoke to find themselves cut off from relatives, work and school. Koch, who could have easily stepped to the other side of his chalk line, did not. He could have gone to the West for freedom and left his new bride of three weeks in the East but, reminiscent of his father’s choice, he chose love.

Koch decided he wanted to get out of the GDR when he lost his job because he didn’t tell the party about a visit from his biological father, but his plans were foiled when he was arrested on a false charge of producing pornography. His wife was not allowed to see him and, threatened with the removal of their young son, was blackmailed into divorcing her husband. Koch was devastated when shown the signed divorce papers in prison and told Funder: ‘At that moment my world broke apart.’ He was released from prison after signing a document retracting his resignation and renewing his pledge to lifelong service to the regime. He was very angry with his wife and it took some time before he could ‘hear’ the truth and remarry her. His Stasi file references her as a ‘negative influence’ causing ‘inconstancy’ to the party.

Chapter 17: Drawing the Line Quotes

‘I chose my wife by her outside, not her political convictions.’ (Hagan Koch) Chapter 17

‘The GDR was haemorrhaging. And it wasn’t just the ordinary workers who were leaving! It was the doctors, the engineers, the educated people.’ (Hagan Koch) Chapter 17

… to build an ‘anti-fascist protective measure’. … which had something of the prophylactic about it, protecting easterners from the western disease of shallow materialism. It obeys all the logic of locking up free people to keep them safe from criminals. Chapter 17

‘Just like my father: he went back to his wife, and I went back to mine.’ (Hagan Koch) Chapter 17

I wonder how it worked inside the Stasi: who thought up these blackmail schemes? Did they send them up the line for approval? Did pieces of paper come back initialled and stamped ‘Approved’: the ruining of a marriage, the destruction of a career, the imprisonment of a wife, the abandonment of a child? Chapter 17

Chapter 18: The Plate

In 1985, Herr Koch was denied permission to attend his father’s funeral and transferred out of the Stasi into the regular army. His private revenge, when leaving, was to take a plate pinned on the office wall. He explained to Funder it was his ‘… little private revenge’. It was all he had the courage to take, showing his healthy fear of the Stasi. In an almost humorous tale, Koch recalls how the Stasi sought the plate: in a typical over-efficient, file-producing committee-forming fashion, the Stasi formed a ‘Working Group on Plate Re-Procurement’. Three weeks later, his old section head came to collect the plate and Koch denied stealing it. Later, after someone saw it in a TV interview, he was visited by men who oversaw the sale of GDR assets, wanting the plate returned. It was only worth sixteen marks but the principle of details and organisation prevailed.

Funder calls Miriam again and visits the site she tried to escape using Koch’s maps to see the terrain.

Chapter 18: The Plate Quotes

His replacement would come in, and no-one would know the difference. He was interchangeable
with any other uniform and bad crewcut. (About Hagan Koch) Chapter 18

‘My little private revenge,’ he says. ‘That plate’-he looks straight at me-‘was all I had the courage for.’ (Hagan Koch) Chapter 18

Chapter 19: Klaus

Klaus and Uwe are not only Funder’s work friends but Klaus is also the friend Funder often drinks with and was a well-known musician before the fall of the Wall. The Klaus Renft Combo was one of the most popular bands in the GDR. The members listened to illegal music from the West and copied its style and songs. However, every song written by the band had its lyrics scrutinised and changed by the Stasi before it could be recorded. As their songs increasingly tried to ‘scratch the GDR at its marrow’, the band were restricted as to where they could play. They continued to play outside the city limits and grew in popularity.

Klaus tells Funder: ‘This society, it was built on lies — lie after lie after lie.’ The regime called him in and offered one of its trademark ultimatums. He could move to the West if he got rid of two other band members. Later, when files were opened to the public, Klaus discovered more about the ‘downfall’ of the band, including a note from Mielke that they be ‘liquidated’. Finally, the band was called to a meeting and simply told: ‘…you don’t exist anymore.’ Klaus secretly recorded this meeting with the Stasi and smuggled the tape to the West, threatening that if anything happened to them, it would be immediately played on Western radio. Funder outlines the overnight removal of all the band’s records, the rewriting of musical history without them, the manager who turned out to be Stasi, and the imprisonment of two members until they were ‘bought’ by the West. Klaus was allowed to go to West Berlin where he worked as a soundman.

An intriguing mystery raised was the death of the band’s writer from a rare cancer. Sketchy accounts traced that the Stasi used radiation to mark people and objects it wanted to track which could have caused cancer in many former prisoners. The Klaus Renft Combo reformed after the fall of the GDR, the last track on their new CD being the recording of the meeting where they were told they no longer existed. Surprisingly, Klaus hasn’t let the past make him bitter; ‘He seems incapable of regret, and anger evaporates off him like sweat.’ Funder is surprised to hear he believes the Stasi have been punished enough, making her ponder their capacity to have a conscience. She recalls Herr Winz, Herr Christian and Herr Koch ‘and the different kinds of conscience there are’. Klaus differs from Miriam and Julia in that he has stopped being bound to the wounds of the past. The chapter closes with his words: ‘You can’t let it eat you up, you know, make you bitter. You’ve got to laugh where you can.’ Perhaps this attitude was only achievable as his life under the Stasi also saw him enjoying a life of ‘sex drugs and rock n roll’.

Chapter 19: Klaus Quotes

He was grumpy and friendly at the same time, just warming up. (About Klaus) Chapter 19

In the ersatz world of the Lipsi, Renft was something authentic and unauthorised. But there was only one record company, AMIGA, and Klaus says that the lyrics to every one of their songs were changed before they could be recorded. Chapter 19

‘… GDR wasn’t just Stasi, Stasi, Stasi. It was “Sex und Drugs und Rock’n’Roll”,’ he says in English. By drugs he means alcohol and cigarettes … (Klaus) Chapter 19

At one point Mielke asked his officers in Leipzig, ‘Why can’t you just grab them? Why aren’t they liquidated?’ (Mielke about Klaus’ band) Chapter 19

‘And then she said to us, “We are here to inform you today, that you don’t exist any more”.’ (Klaus recalls a woman from the committee about Klaus’ band) Chapter 19

‘I didn’t let them get to me.’ This, I think, was his victory. This was what stops him being bound to the past and carrying it around like a wound. (Klaus) Chapter 19

Chapter 20: Herr Bock of Golm

In stark contrast to Klaus, Herr Bock was deeply entrenched in the Stasi. He worked at the Stasi training academy, teaching ‘Spezialdisziplin’, the science of recruiting and handling informers. He believed the purpose of the Stasi was to defend the government against the people. It is clear by now that the people needed defending from the government so his statement seems ironic. Details are offered that show Stasi divisions throughout the GDR, including informers and agents who infiltrated every aspect of society even churches and schools. In a twist, it is noted that at some protest events there were so many Stasi agents that it made the crowd look larger than it really was. Bock discusses with Funder how the definition of ‘enemy’ became wider as time went on, in fact, ‘too wide’ according to him. She is curious about why people became informers. Bock thought some were convinced by the cause but, mainly, it was because ‘They felt they had it over other people’. Bock now works as a business adviser, mediating for West German firms buying assets in the East. He finds it hard to understand what happened in 1989, and says in shock that, ‘It would not have occurred to anyone that our country could somehow cease to be. Just like that’. Funder’s departure from Herr Bock’s house is uneasy as she waits in the dark for a taxi and has to return to call one from his house. He is still a spy, a Stasi man, hiding behind curtains in the dark.

Chapter 20: Herr Bock of Golm Quotes

‘Spezialdisziplin was the science of recruiting informers. Spezialdisziplin was the art,’ he says, ‘of the handler.’ (Herr Bock) Chapter 20

The internal service of the Stasi was designed to spy on and control the citizens of the GDR. The only way to make sense of its name was to understand the Stasi as defending the government against the people. (Herr Bock) Chapter 20

‘It would not have occurred to anyone that our country could somehow cease to be. Just like that.’ (Herr Bock) Chapter 20

‘And I don’t mind telling you that some of us actually thought the paragraphs became a little too wide.’ I nod. If, by the mere fact of investigating someone you turn them into an Enemy of the State, you could potentially busy yourself with the entire population. (Herr Bock) Chapter 20

‘Well, some of them were convinced of the cause,’ he says. ‘But I think it was mainly because informers got the feeling that, doing it, they were somebody. …. They felt they had it over other people.’ (Herr Bock) Chapter 20