MT.

HIRA DETAILED NOTES ON STASILAND COLLEGE

VCE English – Unit THREE | Sena Kocoglu Chapter Summaries

CHAPTER ONE – Berlin, winter 1996

• Anna is introduced as hung-over - Setting: Alexanderplatz station. • Loss of self-control/vulnerable - “Tomorrow bruises will develop on my skin, like a picture from a negative”. Pg. 1 • Waiting underground for her train (to Ostbahnhof) to get to Leipzig (East Germany). • Alexanderplatz station -> “monstrous expanse of grey concrete designed to make people feel small.” Pg. 1-2 • Walks to toilet (not coping well with underground environment) – “the sick smell of antiseptic is overpowering.” Pg. 2 • Approaches “large woman in a purple apron and loud makeup” – selling condoms, tissues and tampons. Unafraid of detritus life. 65 years old. Pg. 2 • “Berliner Schnauze – snout. Its attitude: it’s in your face”. Pg. 2 • Lady has been working there (train toilets) for twenty one years. She’s familiar with customers. • Berlin Wall – East & West Berlin is introduced to text. • Berlin Wall runs “a couple kilometres from here”. Pg. 3 • Lady – “You know what I’d really like to do? I’d really like to have me a look at that Wall of theirs.” Pg. 3 * * * • On the Ostbahnhof train – “The rhythm soothes like a cradle, hushes my tapping fingers. The conductor’s voice comes through speakers reciting our stops.” Pg. 3 • Northern Germany is introduced as a dreary, sullen environment. This is where she lives –“I inhabit the grey end of the spectrum: grey buildings, grey earth, grey birds, and grey trees. Outside, the city and then the country spool past in black and white.” Pg. 3 • “Last night is a smoky blur.” – Klaus is introduced – Pub. Pg. 3 • Remembering the past while hung-over. “I remember things I haven’t remembered before … memories I call my past.” Pg. 3 • “I remember my mother’s moustache in the sun … acute hunger-and-loss feeling adolescence … burnt-chalk smell of tram brakes in summer.” Pg. 3 • Anna begins explaining her connection to the German language. “I remember learning German – so beautiful, so strange – at school in Australia...” Pg. 4 • “…the language of the enemy.” Pg. 4 • “And I liked the order, the directness that I imagined in the people.” – Relating characteristics of the language to the people who speak it – Germans. Pg. 4 • Came to live in West Berlin in 1980s – “…I wondered long and hard what went on behind that Wall.” Pg. 4 • On the train – “I think about the feeling I’ve developed for the former German Democratic Republic”. Pg. 4 • Describes her feeling as “horror-romance”. Pg. 4 • Romance – “Dream of a better world the German Communists wanted to build out of the ashes of their Nazi past”. Pg. 4 • Horror – “the horror comes from what they did in its name.” Pg. 4 • First visit to Leipzig – 1994 – almost 5 years after the wall fell. • East Germany is described as “secret walled in garden” and “place lost in time”. Pg. 5 • Die Wende – the Turning Point. “The Wende was the peaceful revolution against the Communist dictatorship East Germany, the only successful revolution in German history” Pg. 5 • “A map bore no resemblance to how life was lived in Leipzig.” Pg. 5

* * *

• Looking for Stasi museum in the Runden Ecke – Formerly, it was the Stasi offices • East Germany Ministry for State Security. • “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.” Pg. 5 • Between 1989 and 1990 – Over • “I shrank like Alice.” Pg. 5– Could be understood in different ways – not only literal/physical. • Ministry of State Security – Leipzig Division • Print of famous photograph in 1989 – “It showed a sea of people holding candles, their necks craned up to the building, staring their controllers in the face.” Pg. 6 • Signals for observation poster – “… a choreography for very nasty scouts.” • Stasi artefacts on glass cases: fake wigs and moustaches, handbags with built-in microphone disguised as flower decorations. Bugs were implanted in apartment walls. Pg. 7 • “… Pile of mail that never reached the west. One of the envelopes has a child’s handwriting on it in coloured pencil.” – Evokes feelings of sadness or even anger in readers. Pg. 7 • Frau Hollitzer – runs the museum. • “She looked friendly, but she also looked as if she knew I had been making mental ridicule of a regime which required its members to sign pledges of allegiance that looked like marriage certificates, confiscated children’s birthday cards to their grandparents …” Pg. 8 • Smell samples theory – we all have our identifying odour, which is left on everything we touch. • Taken from: clothes worn close to skin, seats sat on wiped with cloth – then placed in glass jar. • Frau Hollitzer introduces Miriam – “… a young woman whose husband had died in a Stasi remand cell nearby.” Pg. 9 • Rumoured that the Stasi orchestrated the funeral; “substituting empty coffin for a full one, and cremating body to destroy any evidence of the cause of death.” Pg. 9 • “I imagined not knowing whether your husband hanged himself, or whether someone you now pass in the street killed him.” – Evokes feelings of sadness/anger in readers. • Finds part-time job in television. • The search for Miriam’s story begins the search “for some of the stories from this land gone wrong.”

CHAPTER TWO – Miriam

• Job at overseas television service – Viewer Post: answers letters from viewers who’ve been beamed at & have some queries. • “I write contained and appropriate responses. Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to be German.” – Shows personal interest. Pg. 11 • Alexander Scheller – Boss • Scheller’s off-sider – Uwe Schmidt – “Uwe’s main job as adjutant [assistant] is to make Scheller seem important enough to have an adjutant. … To appear busy and time short…” Pg. 11 • Uwe – “deeply distracted by desire.” Singing love songs with “tears on his face.” Pg. 11 Funder exposes a sensitive side to Uwe • “…looking at me like food…” Pg. 11 • Letter from German living in Argentina in response to “puzzle women” in Nuremberg “puzzling together the shredded files the Stasi couldn’t burn or pulp.” Pg. 11-12 • Requests an item on “what things are actually like now for the East German people instead of … poor cousins.” Pg. 12 • Funder suggests doing an item “from the eastern point of view.” Pg. 12 • “…no point us doing items on the Ossis for their gratification.” – Shows the way Western Germans see the Eastern troubles as irrelevant or unimportant. Pg. 12 • “I just think that we should show some of the stories from there.” Shows Anna’s interest in East German stories/perspective before she starts writing. Pg. 12 • “There must be people who stood up to the regime somehow, or were wrongfully imprisoned.” – Passion Pg. 12 • Western opinion – “They aren’t a nation.” Pg. 13 • “I could hear my voice getting higher” Pg. 13 • “Should I tell him that no-one here is interested in East Germans and their stories, because they don’t form part of our overseas image?” – Façade/Swept under the rug. • “You won’t find the story of human courage you are looking for.” Pg. 13 • “…bunch of downtrodden whingers… They just had the rotten luck to end up behind the Iron curtain.” Pg. 13 • Uwe – “solicitous as a doctor with a patient who’s had bad news.” Pg. 13 • “No-one is interested in these people.” Pg. 13 • “… The whole Stasi thing… it’s sort of embarrassing.” – Germany’s embarrassing history that is chosen to be kept silent about. Pg. 13 • “History is made up of personal stories… issues were being swept under the carpet… and people along with them” Pg. 13-14 • “Why are some things easier to remember the more time has passed since they occurred?” Pg. 14 • Miriam Weber – “small still woman” Pg. 14 • Miriam’s apartment – roof of her building, “one big light space under the eaves. Pg. 14 • Anna – “damaged head” Pg. 14 • “I know she has not told her story to a stranger before” Pg. 14 • “Cranes are picking over holes open as wounds” Pg. 14

• Miriam – “officially and Enemy of the State at sixteen” – her age being sixteen is repeated NUMEROUS times throughout Miriam’s story, it’s emphasised. Authorial purpose: Anna often mentions her young age to position readers to feel sorry for her. Pg. 15 • Pride – “how she became such a fiend” Pg. 15 • Disbelief – “country created enemies of its own children” Pg. 15 • 1968 – University Church in Leipzig was demolished without public consultation – this ignites Miriam’s trouble with the state. • “Miriam and her friend Ursula thought this was not right” – had an idea for “justice”. “it wasn’t fair” Pg. 15 • Roneo printers, typewriters, photocopiers: controlled by license in the GDR • Made leaflets: “Consultation, not water cannon! People of the People’s Republic speak up!” – Critical of the state – disliked. Pg. 16 • Put them up at night, wore gloves and hid them in milk crates – proves their awareness of the fact that if they’re caught, there would be consequences. • “They were clever” Pg. 16 • They were caught after they put leaflets in mailboxes of students they knew – parents reported it. • “It seems so harmless” Miriam comes back quiet but strong (A.P: mentioned “quiet but strong” to show seriousness, but doesn’t make Miriam look “bad”) “At that time it was not harmless. It was the crime of sedition (treason)” Pg. 16-17 • Government controlled all media outlets e.g. newspapers and magazines. • Sedition was handled by “the secret police” not ordinary Volkspolizei. • Stasi were “methodical” • Men with gloves and dogs search Miriam’s house and find rubber letters in carpet – put in solitary confinement for a month. • Eventually, “…they break you. Just like fiction.” Pg. 17 • After being let out to await trials, Miriam thought “there’s no way they’re putting me back in that place.” – Miriam Weber was going over the Wall – New Year’s Eve 1968. Pg. 18

CHAPTER THREE – Bornholmer Bridge

• Miriam – “alone in a big city” – Funder is sympathetic of her situation. (A.P. chooses to include this to position readers to feel sympathy. It’s her subjective view/opinion) Pg. 19 • “You must be able to get over that thing” - Determination. Pg. 19 • “It was too flat and too high to climb” Pg. 19 • “She was cold and unhappy” – A.P Pg. 19 • Bornholmer Bridge station – gets off here the second time to climb over Wall. • Funder – “Now, I see nothing but this bridge each time I open a street map” – A.P. telling readers how much it’s affected her, and that it should affect them too. Pg. 20 • “Maori nose-kiss” – uses this to describe the way the East and West German train lines meet and depart. Pg. 20 • Street lamps – “…heads bent in submission at exactly the same angle” – like the East Germans. Pg. 21 • Between Miriam and the West was: wire mesh fence, patrol strip, barbed-wire fence, twenty metre wide Asphalt Street, footpath. • “If she had any future it was over there, and she needed to get to it” – A.P. opposes any argument against Miriam and her climbing the Wall being silly or naïve. Pg. 21 • “Boldness of being sixteen” – Miriam being sixteen is repeated again! Pg. 21 • Funder – “We both like the girl she was, and I like the woman she has become.” – A.P. blatantly expresses her liking Miriam, which makes her overtly biased. While explaining Miriam’s story, she often makes her out to be flawless and saint like. Pg. 22 • “… I still have scars on my hands from climbing barbed wire.” Pg. 22 • Miriam – “went for it” Pg. 22 • “she was nothing but nerve endings and fear” – A.P Pg. 22 • “…a huge German shepherd” – A.P. The word huge exaggerates the issue and makes Miriam more heroic, again heightening her status. Pg. 22 • “She could see the West – shiny cars…” A.P. Choosing to explain the shiny cars makes the West appealing. Pg. 23 • “’only four more steps, just RUN before they get you. But here’ – she marks and X, over and over, on the map she has drawn me –‘here was a trip wire.’ The voice is very soft. She marks and re-marks the X till I think the paper will tear. ‘I did not see the wire’” – A.P. disappointment, frustration. Makes readers feel sorry for Miriam. Mentioning her soft voice again exaggerates her good personality. Pg. 23 • When the Stasi officer calls her a “piece of shit”, readers may react more than they would if Funder hadn’t elevated Miriam so much. Pg. 23 • “They took her to the Stasi HQ” Pg. 23 • Mentions the blood and pain experienced by Miriam – A.P • Returned to Leipzig – “contacted her parents, who no longer wanted anything to do with her.” – A.P – sympathy. Pg. 24 • “held in a cell in Dimitroffstrasse” “cell is two metres by three…tiny window…very high up…door is thick, with metal bolts across it, and a spyhole for the guard to watch you” Pg. 24 • “she was sixteen and back in solitary” Pg. 24 • Interrogation – “that’s when the whole miserable story really took off” Pg. 24 • “obscene torture method … sleep deprivation” Pg. 24 • “The interrogation of Miriam Weber, aged sixteen, took place every nights for ten nights for six hours” Pg. 24 • “she slept two hours before being taken into the interrogation room” Pg. 24 • “She was not permitted to sleep during the day. A guard watched her through the peephole, and banged on the door if she nodded off” Pg. 24-25 • “they really made sure I didn’t sleep” Pg. 25 • Funder looks into sleep deprivation and finds: can mimic symptoms of starvation, victims become disoriented and cold, lose sense of time, neurological dysfunctions. • “angry, angry, angry” Pg. 25 • Incomprehensible for a sixteen year old to get so far with no help of an underground organisation. The main point of the questioning was to find the “name of the underground escape organisation that helped her” Pg. 25 • “I am a refugee from political persecution by you people” – courage to stand up to Stasi. Pg. 26 • Major Fleischer – main interrogator. “pretended to be her friend …other times he was threatening” Pg. 26 • “grey uniforms” Pg. 26 • Miriam’s answers remained the same – “I got a train from Leipzig, I bought a map at the station, I climbed over with a ladder, I went under on my bell, and then I made a run for it” Pg. 26 • Funder emphasises on how long ten days is and how hard it must have been for Miriam – A.P • “Ten times twenty four in which you hardly sleep. Then times twenty four in which you’re hardly awake. Ten days is time enough to die, to be born, to fall in love and to go mad. Ten days is a long time” – Passages like this make Stasiland fluent to read, different to normal non-fiction texts, it almost feels like reading a novel. Pg. 26 • Miriam gives in and makes up a story about Auerbach’s Cellar and meeting people who help her make plans to cross. • “I cooked them up a story I would not have believed myself” “They swallowed it. All I wanted to do was sleep.” Pg. 26- 27 • Afterwards she was allowed to sleep for a fortnight and was given a book a week. • “Fleischer had won” Pg. 27 • “She is imagining herself at sixteen, and it makes her happy” Pg. 27 • “Miriam explains gently” A.P. saint-like character of hers. Pg. 28 • “Everyone suspected everyone else, and the mistrust this bred as the foundation of social existence” Pg. 28 • “I am laughing hard now, enjoying the child’s-eye detail” – Referring to Miriam’s description of the man who helped her. Pg. 29 • Fleischer summons Miriam two weeks later – “he has both hands on the table as if restraining himself from throwing it” Pg. 29 • When confronted about her false account she simply replies with “I wanted sleep” • Deception of the Ministry – criminal offence • “she could have been responsible for the outbreak of civil war” Pg. 29 • Fleischer protected himself by not including this in her file as sleep deprivation was a form of torture and was not allowed. • Judge gave her 1.5 years in Stauberg in Hoheneck – Juvenile Accused Number 725 “could have started World War 3. Pg. 30

CHAPTER FOUR – Charlie

• “When I got out of prison, I was basically no longer human” Pg. 31 • On her first day at Hoheneck: required to undress, blue & yellow striped uniform, led naked down a corridor, “Baptism of Welcome” Pg. 31 • “thought she would die” Pg. 31 • Bath was filled with cold water. Pushed her head under for a long time. “She could do nothing, and she could not breathe” Pg. 31 • “insults were what she breathed” Pg. 31 • Anna notices Miriam is upset and says she can’t look at her – A.P • “I can’t stay focused on the awfulness of it all” – A.P. These almost sneaky comments here and there explain how Funder feels and what she experiences emotionally as a result of listening to these stories proves her bias and subjective writing (rather than objective, which is what usual non-fiction text is written in) Pg. 32 • Prison left Miriam with strange “tics” • She’s taken all the doors off their hinges – she “starts to sweat and go cold” in small places, which explains her spacious apartment now. Pg. 32 • “Automatic flight reaction” – fight/flight reflex occurs when danger or risk is suspected. The person either fights the danger or flights from the scene. Pg. 33 • “I want someone to give her a rub. I want someone to give me a rub” – A.P Pg. 33 • “I want the benevolent prison governess of TV land to have existed, I want the lesbian with the heart of gold to have protected the little girl” – Overtly feels sorry for Miriam and wishes she was treated better. After all, she was a “little girl” who needed protecting. A.P. Pg. 33 • Karl-Heinz Weber – “but everyone called him Charlie” – Pg. 33 • He brought her round again. • Miriam cuts herself out of their wedding photo. • Charlie – trained as sport teacher, studied physical education and biology. • “In the GDR, sport was closely linked with politics” – for the “glory of the nation” Pg. 34 • He left teaching because couldn’t represent a state that was doing this to him to his students. • While on holiday, Charlie and his friend spot a Swedish boat and as a game, decide to swim to it to see how far they could get. • “The authorities brought them in on suspicion of wanting to leave the country. That was the beginning of Charlie Weber’s pursuit by the Stasi” Pg. 34 • Started to write. Wrote a “small book … about the way that one dictatorship here is the same as another” Pg. 34 • Miriam being an ex-criminal and Charlie under surveillance, they’d have their house searched from time to time. • Authorities found “Orwell’s Animal Farm, which of course, was blacklisted” Pg. 35 • Miriam wasn’t allowed to study and every job she applied for “the Stasi made sure I was turned down” Pg.35 • “We didn’t have to submit ourselves to the sorts of structures and authority that we couldn’t trust here.” Pg. 35 • 1979 – Miriam’s sister and husband tried to escape to West Germany and Charlie drives them in the boot of his car to meet the courier smuggling them over the border. • Stasi followed every move. Charlie was caught and “placed on a type of probation.” Pg. 35 • “Charlie stood under formal suspicion of the crime of Attempting to flee the Republic” Pg. 35 • Miriam and Charlie apply to leave the GDR. Applicants are put under complete scrutiny. • “…if the fancy took them…” A.P. ridiculing language. – They could see it as a statement of the GDR not being good enough. “In that case it became a Hetzschrift (a smear) or a Schmaschrift (a libel)and therefore a criminal offence” Pg. 36 • 26 August 1980 – Charlie is arrested and held in a remand cell. • 15 October – Policeman visits Miriam’s house to collect her husband’s belonging because “he is dead” Pg. 36 • Socialist Unity Party’s instruments -> the Stasi • “Judges often got their instructions from the Stasi” “There was no room for a person to defend themselves against the State because all the defence lawyers and all the judges were part of it” Pg. 36 • Major Trost – district attorney responsible for investigating Charlie’s death – tells Miriam that Charlie hanged himself. Miriam questions him (courageous, brave) • She’s told many different stories from the same person – A.P. Funder tries to expose the unreliable and unprofessional conduct of the Stasi. • “She confronted him… The least you people could do is get your story straight” Pg. 38 • Herr X (Leipzig sentative for Dr Wolfgang Vogel) had the Weber matter for eight weeks and only prepared a file of “only a single sheet of paper” Pg. 38 – A.P. again belittling the regime – pathetic. • Tuesday 21 October 1980 – Stasi man tells Miriam that Charlie’s corpse has been released and that “the ministry would like to be of service to her with the funeral arrangements” Pg. 39 – Miriam refuses help from the Ministry who is the core reason of her problems. “She told him to go to hell” • Southern Cemetery offices – suggests cremation instead of burial, doesn’t want to allow an open casket at funeral – however makes arrangements to do what Miriam wants, as long as she stays with their service – Stasi can access the funeral this way. • “I could still see his head injuries. And I could see his neck … no strangulation marks, nothing” Pg. 40 • Miriam suspects Charlie’s body being taken out of casket and being cremated to destroy evidence of his real cause of death. • The Stasi were largely present at the funeral, “ready to watch the whole thing”. The Stasi file on Charlie reported: divisional plans for organisation and surveillance of Weber funeral, Miriam’s telephone being tapped, sound recording technology to be used, photographic documentation to be made, and citizens of FDR to be supervised. • Herr Mohre – “guaranteed the Stasi complete freedom of movement for the Weber action” Pg. 41 • The Stasi file on Charlie writes “no definitive information is available as to the date of the cremation” and was scheduled AFTER Charlie’s funeral. A.P. Funder chooses to include this information again, to emphasise evilness of the regime. Pg. 42 • Every month, for several years, Miriam was called by the Stasi for a chat. After a while, she “stopped obeying the cards” that called her to meet. Pg. 42 • “They were playing with me like a mouse.” A.P. Included, bringing possible feelings of anger for people putting themselves in Miriam’s shoes. Pg. 43 • Later, Miriam was granted access to live in the West. “You are on a train tonight” “…being expelled from the GDR… leaving her life behind” • “Deportation came eleven years too late and six months too early” Late because if they were granted these eleven years ago when they first applied, Charlie would be alive with her. Six months too early because they Wall fell then. Pg. 44 • Funder suggests “this place” being special or out of the ordinary as she says that once night fell, “this could be any city, in any normal place” A.P Pg. 44 • “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; … For Miriam, the past stopped when Charlie died” Pg. 44 • “She is brave and strong and broken all at once”. Pg. 44 • “ ... and I can see that under the smile, she is fighting back tears” Pg. 44 • Miriam is back to living in Leipzig. She is close to the investigation of Charlie’s death in Dresden (one hour) and hopes the puzzle women in Nuremberg can piece Charlie’s file together. • “…they just want to stop thinking about the past. They want to pretend it all didn’t happen” Pg. 45 • “She is a maiden safe in her tower” Pg. 46

CHAPTER FIVE – Linoleum Palace

• In this chapter, readers really see Funder as a character, as it is largely based on her and her life – similar to the way the book began in chapter one. Mostly present tense and 1st person. • Finished interview with Miriam and explains her extreme lethargy. Extremely descriptive chapter. • “Miriam’s story has winded me. My head … started to pulse again as soon as I left her apartment.” A.P. by choosing to explain how much she is affected by her story, she positions reader’s to feel the same. Pg. 47 • Focusing her attention on little things. Extremely descriptive. “My heart is just a small pump.” Pg. 47 • Again makes reference to the colour grey. “… Grey sprayed on concrete…” Pg. 47 • She lives on the first floor, up the stairs, to the right. • “The stairwells walls are covered in bright but inscrutable spray can graffiti which could be expressions of joy or pain depending on how you look at them…” Reference to pain and joy. Pg. 47 • “Home free, home safe” – still under effect of the stories obviously, as the victims would worry about their freedom and safety. Pg. 48 • When she enters her house, readers meet Julia Behrend – Funder’s landlord • Julia makes an unusual entrance, terrifying Funder by having the lights on and yelling at her to not be frightened. • “The pump in my chest pumps, hard” Pg. 48 • Julia is unscrewing bookshelves. • Her apartment – “… it was in the old east where I wanted to be…” Pg. 48 • “… All I need is a bed, a desk, a chair and a coffee pot” – simple life, mundane. • Julia mentions that Leipzig is “where it all started” • “Julia regards fixed appointments as intolerable constraints on her freedom” – Living under the effects of the regime. Pg. 49 • In the morning Funder can “see my breath” – cold. • Still under the effect of yesterday’s interview with Miriam – “…yesterday feels like a different country.” Pg. 49 • Notices a freshly exposed piece of brown linoleum. • While explaining details of her apartment’s appearance, she comments on its conversion under the Communist reign – “converted under to Communists into a place of concrete-render on the outside and, on the inside, practical lino brownness, washed and waxed and charmless.” - Again explaining it to be dull and lifeless, just like the Stasi. She takes obvious dislike in them and places negative connotations where she can. Pg. 49 • She describes her furniture or apartment but this can be personalised to the victims of the regime – “I soon realised everything here was either broken or about to be.” Pg. 49 • Her apartment is broken or breaking down. • “…plumbing that needed to be learnt.” Pg. 50

• Funder shows her position on Julia from the beginning and shows her in a positive light. She explains how Julia filled her coal tin for her last night. “She must have gone down last night to the pitch-dark cellar to fill it… Although it would take hours to heat up, her kindness warms me already.” Pg. 50 • She explains how she doesn’t hold her visiting at such late hours against her – A.P. • Positions readers to feel sorry for Julia – “…in the summer the smells from the garbage bins in her yard rise up to her, almost visible.” A.P Pg. 50 • Her neighbours are unfriendly. • “…she needs to be alone but suffers from it too…” Pg. 50 • Funder associates Julia with anxiety. • “…comes back to her old life every now and again” Pg. 50 • “…Predominance of linoleum in my life.” Pg. 50 • Five types of linoleum in her life – all of them are brown. • “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 accidently or arranged, of beauty or joy. In this, I think, it is much like East Germany itself.” Pg. 51 • Parliament building of the GDR, the Palast der Republik – “…the outside world and everything in it is reflected in a bent and brown way… dreams were turned into words, decisions made, announcements applauded, backs slapped…could be a whole other world, time could warp and you could disappear.” Pg. 51 • No one can decide whether to make it a memorial to represent the past, or to get rid of it and be unburdened from the past. • “…but to erase is altogether might signal forgetting or denial.” Pg. 52 • “…remember or forget – which is healthier?” Pg. 52 • Funder’s neighbourhood is Mitte in Berlin, again associated with dull, boring connotations – “with its grey buildings, white sky and naked trees.” Pg. 52 • Street names are being changed from Communist leader’s names to ordinary names “in a massive act of redecoration.” E.g. Marx-Engels-Platz to Schlossplatz, Leninallee to Landsberger Allee, Wilhelm-Pieck-Strasse to Torstrasse. Pg. 52 • “Most of the buildings though, are not yet renovated. They have largely lost their plaster and are scraped back to patches of brick; they look like tattered faces after plastic surgery.” – Is this sort of like the people who are still living under the effects of the regime? Pg. 52 • “Shifting through this greyscape…” – grey. Pg. 52 • Walks through park and only notices or mentions the drunken people and punks in the summer and winter – quite negative. • Compares an old customer at the corner store to a “Winter King”. • When talking about the baker, she mentions that he is doing better “freed of state-run constraints on his ingenuity…” Pg. 53 • “Over the next week I think about Miriam and I think about Stasi men.” Pg. 53 • She’s curious as to what it was like to be one the inside of the Firm, and then to “have the world and your place in it disappear.” Pg. 53 • Puts advertisement in the “personal columns of the Potsdam paper” seeking former Stasi officers and unofficial collaborators for interview.

CHAPTER SIX – Stasi HQ

• “The next day the phone calls start very early in the morning.” Pg. 54 • “I hadn’t imagined what it would be like to have a series of military types, who had lost their power and lost their country, call you up at home.” Pg. 54 • The first caller puts up a front and when Funder asks who she’s speaking to, he is stern – “That doesn’t matter for the moment” Pg. 54 • He explains that is it very hard for ex Stasi to find jobs “in this new Germany.” – Critical of reunified Germany; there was to unemployment in the GDR. • They are “discriminated against and ripped off blind … in this Kapitalismus” Pg. 55 • He was an IM – inofizielle Mitarbeiter or unofficial collaborators. • “They are the most hated people in the new Germany …these informers reported on family and friends without them knowing.” Pg. 55 • Funder remembers Miriam telling her that informers argue their information didn’t hurt anyone and that they didn’t know what it was used for. “It is as if they have all been issued with the same excuses manual.” Pg. 55 • Funder denies the interview although she knows not many informers will be willing to talk to her – “How can I reward informers a second time around?” – heightens her status in the book and makes herself look loyal. Pg. 55 • Organises meetings with numerous people in: Berlin, Potsdam, outside a church, in a parking lot, in a pub, at their homes. • Explains observations of a naked man in his apartment – author is unafraid of talking about things normally shied away from. • Overwhelmed – “I need to get out of the house, and away from the phone.” – Vulnerable. Pg. 55 • Weather is cold, bitter, and soggy. • On her way to Stasi Headquarters at Normannenstrasse in Lichtenburg – Runden Ecke. • “From here the whole seamless, sorry apparatus was run; Stasi HQ” Pg. 56 • Erich Mielke – Minister for State Security. • Now a museum, “people come here to read their unauthorised biographies.” Pg. 56 • “No one is crying or punching the wall.” – Emotional, effects the Stasi had on people’s lives. Pg. 56 • “Mielke’s apparatus, directed largely against his own countrymen, was one and a half times as big as the GDR regular army.” Pg. 56 • East Germany was called ‘the most perfected surveillance state of all time’ by the media. Pg. 57 • Stasi had 97 000 employees. • 173 000 informers among the population. • Hitler’s Third Reich: one Gestapo agent for every 2000 citizens. • Stalin’s USSR: one KGB agent for every 5830 citizens. • GDR; one Stasi officer/informant: every 63 citizens. • “Everywhere Mielke found opposition he found enemies.” Pg. 57 • 14 regional Stasi offices in the GDR – Normannenstrasse • Describes Mielke – “he loved to hunt; footage shows him inspecting a line of deer carcasses as he would a military parade.” Pg. 57 • Attacking, critical. “It is said that psychopaths, people utterly untroubled by conscience, make supremely effective generals and politicians, and perhaps he was one.” – A.P. thinks Mielke is a psychopath. Pg. 57 • Mielke – most feared man in the GDR. • Includes quotes from Mielke on page 57 that portray him in an extremely negative light – Topics including the death penalty and execution. • Mielke: born in 1907, joined Communist youth organisation at 14, joined the Party at 18, killed the local police chief and his off-sider by shooting them in the back – political situation in Germany was volatile. Pg. 58 • Fled to Moscow. Attended International Lenin School – the elite training ground for Communist leaders, and worked with Stalin’s secret police (NKVD). • A warrant was issued for his arrest for Bulowpltaz murder. • Mielke was a hatchet man in Stalin’s secret police. • Returned to the Soviet sector of Berlin after the war – safe from persecution. • Took over as Minister for State Security in 1957. • 1971 – Helped organise Erich Honecker to gain power as Secretary-General. • “The two Erich’s ran the country” Pg. 58 • Explains Honecker’s similarity to Mielke. • Honecker: father was a miner, joined the Communist Youth at 14, apprenticed roof-tiler, 1930-31 studied at the Lenin School in Moscow, and worked underground for the Communists against the Hitler regime. • Arrested by Gestapo and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for ‘preparation of high treason’ in 1937. Escaped just before the end of the war and made his career in the Party running East Germany. Pg. 59 • Stasi’s brief to be ‘the shield and sword’ of the Communist Party; Socialist Unity Part of Germany (SED). • “…to protect the Party from the people. It arrested, imprisoned and interrogated anyone it chose.” Pg. 59 • Stasi – Inspected mail (copying letters and stealing valuables), tapped into phone calls (tens of thousands), bugged and spied on people, ran universities, hospitals, sport centres and terrorist training programs. • Funder mentions that the GDR’s secret service was “unlike secret services in democratic countries” – The Stasi was the backbone of State power. Pg. 59 • SED regime. • In the former Stasi HQ museum – describes visitors: “They wear bright colours and expensive fabrics, and have come to have a look at what would have happened to them had they been born, or stayed further east.” This is a stark difference to the grey spectrum she chooses to describe East Germany. West Germany is associated with bright colours and expensive fabrics. Pg.60 • Within the Stasi HQ; internal supermarket with delicacies unable to be access anywhere else, hairdresser, shoemaker, locksmith. • “The guide crinkles her nose in order to push her glasses up to its bridge; a reflex which doubles as a gesture of distaste.” A.P. Funder sometimes does this with her writing – mentions something but can be related to another. Pg. 60 • Unable to see the inside from the outside, lined with copper to keep information safe from satellite surveillance. • Stasi HQ had; munitions depot (weaponry) and “a bunker underneath for Mielke and a select few in the event of a nuclear catastrophe.” – Funder chooses to expose this fact to readers and positions them to ask themselves why the other Stasi don’t have this type of protection? Pg. 60 • Atrium – “it smells of dust and old air” Pg. 60 • Funder tunes in on tour guide saying something about a ‘biological solution’. “The westerners become silent.” – Possibly a topic of interest or maybe they’re stunned silent or shocked. Pg. 60 • Tour guide explains, “wrinkling her nose”: People stopped wishing for a revolution and started hoping that those in power would die off – the GDR had the oldest leadership in the world; “We have got to have broken some kind of record there”. • Unlike China or other communist countries where the leaders where publically displayed once they died, “the old men here showed remarkably little sign of physical decay” Pg. 60 • They injected sheep cells and ultra-high doses of oxygen – “those blokes wanted to live forever”. A.P. The power they possessed was the only thing they had – pretty sad. • “Mielke and Honecker grew up fighting the real evil of Nazism.” Pg. 60 • They fought the west, which they saw as Nazism’s successor for 45 years after the war. “They never wanted to stop.” Pg. 61 • Tour guide begins speaking about the “beginning of the end”. • Soviet Union 1985 – Mikhail Gorbachev implemented perestroika (economic reform) and glasnost (openness of speech). • June 1988 – he declared the principle of freedom of choice for government and abolished (renounced) the Soviet military force. • “…the GDR regime could not survive. The options were change, or civil war” Pg. 61 • East Germany never had culture opposition – “…part due to the better standard of living, perhaps due to the thoroughness of the Stasi …the willingness of Germans to subject themselves to authority” Pg. 61 • East Germany would ‘dump’ people who spoke out to the west. They’d imprison them and then sell them “for hard currency”. • Men running GDR were ‘ossified’ and weren’t interested in reform. • They couldn’t all be thrown out. “That would be impractical, and, worse, might amount to giving the people they freedom they craved” A.P. Funder implies that the GDR would rather be impractical than give their people what they want. Pg. 61 • “So, the old men had another scheme: they would contain the dissenters at home”. Pg. 61 • Documents reveal meticulous plans for the “surveillance, arrest and incarceration of 85, 939 East Germans, listed by name.” A.P. Funder writes this step by step, thorough process to inform readers they effort the GDR went to get what they want. Pg. 62 • Day X: the day any crisis was declared – Stasi officers in 211 local branches were to open sealed envelopes containing the lists of the people in their area to be arrested. 840 people every 2 hours. • Plans included “exact” provisions for use of all available prisons and camps. Funder chooses to mention that they used to be used by the Nazi, somewhat comparing the two reigns together. This may position readers to associate the Holocaust horrors with the ones caused by the GDR. Pg. 62 • Mentions “detail” and “exact[ness]”. • The plans included a packing to be given to each prisoner. Funder mocks and ridicules this: “They would be locked up indefinitely and for no reason at all, but they would have clean shoes, teeth and underwear” Pg. 62 • “People were protesting against travel restrictions, shortages of basic goods and the falsification of election results.” Pg. 63 • “Their protests took them to the offices of most obvious representatives of the regime: not the Party, but the Stasi.” Pg. 63 • In August, Hungarians cut the barbed wire at their border in Austria. • “Thousands of East Germans flocked there and ran, crying with relief and anger, across the border.” Shows obvious pain and deep emotion that readers can possibly relate to. Pg. 63 • “Honecker hoped to humiliate the expellees by confiscating their identity papers and he wanted them to fear that he would stop they trains and arrest the passengers”. Pg. 63 • His plan backfired as people ripped up their identity papers with “tears of joy” • Leipzig was a flashpoint and people were rebelling: “people were refusing to refill police vehicles” • People risked dying to go and demonstrate. “People made their wills and said things they wanted their children to remember before going out of demonstrations.” Pg. 63 • “There were rumours of tanks and helicopters and water cannon coming, but then so were the postcards from friends who had already reached the west.” Pg. 63 • Honecker: “Nothing can hinder the progress of socialism”. • October 8, Mielke began activating plans for Day X but things were already too far gone. • “Instead of incarcerating the people, the Stasi, hiding in their buildings, locked themselves up.” A.P. funder presents them to be weak and cowardly. Pg. 64 • In fear of lynching (execution, assassination, mobbing, killing), they had 60 000 pistols, 30 000 machine guns, hand grenades and tear gas. • “Leipzig police were shown photographs of a Chinese policeman immolated by the mob …and told ‘It’s you or it’s them’”. Pg. 64 • 7 October 1989: GDR celebrated 40 years of existence. “Old men on the podium wore light-grey suits …” Again, reference to the colour grey in relation to GDR. • Mikhail Gorbachev came to convince Mielke and Honecker to adopt his reformist policies and to respond to reality, however was ignored, just like they ignored protesters chanting “Gorby, help us!” • 9 October: “70 000 protestors went out in the dark, in big coats and carrying candles. They stood outside the Runden Ecke with their demands.” Pg. 64 • Leipzig was known as the “City of Heroes” • “The Party belatedly tried to change its image.” Critical. Pg. 65 • 9 November: relaxed travel restrictions. • The regime held a regular press conference with the international media to announce the new decision. • Politburo member Gunter Schabowski, in a hurry, read out a hastily given note revealing the politburo’s decision on travel restrictions. • When asked when the new provision would come into force, embarrassed, he replied “to my knowledge, immediately” Pg. 65 • The provision was initially planned to commence the next day, after border guards were instructed accordingly. However once Gunter revealed the news, it was too late. • “Within hours of his blunder 10 000 people were at the Bornholmer Bridge checkpoint … thronging the Wall.” Pg. 65 • “The light from the death strip showed up breath, exhaust.” Pg. 65 • “…it was too late, it was all over, and people from east and west were climbing, crying, and dancing on the Wall.” Pg. 65

CHAPTER SEVEN – The Smell of Old Men

• Begins chapter by explaining the panic at Normannenstrasse headquarters. “Stasi officers were instructed to destroy files, starting with the most incriminating – those naming westerners who spied for them, and those that concerned deaths.” Pg. 67 • Funder explains a shortage of shredders, and makes statements that make mockery of them for sending agents under cover into the west to buy more – pathetic. • They resorted to destroying files by hand – “but this was done in such an orderly fashion – whole drawers put into the same bag – that now, in Nuremberg, it is possible for the puzzle women to piece them back together.” – Them being so exact, meticulous and orderly has become detriment to them – backfired. Pg. 68 • 13 November, Mielke “aged 81, became desperate about the waning of his world.” • It was broadcast live. “’Dear Comrades’ he opened, and the booing began…Then, as if he simply could not understand why he might be disliked, Mielke stammered into the microphone…” – Again, ridicules and doesn’t sympathise with Mielke, and writes about him in ways that make him look vulnerable. Pg. 68 • “Perhaps there is something healing about ridicule. It is a relief, anyway, from terror and anger” TAKE NOTE OF THIS QUOTATION!!!!!!! This could be Funder’s reason for constantly ridiculing and mocking the GDR regime and its supporters! She’s telling readers she is in terror and anger. Pg. 68 • December 3: Mielke and Krenz become expelled from the Party. • Funder describes the western tourists becoming ‘tighter’ and “the quiet jokes among the men have stopped…” Pg. 68 • When the tour guide asks if they’d like to explore the top of the building, the westerners make excuses and leave. Funder chooses to explain this and their obvious uncomfortable state. Possibly, she explains this to make herself elevated in her choice to stay and explore. Courage. • “Eventually, after the Stasi had done all they could to remove or destroy the files, they opened the doors to the demonstrators.” Pg. 68 • “The denunciations against Mielke began as soon as he lost power – and how could they not, his people being trained to the highest level in denunciation.” Again, introducing her subjective opinion, thoughts and feelings. Pg. 69 • Mielke was taken into remand. “Through 1990 and 1991 he was in and out of custody in various Berlin prisons including Hohenschonhausen, where he had sent most of his political detainees.” What goes around comes around. Pg. 69 • His Bulowplatz murder in 1931 was included in his charges. For his part in those, he was sentenced to 6 years imprisonment. • Tour guide believes it was ridiculous to sentence him for those old murders – does she side with him? Did she like living under the reign of Communism? • Honecker fared worse and was arrested on suspicion of corruption and high treason. Later, he was accused of responsibility for the killings at the Wall but fled to Moscow. He told the press “he had to regrets” Pg. 69 • He died in Chile, May 1994. • Runden Tische passed a resolution demanding free elections be held, and that the Stasi be dissolved under civilian control. Most informers voted in favour; “It seems they felt compelled, in order to maintain their cover, to vote for measures to destroy the regime that employed them.” Dog eat dog world. Everyone’s concerned with their wellbeing – no loyalty. Pg. 70 • October 1989-1990: “debate raged hot in Germany as to what to do with the Stasi files” Pg. 70 • “What were the dangers of knowing? Or the dangers of ignoring the past and doing it all again, with different coloured flags or neckerchiefs or helmets?” Pg. 70 • Those who had been in power or were informers in the GDR argued against making the files the Stasi kept on its people accessible to them. • August 1990: GDR parliament passed law that granted people the right to view their own files. • October 3, 1990: German reunification and the day the GDR ceased to exist. “Germany was the only Eastern Bloc country in the end that so bravely, so conscientiously, opened its files on its people to the people.” Pg. 71 • The group leaves, extremely affected by the information they just received “in a hurry to get back to the international- style West Berlin hotel that reminds them of nothing, and I don’t blame them.” Funder is obviously strongly affected by all the information too. Pg. 71 • Tour guide asks Funder her interest in this place. • “I explain that after the Runden Ecke in Leipzig, I wanted to see the Stasi headquarters.” Pg. 71 • She mentions looking for people who confronted the regime and those who represented it, the tour guide says she needs to meet Frau Paul. She gets her phone number. • Funder begins exploring the upstairs. • Observes glass cases displaying objects that documented the enemy – more variety than in Leipzig. • Thermos with microphone in its lid, hiker jackets with camera sewn into it and antenna that could pick up conversations fifty metres away. • A room dedicated to Stasi trophies: mugs, statues, and figures, portraits of people including Honecker, Mielke, Lenin and Marx. • “The rugs fascinate me. They demonstrate, I think, the value of labour over everything else here, mostly aesthetics and utility.” Pg. 72 • Leads into a smaller room dedicated to the 1985 plans of the Stasi, together with the army, for the invasion of West Berlin. • The plans are methodical. • Medals cast in bronze, silver and gold, by Honecker’s order, to be awarded after successful invasion, for ‘Courage in the face of the Western Enemy’. • “No-one in the west has imagined the extent of the Stasi’s ambitions.” Pg.72 • Mielke’s quarters are on the second storey. • “My shoes make a plasticky noise on the lino, till I reach his office where the floor is parquetry. It’s a spacious room, with the feel of well-kept impoverishment.” Pg. 72 Funder makes note of the other rooms having lino, but Mielke’s room is more luxurious with parquetry floors. Appeal to justice? • His room’s main feature is an average sized veneer desk. Funder takes note of the portrait of Lenin in the room. There are two telephones and a white plaster death mask of Lenin on the desk. • “His eyes follow me across the room.” Pg. 72 like the Stasi who constantly watched everyone. • “Life-size, his head seems small compared with all the exaggerated versions of it in wool and paint and marble in the treasure chamber downstairs.” Possibly trying to say that Lenin wasn’t as big as he was made out to be. Pg. 72 • Walks further into Mielke’s private quarters with his bed, bathroom and anteroom which is now a cafeteria. She mentions that the cafeteria is empty. • Begins to watch a video. • “…amateur footage of demonstrators storming this building on the cold night of 15 January 1990. They walked through the offices, the supermarket, the hairdressers, opening locked rooms and staring at the sacks and sacks of paper.” Pg. 73 • They didn’t seem jubilant and didn’t even show bravado. “Their faces wore instead a quiet mixture of disgust and sadness. I have heard this particular feeling described as not knowing whether you want to laugh or throw up.” Pg. 73 • “It’s cold in here and the air tastes recycled. I pull my coat collar up to my ears. I think that there is no parallel in history where, almost overnight, the offices of a secret service have gone from being so feared they are barely mentionable, to being a museum where you can sit in an easy chair next to the boss’s private pissoir and watch the video on how his office was stormed.” Pg. 73 • Her thoughts are interrupted by a woman who cleans the museum. • “She starts spraying the tables with perfumed ammonia.” Pg. 73 Does she mention ammonia to say she needs such a strong chemical to clean the dirty history out of these places? • The video shows an interview with a worker at the Southern General Cemetery who explains that ‘about 20 or 30 times’ he’d get a call to leave the oven on so the ‘Stasi could do their business’. This means that they cremated bodies that people thought they were burying. • “The man looks uncomfortable but shrugs to as if to say ‘it was just my job’. Pg. 74 • Thinks about calling Miriam about they thirty urns found at Leipzig Stasi offices, unlabelled and unclaimed. Obviously has a stronger relationship with Miriam, which breaches just an interviewer/interviewee relationship. • Next interview is a Stasi psychologist: “He is accounting for the willingness of people to inform on their countrymen, which he calls ‘an impulse to make sure your neighbour was doing the right thing’”. Pg. 74 • “He doesn’t bat an eyelid” – Funder surprised that he doesn’t seem effected or surprised by this, and talks about it as the norm. Pg. 74 • “It comes down to something in the German mentality, a certain drive for order and thoroughness and stuff like that.” Funder ridicules this by repeating “stuff like that”, as if it weren’t anything significant Pg. 74. • Cleaning woman gives small anecdote and mentions that she lived a normal life. “I conformed just like everybody else. But it’s not true to say the GDR was a nation of 17 million informers. They were only two in a hundred.” She is an example of the people who didn’t mind living under the GDR’s reign Pg. 74 • Funder says she’s stumped and comes to the sudden realisation that even with one informer for every 50 people; the Stasi still had the entire population covered. • “Can’t get these tables clean” • “There’s no real unity in this country even after seven years.” Pg. 74 • Suburb of Kreuzberg in West Berlin wanted the Wall back. • “Can you understand this German thinking?” Pg. 74 • It took only 40 years to create two very different kinds of Germans and will be a while before those differences are gone. • Cleaner mentions they only needed a male toilet up here since women couldn’t get past colonel rank (only three women as colonel anyway). • She puts her head into a small room for a sentry. Behind the desk, there’s a smudge on the painting. “That’s where the fella would have leant back on his chair and rested his fat greasy head on the wall” She’s disgusted. “Won’t come off.” Pg. 75 • Funder asks cleaner woman if she get scared here by herself at night. Woman says that is was much worse when the place first opened. She mentions a prominent smell that wouldn’t leave even after they scrubbed and scrubbed. • “She stops walking and turns her face up to me.” A.P. Funder chooses to include this detail, almost shadowing a movie scene that is exaggerated with pauses in speech and people looking you in the eye as if to say something important. She emphasises this part. Pg. 75 • “She winces. ‘Do you know it? It was the smell of old men.” Pg. 75

CHAPTER EIGHT – Telephone Calls

• “I steer myself for another Stasi man. But it’s a woman’s voice.” – Funder anticipates more Stasi men to interview and is on edge for more calls. Pg. 76 • When she finds out it’s Miriam calling –“Something turns itself over in my chest” Pg. 76 • Miriam calls to thank Funder for the interview. “What is she thanking me for?” – Again, Funder is exposing her softness for Miriam here. • Miriam wishes Funder good luck with her investigations. Choosing to include this in her book, Funder is further exposing her intimate, out of the ordinary relationship with Miriam. Pg. 76 • Funder is worried about this call being a final one, and asks Miriam if she’s heard about the unclaimed urns in Runden Ecke. She follows it up with asking to meet up again. Miriam responds extremely enthusiastically. • “If I where 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.” Courage Pg. 77 • “…written down by other people, stolen and steered.” Referring to the Stasi. Pg. 77 • “I walk back through the bare and broken apartment, retracing the lead to its source” Pg. 77 • Sleeping in the living room – closer to the heater. Watches television until asleep. • Leipzig stripper named Heidi aka Yasmina. • The interviewer asks if it’s true that she stripped for the Politburo, and she doesn’t deny this, or have trouble denying it either. • “The whiteness of the plaster reminds me of Lenin’s head on Mielke’s desk.” Irrelevant things are reminding her of anything to do with her investigation. It’s obviously weighing heavy on her mind. Pg. 78 • “People like me who do not want to stay still.” Pg. 78 • Talks about eastern Germany in the glorious summer. “The footage is mesmerising” First positive connotation with the East German scenery/environment. Pg. 78 • “…bright yellow of rape, the green haziness of wheat and the heavier green of summer oaks lining the road…move magically through village after thawed village…” Pg. 78 • Funder explains her dream of her and another blurred naked woman soaring through the wind together and exposes readers to the fact that she isn’t afraid to write about sexuality or things of the like. Writer style. • “… and they’ll all see me, fallen and naked and pointless.” Does this dream symbolise her investigative journey and her fear of failing and being exposed to the world, pointless? Does she fear rejection? Pg. 79 • Introduces Klaus into the chapter in an interesting way – he calls her, and interrupts her weird dream, asking her if she wants to drink with him and calls her to the pub (2:30 am) • “Klaus Renft is the legendary ‘Mik Jegger’ of the Eastern Bloc” Pg. 80 • His band: Klaus Renft Combo. Funder describes him to have a laid back personality; smoking and drinking all the time, spontaneous. • Next morning she wakes to the phone ringing. Someone is inquiring about her ad in the Markische Allgemeine. • “I am looking to speak with people who worked for the ministry, in order to be able to represent what it was like. I’m writing about life in the GDR.” Pg. 80 • He seems surprised by the fact that she’s Australian and questions her about it. • After finding out that she will be writing in English, he agrees to meet with her “in order to set the record straight. It is possible that in Australia your media has not tainted people against us and that there at least, we can put our side. With objective information and analysis.” Pg. 81 • Does Funder provide objective information and analysis? No. • They agree to meet in Potsdam in the afternoon. • “Then I will meet with you as follows: I will be outside the church on market square at fifteen hundred hours. I will have tomorrow’s Markische Allegemeine rolled up under my left arm. Understood?” Still adapting to his former behaviour and authority. Pg. 81 • “Yes, I say obediently, although I am incredulous that this man wants to play spy games seven years after the fall of the Wall.” Pg. 81 • The man is identified as Herr Winz. • She’s early to the church. “They sky is blanket-grey and close.” Pg. 81 • Gives brief description of surroundings and pays attention to minute details. This gives the effect of her having waiting for long, making Herr Winz look bad already. • “After ten minutes a man approaches…” Pg. 81 • “…has leather elbow patches: he is disguised as a westerner.” Pg. 81 • “They parking here is terrible’ Herr Winz says by way of apology for being late, but also as if it were my fault. He speaks in authoritative barks.” Already gives readers the impression of a person with a bad personality. These descriptions are designed to cause readers to dislike Herr Winz even before they hear his story – Funder is a smart writer. Pg. 81 • Funder talks about being suspicious of Herr Winz hiding his car so she can’t follow him – just like the Stasi would. • “…I start to explain to Herr Winz my interest in speaking with former Stasi employees. He waves me silent.” If this were a normal interview, these details and descriptions as to the interviewee’s body language and other things wouldn’t be addressed. This is one way Funder’s writing is different to ordinary non-fiction texts. Pg. 82 • Herr Winz states that you can never be too careful these days. He asks to see her ID. • When he finds out Australians don’t carry ID cards, “He is speechless. He looks at me as though all his suspicions are confirmed: I come from a place so remote, so primitive that the people there have not yet been labelled and numbered.” Pg. 82 • Funder shows Herr Winz her passport as ID. “I have to prove my identity so frequently that I now carry my passport around with me like a fugitive.” Pg. 82 • Herr Winz observes that she visited the GDR – “So you visited my country she says approvingly” Pg. 82 • “I remember a cold grey day in Potsdam like this one, the streets were deserted” Pg. 82 • “I visited only long enough to wonder what was being kept from me.” Pg. 83 • “I ask to see Herr Winz’s ID too, but he fobs me off with a laugh and a dismissive gesture.” Pg. 83 • Herr Winz opens his briefcase and pulls out papers, pamphlets and a thesis. He places a book on the pile: it’s a Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s The Communist Manifesto. • He worked from 1961-1990 at the ministry in Potsdam, exclusively in counter-espionage. • The thesis he pulled out earlier is a discussion paper he wrote on his work at the ministry. “If you read this, you will learn a lot of what you want to know.” Pg. 83 • He wrote it for the Insiderkomitee and he is a member. • They have changed their name to the “Society for the Protection of Civil Rights and the Dignity of Man”. • “The Insiderkomitee. Civil Rights and the Dignity of Man?” – more of less secret society of former Stasi men who write papers putting their side of history, lobby for entitlements for former Stasi officers, and support one if facing trial. Pg. 84 • “It’s widely suspected, however, that these men also harass people who they fear may uncover them” Pg. 84 • “Detaining people clearly has its own pleasures; a habit hard to break.” Pg. 84 • Ex Stasi: “wannabe victims of democracy and the rule of law” Pg. 84 • What does the Insiderkomitee do? “We try to present an objective view of history. To combat the lies and misrepresentation in the western media.” Pg. 84 • “I am here to tell you about the excellent work – the masterful work – of the Stasi in counter-espionage.” Proud of his work and still stands by it. Isn’t remorseful or guilty. Pg. 85 • He won’t respond to questions about the Insiderkomitee or talk about himself. • “Each time I ask him about the reality of life in the GDR he returns to the beauties of socialist theory. I think he hopes, through me, to sow the seeds of socialism in an untainted corner of the world.” Pg. 85 • His main interest seems to have placed young committed East Germans into lives in West Germany, where they would eventually see the West German security service and be recruited. • Funder finds it hard to believe Herr Winz was personally involved in a high level. • “He was too under confident and unconvincing with all his spy play-acting to have ever done it for real.” Pg. 85 • She constantly states that she doesn’t believe some things he says or implies, and makes assumptions. • Wanting to know why he’s disguised as a westerner, Funder asks him how he’s treated as a former Stasi man. Smart! • “The foe has made a propaganda war against us, a slander and smear campaign. And therefore I don’t often reveal myself to people.” Pg. 86 • “People in Potsdam come up and say ‘You were right. Capitalism is even worse than you told us it would be in the GDR you could go out at night as a woman! You could leave you apartment door open!’” Pg. 86 • Funder: “You didn’t need to, I think, they could see inside anyway.” Again, ridiculing the GDR. She doesn’t give into what Herr Winz is trying to do. • Herr Winz describes capitalism as: exploitation, unfair, brutal, rich get richer, masses get steadily poorer, makes war. • “He takes a sip of his coffee and holds his hand up to stop me asking anymore questions.” Pg. 86 • Capitalism plundering the plant: “this whole in the ozone layer, the exploitation of forests, pollution…the human race will not last the next fifty years.” Pg. 86 • “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” Pg. 86 • He speaks of social as an article of faith, and it continues to exist in the minds and hearts regardless of the miseries of history. Pg. 86 • Funder understands that Winz is waiting for the second coming of socialism. • He gives The Communist Manifesto to Funder (she mentions that is looks well-loved), and despite this, she makes it out to be a bitter moment – his ‘kind’ gesture of giving her a gift is now seen as something negative because of the way she describes the situation. • “’You should read it’ he hisses, ‘It’s a present from me’” Pg. 86 • He inscribes it: “as a memento of our Potsdam discussion.” • As he leaves, she makes the last thing the readers hear about him an abrupt and forceful way. • “stands up to go… puts one set of knuckles down on the table and pushes his face close to mine … his voice is getting louder. I can see the veins in his forehead…marches through the front door…waiter brings me the bill.” Pg. 87 • Miriam: “a cheery voice” • Funder consciously makes an effort to keep in touch with Miriam. • “For a few days afterwards each time the phone rings I think it might be her, but it’s mostly Stasi men.” Disappointment. Pg. 87 • After a week passes, she begins to think she may have offended her. • Waits another fortnight before calling her again. • “I am aware that I am following a person who has been hounded enough.” Pg. 87 • “Does telling your story mean you are free of it? Or that you go, fettered, into your future?” Pg. 87

CHAPTER NINE – Julia Has No Story

• Funder catches the underground to Rosenthaler Platz and walks home through the park. • “The park belongs to the drunks and punks.” She continuously mentions and gives detailed descriptions of them physically, or their behaviour. Pg.88 • “They hold what look like philosophical discussions… to share knowledge of a world where each of them once had a place.” Are they nostalgic of living under Communism where they weren’t homeless? Pg. 88 • Punks: have as much beer and cigarettes as the drunks but a lot more rancour (anger, resentment, ill-will). • Punks sleep on the ground. Drunks claim the benches and tram shelters. • “The dogs often look better groomed than the humans.” Pg. 89 • “I realise I probably underestimate the effort required to maintain a cockscomb of eight 12-inch cones of hair erect and green, every day.” Pg. 89 • Her door is unlocked and Julia is inside again, with no notice. Julia is collecting old love letters. • “I came over to water the plants. I thought I’d just get some of this old stuff while I was here.” Pg. 89 • With reference to blushing: “This used to happen to me until some merciful God put an end to it” Did she have bad experiences being in love? Pg. 89 • “Julia has started to use the plants as a reason to drop by… ‘The plants’ are two skinny crooked bald-trunked palm things”. By this, Funder is trying to say that the plants are barely even considered plants anymore (they don’t need watering) and Julia is probably just lonely. Pg. 89 • “It tolerates my presence but demands as little interference from me as possible.” Like the GDR??? Pg. 90 • Julia is dressed “in her usual assortment of black…baggy jumper.” Pg. 90 • “Under all those layers of black is a wiry body…something about Julia that breaks my heart.” Funder makes Julia out to be small, frail, wiry, weak and vulnerable. Pg. 90 • “She is a hermit crab, all soft-fleshed with her friends but ready to whisk back into its shell at the slightest sign on contact.” Funder knows this and approaches talking to her accordingly, and successfully gets a lot out of her! Pg. 90 • “East Germans drank more than their West German counterparts” Again a negative connotation to East Germany. Makes West German more appealing or ‘better’. Pg. 90 • “You should be careful of those bums” “…seem harmless enough” Funder and Julia – opposing ideas. This is attributed to their very different experiences. • “Being on the street you get harassed nearly every day”. Pg. 91 • “I am willing to admit that I notice staring men on the street.” Pg. 91 • Julia thinks that her first boyfriend being a “macho autentico’ (he was Italian) might be one reason she reacts so strongly to harassment. Pg. 92 • Julia says she can tell sexual stalking and normal stalking apart. • She compares the boys who would take their tops off for her and her sister while sunbaking, to the two men in the Russian Lada that would “crawl slowly along the street in front of our house…that was creepy.” Pg. 92 • Julia says that the car was there for her. • “Things can end so badly…it was funny…I ended it with my Italian boyfriend…but that wasn’t the end of it all.” Pg. 93 • Funder describes Communism as “the twentieth century’s experiment on humans.” Pg. 93 • Julia gets uncomfortable and says she needs to leave to go to a class. • Funder: “I don’t want to be left here alone now with all those stuffed heads in my attic, shaking in high winds.” She wants her to stay Pg. 94 • “We drink more coffee and she stays.” They eat dinner together. Pg. 94 • Funder and Julia were born the same year (1966) • Julia was 23 when the wall fell. • “She could get an education and a new life, instead, like many older people, of just losing their old one.” Pg. 94 • Julia – “unable to go forward into her future.” Pg. 95 • Julia has a finely articulated voice “which can turn this barking language into a song of aching beauty and finesse.” Pg. 95 • Julia Behrend: third of four girls. Her parents were born during the early years of the war. They were both high-school teachers. • “We weren’t dissidents” Pg. 95 • “We were an ordinary family. None of us had ever has a run-in with the state.” Pg. 95 • Her mother Irene: practical woman, didn’t expect a lot from the state, didn’t rock the boat to change it. She told her daughters they could be anything they wanted. • Her father Dieter: sensitive man, wanted to better what he saw to be a flawed system (but one that was fairer than capitalism). Joined the Free German Youth. He spoke up against things he disagreed with (recruiting eighth graders) • “In the GDR people were required to acknowledge an assortment of fictions as fact. Some …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.” Pg. 96 • “Others more specific: that East Germans weren’t the Germans responsible for the Holocaust; that the GDR was a multi- party democracy; that socialism was peace-loving; that there no former Nazis left in the country; and that, under socialism, prostitution didn’t exist.” Funder is insinuating that the things above are all fictitious. Pg. 96 • Dieter retired from teaching, was depressed and required medication. • “Depressed people have a more accurate view of reality.” Pg. 96 • “Julia and her family, like many others in the GDR, trod this line between seeing things for what they were in the GDR, and ignoring those realities in order to stay sane.” Pg. 96 • Julia won first prize in a state Russian competition. She had pen pals in Algeria, the Soviet Union and India. She would formulate letter in French, Russian and English. She wanted to be a translator and interpreter. • “I see a woman who leaves her past in a box but then comes to collect it; and whose part-time study and part-time rental agency work keep her only part-attached to the world” Pg. 97 • “Julia believed in East Germany as an alternative to the west.” Pg. 97 • “I wanted to explain to people overseas about the GDR – that Communism was not such a bad system.” Pg. 97 • She knew about unemployment, homelessness, hard drugs and prostitution in the west, or capitalist countries, and this put her off the idea. • “She doesn’t seem bitter about her belief in the GDR now. She seems, somehow, nostalgic.” Pg. 97 • Julia has not voiced her memories/experiences much before. Is this a sense of achievement for Funder?

CHAPTER TEN – The Italian Boyfriend

• Age 16, Julia worked as an usher at the Leipzig Fair (famous international trade fair for which twice a year East Germany opened itself up to the outside world). • There was western press who’d stay in Hotel Merkur or were billeted to families who’d fight over them. Pg. 98 • Julia’s job (selected for her loyalty and language skills) was to direct visitors around the fair and the city. This is where she met the Italian boyfriend. • Almost immediately, he asked her out and she declined. He persisted and in the end she said yes – “because he persisted, because it might be fun, because what harm could come of it?” Funder mentions this because after hearing Julia’s story, readers understand that it was harmful and not fun at all. Pg. 98 • Italian boyfriend: 30 years old, representing a northern Italian computer firm. • They had a long distance relationship. • “He came to visit her twice a year – at Easter and Christmas, and they met for annual holidays in Hungary. Hungary was relatively free then.” Pg. 99 • They telephoned once a week and wrote frequent letters. “He became her most intimate pen pal.” Pg. 99 • They were together for two and a half years. • “Whenever he stayed with her, the surveillance was intense and overt. The couple could hardly leave the house without being stopped by the police.” Pg. 99 • The Italian boyfriend was terrified at each search. “He’s start to sweat, then he’d go all pale and literally shake with terror.” Pg. 99 • She didn’t like the scrutiny but thought “I live in a dictatorship, so that’s just how it is.” Julia often makes excuses for the GDR. Does she do this to comfort herself? Pg. 99 • Julia: “It was clear to me as a simple act of GDR logic: I am with a western foreigner; now I will be under observation.” Pg. 99 • Julia went to her grandmothers for her weekly call to him. • She figured people tapped into their phone calls so when she’s say goodnight to him, she’s say “good night all” as a joke. • It was a condition of sanity both to accept GDR logic and to ignore it. Pg. 100 • “If you took things as seriously…we would have all killed ourselves!” Pg. 100 • Funder writes that she feels agitated although Julia laughs it off. • Julia topped her year in middle school and wanted to go to a senior high renowned for its language teaching. • Instead, for reasons never made clear, the authorities sent her far away to a boarding school with no reputation at all. • Her mother complained bitterly. • “Maybe they thought I had too much contact with the west and needed to be isolated” Again making excuses. Pg. 100 • The school was strict and students were made to watch Aktuelle Kamera in the long version. “It was hell” • “It never told us what happened in the world!” Pg. 101 • The students also had to watch Der Schwarze Kanal (THE BLACK CHANNEL) with Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler. • Funder: “I have heard about this man, the human antidote to the pernicious influence of western television.” Again, mock • ing when saying ‘pernicious’. Pg. 101 • Von Schnitzler’s job was to “show extracts from western television broadcast in the GDR …and rip it to shreds.” Pg. 101 • “You’d come away feeling sullied, as if you’d spent half an hour atrociously badmouthing someone.” Pg. 101 • “but we also felt that out own country was feeding us lies and that our futures depended on seeming to agree with it all.” Pg. 101 • 1984, the headmaster made an appointment to meet with Julia’s parent at home. • He came to convince Irene and Dieter to influence Julia to break up with her Italian boyfriend. “People assumed… that he was her ticket out.” Pg. 102 • He left dissatisfied. • Again, making excuses for the headmaster, Julia suggests that maybe he’d been warned about the consequences for her, and was trying to help. • 1985, Julia matriculated with straight As. “She went to Leipzig to sit the entrance exam for the university’s translating and interpreting course. She failed.” Pg. 102 • Julia say’s it was the political exam that got her. • Funder: “I am bilious and annoyed.” Pg. 102 • Funder: “I am just over sensitised.” Pg. 102 • “I don’t know with any certainty that it was organised by them that I fail. There were an awful lot of applicants and I have to admit that I did pretty crap in that exam.” Again, excuses made for the GDR. Pg. 102 • She couldn’t name the political parties in the GDR. • Julia was being asked to repeat her knowledge of socialist catechism, her belief in things that were hard to remember, because they were not real. Pg. 103 • Julia was told that there was no point in her trying again next year (from a father’s friend whose parents were university board examiners). • “But the strange this was that afterwards I simply couldn’t get any job. Any kind of job at all… that was when it got hard for me.” Pg. 103 • She thought she might want to work at a receptionist in a hotel so she could practise her languages. • She applied to Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden. • She was a top student who spoke English, Russian, French and a smattering of Hungarian. • She always got an interview which seemed to always pass successfully and was always told that they looked forward to seeing her. • Sometimes a letter would come a week later, other times she would call up herself, and sometimes she didn’t hear at all. • “In the end she stopped ringing to be told the same, uncomfortable excuses.” Pg. 104 • She tried to find a position as a waitress, also without success. • She now assumes that every hotel and restaurant owner was required to check the names of all new employees with the Stasi. • She decided to enrol in a night course to become a Town Plan Explainer. • In the GDR, the word leader (Fuhrer) was forbidden after Hitler. • “Being a town plan explainer was an occasional way to earn pocket-money. It was not a living.” Pg. 104 • “Julia went to the Employment Office, took a number and stood in an interminable line.” Pg. 104 • She asked someone how long they’d been unemployed for and before they could answer “an official, a square built woman in uniform, stepped out from behind a column. ‘Miss you are not unemployed’ she barked. ‘Of course I’m unemployed. Why else would I be here? ‘This is the Employment Office, not the Unemployed Office. You are not unemployed; you are seeking work.” Pg. 104 • Julia: “I’m seeking work because I’m unemployed.” Pg. 104 • The woman started to shout so loudly the people in the queue hunched their shoulders. “’I said you are not unemployed! You are seeking work!’, and then almost hysterically, ‘There is no unemployment in the German Democratic Republic!”. Pg. 104 • Funder collects more GDR fictions: news was real on television and contrary to Julia’s lived experience, there was no unemployment. Pg. 105 • “Julia Behrend had fallen into the gap between the GDR’s fiction and its reality.” Pg. 105 • “Julia could either think she had failed at everything she tried, or that they were out to get her” Pg. 105 • She slept later and later each day. • “I think I was depressed.” Pg. 105 • After a Spanish class she enrolled in, almost every night, she went to the local night club. • She says she thinks her parents felt sorry for her. • “She knew too, that getting on with her life would mean leaving it behind.” Pg. 105 • She was going to have to marry the Italian boyfriend. The idea frightened her. • “That was part of my attraction for him – that I would be utterly dependant on him, in his home and his country and his language. At his mercy.” Pg. 105 • She went to meet for a holiday in Hungary. • They took her aside at the airport and searched her luggage. • They unscrewed her hairdryer and emptied her box of tampons on the examination bench. • She broke up with him in Hungary. • “He was so controlling, so jealous.” Pg. 105 • She has “withdrawn from him, withdrawn into her home, and withdrawn from hope. This was more than internal emigration. It was exile.” Pg. 105

CHAPTER ELEVEN – Major N

• A card came in the letterbox. “It seemed normal enough” Normal for someone living in the GDR. Pg.106 • It had the date and time of the appointment – Could this be one factor contributing to her inability to conform to appointments, dates and times? • “She’s hardly looking at me. She’s hardly talking to me. Her eyes move around the room although there’s not much to see.” Pg. 106 • “She’s remembering as I watch, summoning presences more real than mine.” Pg. 106 • “I haven’t remembered this.” Trying to forget. Pg. 106 • Funder sticks to small facts as she thinks Julia is getting uncomfortable or awkward. This proves her skills as an interviewer, she does this to make it easier for Julia to open up to her and spill everything she knows/has experienced. • “…I wasn’t afraid they’d collect me in the night and lock me up and torture me.” Pg. 107 • In the later stages, the regime mostly stopped “direct action (arrest, incarceration, torture) against its people.” It opted for other ways of silencing them, typically “that your career was broken before it was begun.” Pg. 107 • The police station had a vast waiting hall. Perhaps due to the fact that so many people were in trouble with the law. • For guidance as to where to stand, Julia approaches a policewoman who says she doesn’t need to queue at all, and that she should go directly to Room 118. • “Julia laughs at herself. ‘I was pleased at first!’” Pg. 107 • “Then she noticed that all the people in the queues were going into one or two rooms behind the counters, but neither of those was Room 118.” She notices that something is wrong, unusual. Pg. 107 • “I had to go myself up several flights of stairs and down a long corridor; left around a corner and then left again…Room 118 was way over on the other side of the building.” Makes one room so frightening and feared. This builds tension in the books and becomes exciting to read. Pg. 107 • There was a man alone behind a desk. She notices that he wore a western suit and a good tie. • Introduces himself as Major N, smiling, from Ministry of State Security – STASI! • She felt fear “like a worm in my belly.” Pg. 108 • “He was friendly – in fact for GDR standards, exaggeratedly polite.” Is he behaving this way because he wants something from her? • He asks why “such an attractive, intelligent young woman” is not working. • “Up until this moment it could have all been a product of her imagination: the boarding school, the headmaster’s visit, the constant street searches, the failed exam, the ‘friend’s’ warning, the cruising Lada, the extraordinary unemployment.” As mentioned before, she kept making excuses for all these suspicious occurrences, however not they were all void. • “She was in shock. She spoke slowly.” Pg. 108 • “’But I think you people are forcing me out.’ She realised she was imploring him. ‘I must work somewhere. I am, after all, unemployed.’” Pg.108 • Again, they question her because “there is no unemployment in the German Democratic Republic.” • Pile of papers – “They were copies of her letters to the Italian boyfriend.” Pg. 108 • “Sometimes letter she received from overseas has been brutally torn and taped back together with a sticker: ‘Damaged in Transit’…like all other things, she has never thought about it for long.” Trust and loyalty for her country. She liked living in East Germany, no matter what the conditions were and what it meant for her. Pg. 109 • “Major N. laid the first letter flat on the desk and smoothed it out with both hands. He cleared his throat. To Julia’s horror, he started to read it aloud.” Here, Funder is building tension and is prolonging the way she writes the experience. She builds tension. Pg. 109 • She refers to Major N. as “Major So- and So”. Ridicule, mockery, sarcasm, annoyance, negativity. • He has underlined every word he couldn’t find in his German-English dictionary and he asks her what they meant. • Funder: “The hairs on my forearms stand up. I have stopped looking at Julia now because in this dimness she ceased addressing her words to me some time ago.” Pg. 109 • “I am outraged for her and vaguely guilty about my relative luck in life.” Pg. 109 • Daunting – “One long forefinger on her handwriting, or her lovers.” Pg. 109 • “Cocoriza” “She had to explain.” So blunt yet so powerful. Funder knows how to word herself and is a skilled writer. She intends to make her readers feel, think or act in a particular way and she knows how to achieve this. Pg. 109 • “Then, in his western suit, with his foreign manners and exaggerated courtesy, Major N. through her relationship, one letter at a time.” Does she emphasise his ‘western suit’ to exaggerate a double standard/hypocrisy? This portrays him in a negative light. Pg. 110 • This man knew everything. • He flattered her. He tells her she is much more complex and intelligent than the Italian boyfriend gave her credit for. • “When he was done reading, pointing, probing…” Pg. 110 • He started to tell Julia about her boyfriend. • “He was even sort of witty about it, drawing me in as if we could both have a chuckle about aspects of my boyfriend’s life, as if we were both on the same side, and it was my friend not I who was the object of observation.” Pg. 110 • East German mindset • Italian boyfriend – sales manager for the regional branch of the firm, middle class, “so there’s no thinking he’s rich or anything.” Pg. 111 • Thick manila folder. • “He evaluated her life in progress. ‘He knew everything about me…all the subjects I’d taken…how I did in them…each of my sisters, my parents.” Pg. 111 • “Dieter was ‘problematic’. Irene…was much more loyal to the state.” Pg. 111 • “...you take after your mother…is a good thing.” Pg. 111 • “He was showing me that he had me in the palm of his hand” Pg. 111 • Julia draws her knees up to her chest – “small black ball” Again, fulfilling the small, weak, frail image Funder has of Julia. • The only thing they seemed not to know what that she broke up with her boyfriend. • Italian boyfriend wrote several imploring letters and Julia responds to one, and ignores the rest. • Major N reveals that they are interested in her friend. He asks for her assistance and to meet every now and again for a chat. • “It did not occur to her until she got home that it could have been her they wanted. There was no question for Julia. She would not inform on him or at all.” Portraying Julia in a positive light. Pg. 112 • Smiling, he gives her his card and number if she changes her mind. • “You must not discuss our little talk with anyone – not your parents, not your sisters, not your closest friends. If you do, we will know about it. This afternoon has not occurred. You have never been to Room 118. If you see me on the street you are not to acknowledge me – you must walk on past. All this for obvious reasons, as I’m sure you will have understood long ago.” Pg. 112 • She could be with them, or she could be gone. • “She felt sundered, suddenly and irrevocably, from life.” Pg. 112 • “To listen to her is to witness the process, almost mechanical, of pulling things up from the past.” Pg. 113 • 1989 story is mentioned. “So severe that other things just fell away.” • Funder voices her opinion – she believes what happened to Julia was extreme. • Julia only understands how extreme it was now that she’s conscious of what happened – “I feel the shudder run down my spine.” Pg. 113 • “It’s the total surveillance that damaged me the most.” • “I know how far people will transgress over your boundaries – until you have no private sphere at all… that is a terrible knowledge to have” Pg. 113 • “At this distance I understand for the first time how bad it was what he did in that room.” Pg. 113 • Funder describes her surroundings to emphasise silence: “The empty fridge shudders and stops; the kitchen is a deeper quiet.” Pg. 113 • Talks about the effect this knowledge has on her life. • “I think I am definitely psychologically damaged…That’s probably why I react so extremely to approaches from men and so on. I experience them as another possible invasion of my intimate sphere” Pg. 113 • “I think it’s worse if you repress it.” Pg. 113 • Julia was alright until she got home from Room 118 – her legs couldn’t hold her weight, her voice trembled and she vomited. • She told her parents and her sisters everything. • Her mother was a very pragmatic person. • Julia couldn’t quite believe that this was happening. • “I have to leave here forever – I have to leave my family, I will not see my sisters again, and I have to go to the west.” She really doesn’t like the west. She is comfortable with her life in the GDR. Pg. 114 • “I was disappointed in the state. I realised for the first time that it wasn’t really the good father state you have in the back of your mind. I saw it can be so dangerous, so very dangerous, without me having done anything at all.” Pg. 114 • Dieter sat hunched in rage and sadness at the end of the table. No-one spoke. • Staatsratsbeschwerde: a method by which people could directly write to Erich Honecker if they needed something they couldn’t get, or to make a complaint. Pg. 114 • “She shakes her head – ‘as if the citizen really did have a voice and rights.” Pg. 114 • Naivety: “Back then we thought that the Party and the state were one thing, and the Stasi another. She shakes her head” Pg. 115 • Julia has nightmares that night – “I had nightmares like I have never had before or since.” Pg. 115 • Her dream symbolized something: “It was the loss of everything until I had disappeared too.” Pg. 115 • She didn’t know if she’d dreamt of where she was or where she was going. • “the night was terrible, terrible.” Pg. 115 • She sweated until the bed was wet. • “It was truly terrifying what I lived through.” Pg. 115 • When calling Major N, she saw her hand was shaking. • Major N picked up straight away – was he waiting for her call? • “He was furious and demanded that Julia meet with him alone.” Pg. 116 • He told her that there would be serious repercussions for her and her family “for this breach of her undertaking silence.” Pg. 116 • He threatens her: He reminds Julia that her sister dreamed of studying piano. • Major N and his boss came to Julia’s house but not how they had anticipated. • “N. looked completely different to me. He was sweating and uncomfortable. His boss didn’t look much better. We didn’t know what was going on.” Pg. 116 • Irene told them flatly that they were going to write to Honecker. • The men held their hands up and said there was no need to overreact – “there was no need to get Berlin involved.” Pg. 116 • “But when they left we knew we’d won. We had never really known where the battle was, but we knew we’d won.” Pg. 117 • Julia doesn’t know why the Stasi were afraid of them complaining to Honecker. • The next week Julia was wrung up about a job as a receptionist in a hotel. • “But then came 1989” Dramatic. Pg. 117 • Julia is seeing a psychotherapist. • Funder: “…you cannot destroy your past, nor what it does to you. It’s not ever, really, over.” Pg. 117 • No – one can tote up life’s events and calculate the damages. • “Julia rides back to her barricaded tower, full of things she can’t leave, but can’t look at either.” Pg. 117

CHAPTER TWELVE – The Lipsi

• Chapter begins with an example of hate mail, exposing the more intense style as a narrator: “…you pigdogs think we all here forgotten what you Nazis done and come in my home on my TV with you music and you news you fuckups better write me n-” • Uwe offers Funder a lift home. • “I move to hide the letter in front of me, as if to spare him the insult…The printing is as large and uneven as a ransom note, so it catches the eye.” Pg. 118 • “The hate is not directed at a particular presenter or the station itself, but at the whole nation.” Pg. 118 • They usually respond to those types of letters in a moderate tone and say “the National Socialist dictatorship was a terrible thing that happened to us. That it caused untold pain and suffering and so on, and that whatever attempts there have been to make reparations, amends can never truly be made, etc. etc. Pg. 119 • Hitler: when the war was over the people might well have voted him in again. • “Everyone, always, is claiming innocence here.” Pg. 119 • Funder’s rarely in a car in Berlin. The train network is dense, “popping out of the earth in one place or another. It is a skein of arteries, pumping people around the city.” Pg. 119 • The streets are cobbled. • Funder feels uneasy and in danger due to Uwe’s speeding. “I wonder whether the pack might have some airbag effect.” Pg. 119 • Uwe asks is she’s followed up any Ossi (East German) stories – he seems genuinely interested and lowers the music to listen. • “I’ve been having Adventures in Stasiland. I’ve been in a place where what was said was not real, and what was real was not allowed…” Pg. 120 • Uwe asks how she found these people. • “They’re all around us Uwe.” Pg. 120 • Mentions Julia and her expulsion from life until the Stasi offered to redeem her is she would inform for them.” Pg. 120 • “I can see that Julia’s story is as strange and awful for him as it is for me.” Pg. 120 • He offers her help/connection to people he feels will be useful to her; Hagen Koch (as a young Stasi officer drew the line along the street where the Wall would be built) and Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler (chief propagandist for the regime) • With reference to von Schnitzler: people like that don’t want to be found. • Funder decides to watch some of his programs (Der Schwarze Kanal – The Black Channel) • Was broadcasted in the east from 1960, intended as a countermeasure to the western program Rad Rote Optik (The Red View), a critique of socialism being broadcast into the east from West Germany. • Workers in the power station were alert on Mondays. • First, everyone tuned in at once to watch a movie, so they went on overdrive. • Second, when The Black Channel came on, they struggled to stop the power from collapsing under a black surge as everyone, simultaneously switched off their sets. Pg. 121 • Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler became a one-man institution and the most hated face of the regime. • 1989 demonstrators shouted “Say, Sorry, Schnitzler!” and “Schnitzler to the Muppet Show!” Pg. 121 • “That was exactly was he was: a grumpy old puppet throwing scorn on proceedings from on high.” Pg. 122 • Broadcasted at Adlershof, eastern suburb of Berlin; “a cluster of cold grey buildings in an expanse of gravel…” Pg. 122 • “Grimy glass-sided gangway…” Pg. 122 • There are no people around. • Long linoleum corridor. Ancient editing equipment and piles of film reel. • “Two men in what looked like matching brown cardigans are drinking coffee.” Pg. 122 • She’s come to look at some tapes. Asks for Frau Anderson. • “I am tossing up whether to grovel like a native or to make a scene, foreign-style, when I am saved by footsteps coming along the corridor: Frau Anderson.” Pg. 123 • “It is hard to tell what she really looks like because she is wearing makeup to disguise.” Pg. 123 • With reference to von Schnitzler: “at least he has stuck with what he said back then.” Pg. 123 • Her bitterness and nostalgia shock Funder. • “Clearly only those demonstrably loyal to the state worked here, and Frau Anderson is still one of them.” Pg. 123 • Lino is beige; walls are a peeling bilious yellow. • Centre closes at 4.25 • “’It would be terrible,’ she jokes, ‘to leave you locked up here overnight.’” Pg. 123 • “This place seems to be designed on the same one-size-fits-all architectural principle as everything else: the Runden Ecke in Leipzig and the Stasi HQ in Normannenstrasse…probably the same inside the brown Palast der Republik.” Pg. 123- 124 • Communism’s gift to the built environment – linoleum and grey cement…long, long corridors with all-purpose rooms. Behind these doors anything could be happening, interrogations, imprisonment, examinations, education, administration…or in this case, propaganda. • “The titles come one: a mean looking cartoon eagle, the West German emblem, wearing a red-white-and-black fascism alights onto a television antenna.” Pg. 124 • Von Schnitzler: “The Black Channel…carries filth and sewage…and every Monday at this time we are going to devote ourselves to, as you say, a hygiene operation.” Pg. 124 • The next tape was from 1965 after two people had been shot trying to flee over the Wall. • “…returned from the holiday especially to appear before you tonight. Our border guards in accordance with their duty (again, just doing their jobs) had to shoot at two men. They were breaking the law and seeking to breech out national border. They stopped neither when called, nor when warning shots were fired.” Trying to protect the GDR and is making excuses for it. Pg. 125 • “We determine the order at our border! And we ensure that it is maintained for good reasons…it sounds hard. And will perhaps even be interpreted…as ‘inhumane’…but what is humane and what is inhumane?” Pg. 125 • “Humane it is, to make peace for all men on earth. That is not done by prayer! It is done by fighting! And if, as history teaches us, wars are made by man and not God, then peace too, is a work of man…peace has been elevated to a governing principle of the state. Whoever seeks to weaken or damage the GDR, whether consciously or unconsciously, weakens or damages the prospects of peace in Germany. It is humane to have created a built this state. It is humane to strengthen and protect it! It is humane to guard the German Democratic Republic against these people who would most like to eat it for breakfast!” Pg. 125 • “I want to be able to see clearly how this man turned inhumanity into humanity, these death symbols into symbols of salvation.” Pg. 125 • As Funder is getting ready to leave, the tape plays something that takes her interest. • “Lipsi – that’s all my customers are asking for! It’s an epidemic!” Pg. 126 • Slogan: “If you really want to know, simply dance away, all the young people dance the Lipsi today!” Pg. 126 • “Strangest dance I have ever seen.” Pg. 126 • A mix of Greek, Irish, waltz and Russian. • “They smile huge fixed smiles as if they needn’t give a single thought to what their feet are doing.” Pg. 126 • Lipsi is 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. • She concentrates on their movements and in not one of this panoply of gestures do the dancers’ hips move. • The makers of this dance had plundered every tradition they could find and painstakingly extracted only the sexless moves. • Just as the Black Channel was an antidote for western television, the Lipsi step was the East’s answer to Elvis and decadent foreign rock’n’roll. • Funder’s over-stayed her welcome (it’s passed 4:25) and is rushing to get back. • “I don’t know whether she can tell I’ve panicked and is having a bit of fun with me. Perhaps I’ve started to take deadlines, train times and closing hours too seriously in this land of merciless punctuality.” Pg. 128

CHAPTER THIRTEEN – Von Schni –

• “It’s her maiden name, not his one the doorbell.” A.P. Funder chooses to include this information as it backs up what was said earlier, about von Schnitzler not wanting to be found. People hate him. Pg. 129 • Frau Marta von Schnitzler was an actress. • “He greets me, nodding in my direction.” Pg. 129 • ‘Sudel-Ede’ or ‘Filthy Ed’. • Notices figurines in his house: “a bust of Marx, a daguerreotype of Lenin…miniature full-body statue of Stalin.” Pg. 130 • Funder is cut off by Schnitzler when she says she wants to ask a few questions about his biography. • He says that 95% of what she’s read about him is false. • She’s cut off again. • “I don’t think, I know. It is so.” Funder is shedding light on the type of person Schnitzler is. She doesn’t like him and she focuses on particular things which position the reader to feel the same. Pg. 130 • “His voice is gaining strength and timbre” Pg. 130 • “He doesn’t even crack a smile.” Pg. 130 • “This is not going to be easy.” Pg. 130 • Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler: - born in 1918 into wealthy Berlin family who remained close power to the Nazi regime - reacted against disparities of wealth and Nazism around him - at 14 became fascinated by communism - served in Hitler’s army during World War 2 - Began making broadcast in German at the BBC for the program ‘German Prisoners of War speak to the Homeland’. - “But before long his staunchly Communist views brought him into conflict with the British administrators and he was sacked.” Pg. 131 • “The man with the ridiculously noble name became the media face of the regime.” Pg. 131 • He goes into detail about the war and Funder interrupts him, saying she’d like to discuss the Black Channel with him instead. • “But you’re jumping an important part of my life” Pg. 131 • “Frau von Schnitzler has installed herself away from out sight-line but well within earshot” Pg. 131 • “He continues with his full life story anyway” A.P. stubborn, everything must be his way. Pg. 131 • “von Schnitzler spent his career excerpting and critiquing western television and he will not have his life excerpted by me” Pg. 131 • “He has slipped into a practised authoritarian speech rhythm with occasional startling emphases.” Mentioned possibly to say that her attention has waned and he startled her by stressing a word. Good skill to have as a broadcaster Pg. 131 • She cuts him off and again asks to talk about The Black Channel. • “He’s angry now. ‘But it is more important to talk about history!’” Pg. 132 • “I recognise this pattern of unpredictable shouting followed by bouts of quiet reason from other bullies I have known” Is she calling the Stasi men bullies? Pg. 132 • The Black Channel was his idea. “I once saw the western politicians on the television news spouting filthy lies about the GDR” Pg. 132 • He insisted on it being aired once a week. • “‘Today’ he leans towards me, furious, ‘today I could make one every…single…day!’ This is a tantrum engineered to frighten me. ‘That’s how disgusting this, this shitbox television is!’” Pg. 132 • Funder asks what angers him most about television. “‘Nothing angers me!’ He is incandescent with rage… ‘That’s why I’m a communist! So nothing can anger me!” Pg. 132 • Talking about Big Brother: “That one where they locked up ten people…Named for the head of surveillance in Orwell’s novel 1984.” • “…survive the longest living with others under such closed and scrutinized circumstances.” Pg. 133 • Orwell was banned in the GDR. • “General stupidity” She’s referring to Big Brother as stupid. The show reflects lifestyle under the GDR, so she could be directing it to GDR as well as Big Brother. Pg. 133 • “Escapes were always tried on at Christmas time.” • “He uses the word ‘insziniert’ which means staged, as though escapes were orchestrated deliberately to make the regime look bad.” Pg. 133 • Funder reads out something Schnitzler says on The Black Channel. • “The politics of ‘freeing those in the Eastern Bloc’ is code for liquidating the GDR, and that means civil war, world war, nuclear war, that means ripping apart families, atomic Armageddon – that is inhumanity! Against that we have founded a state! Against that we have erected a border with strict control measures to stop what wen or during the thirteen years that it was left open and abused – that is humane! That is a service to humanity!” • “My question is whether today you are of the same view about the Wall as something humane, and the killings at the border an act of peace.” • “He raises his free arm, inhales and screams, ‘More! Than! Ever!’ He brings his fist down.” Pg. 134 • “I did not “consider” it necessary. It was absolutely necessary! It was a historical necessity. It was the most useful construction in all of German history!” Pg. 134 • “It prevented imperialism from contaminating the east. It walled it in.” Pg. 134 • “The only people walled-in were his own.” Pg. 134 • He argues that people in the east weren’t “walled in” and that they could travel to Hungary and Poland. They just couldn’t go to NATO countries because naturally, you don’t travel around in enemy territory. • “This is so mad…he contradicts himself.” Pg. 134 • He believes that during the last few years, that the wall should’ve opened because they would have come back again anyway. • “I wonder if he can truly believe this. The eastern states are still, seven years on, losing its people.” Pg. 135 • “He was one of those people whose ideas were moulded in the 1920s by the battle against the gross free market injustices…and then the outrages of fascism, and who went on to see the birth and then the death of the nation built on those idea.” Pg. 135 • “He is a true believer and for him by questions only serve to demonstrate a sorry lack of faith.” Pg. 135 • “There was a serious attempt to build a socialist state, and we should examine why, at the end, that state no longer exists.” Pg. 135 • He confined himself to his specialist area; the work against imperialism. “And for that reason I am so be-lov-ed.” Pg. 135 • “That’s why I’m so beloved by all those who think imperialistically and act imperialistically and bring up their children imperialistically!” Pg. 135 • Each time he says imperialistically he thrusts his fist on the stick. • “This man, who could turn inhumanity into humanity, faces now perhaps his greatest challenge: to turn the fact that he is hated into the fact that he is, in the face of all available evidence, right.” Pg. 136 • He focused his program quite deliberately and exclusively on anti-imperialism, not on GDR propaganda. • “The success propaganda in the GDR media was also lies.” Pg. 136 • “He can switch from one view to another with frightening ease. I think it is a sign of being accustomed to such power that the truth does not matter because you cannot be contradicted.” Pg. 136 • When Funder asks why he didn’t comment on those lies, he says he wouldn’t even consider it! “I’m not about to criticize my own republic!” Pg. 136 • Funder says that she criticizes her own country and he replies saying she has a lot more reason to. • He talks about his very good friend Erich Mielke. • “My curiosity is directed solely towards the machinations of imperialism and how they can be countered.” Pg. 136 • Funder talks about the internal observation of the GDR population with unofficial and official collaborators. • He cuts her off. “You can throw 90% of what you know about that out. He’s angry again.” Pg. 137 • “It’s all lies” • “It’s all been exaggerated immeasurably.” Pg. 137 • “The Wall was necessary to defend a threatened nation. And there was Erich Mielke at the top, a living example of the most humane human being.” Pg. 137 • Funder says that she’s never heard Mielke be referred to in this way. He was too fierce and too feared to be referred to with anything like affection. • With reference to capitalism: “It is what you expected or is it not as bad as you thought.” Pg. 137 • “I live, he says fiercely, among the enemy. And not for the first time in my life. I lived among the enemy during the Nazi time as well.” Pg. 137 • He means that as long as the Iron Curtain was up, the NATO countries would not have bombed the former Yugoslavia for fear the Russians would have retaliated on behalf of the Serbs. • “He’s puffing and cross and, I think, finally stuck.” Pg. 138 • “I can see the tiny red veins filigreed across his eyeballs.” Pg. 138 • She gives him a small gift from Australia: an enamel pin of the German and Australian flags crossed over one another. • “That is not my flag. That is the Federal Republic’s” Pg. 138 • Funder explains that couldn’t find one with the GDR flag and he seems happy enough and says he thinks he had room for it with Lenin, Marx and Stalin.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN – The Worse You Feel

• Funder calls Julia over for lunch • “I’m putting as many calories into something as I know how.” Is it because she’s weak, frail and small? Pg. 139 • “She rings about the time she’s due, and asks whether it OK to be late.” Can’t deal with conforming to dates, appointments, and times. Pg. 139 • “When you can’t smell it, it’s still there.” Pg. 139 • Julia mentions that she’s started to smoke again. • Start of page 140 is extremely descriptive. • “I have invited her here for a meal, but we both know there is more of her story to tell.” Pg. 140 • Funder asks whether she saw her life unfolding differently after the Wall came down. • Julia: “lots of things, personal things.” Pg. 140 • “I think that I experienced it more intensely than others” Pg. 140 • Julia talks about this with her therapist and she keeps coming back to a reoccurring theme, “one that is quite uncomfortable with me.” Pg. 140 • She constantly pauses and is hesitant to open up and explain. • “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…I just can’t have structure imposed on me.” Pg. 140 • Reoccurring – BEER. Funder constantly talks about drinking and she relates it to getting her mind off things. “…it loosens up the afternoon.” Pg. 140 • “…colours of the yard have seeped in here, grey and brown…” Again, grey connotations with Germany. Pg. 141 • “It’s hard to live in society if you can’t subordinate yourself to authority, particularly German society.” Pg. 141 • “Being trapped by the Wall before, and then working in jobs which were way under my capacities…” Pg. 141 • “I just can’t stand the sort of structures that keep you in” Pg. 141 • “I was raped. That happened to me just after the Wall fell. It was in the east, and it was really the last straw” Pg. 141 • “Now I am cold and sober and scared of what I am about to hear.” Pg. 141 • “A week later she rang and said that afterwards she has felt sick for three days.” Pg. 141 • Shortly after the Wall came down, prisoners (mostly political) were amnestied. • Julia was in Thüringen for a wedding and was staying alone in the bride’s apartment. • She walked the bride outside the apartment. • “When she got back inside the building, there was a man waiting for the lift. It came and they both entered and turned to face the closing doors” Pg. 141 • Julia says that she knew it was going to happen then, and she knew something was wrong and considered running out the doors. “But you are taught to say to yourself ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’, so I stayed put” Pg. 141 • Then he jammed it with the emergency button. • “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.” Pg. 142 • When it was over, she “crawled from the lift to the apartment door.” Pg. 142 • “Julia spent the night alone, terrified, in the apartment.” Pg. 142 • The man knew where to find her. • The next day she managed to get herself to a police station. To me, this proves her courage/bravery. Although she was threatened with her life, she still sought help (similar to the Major N story). • “She received no counselling, no medical attention, and no sympathetic treatment. Rape was taboo in the GDR” Pg. 142 • The female officer on duty declined to examine her and went outside for a cigarette instead. • “A male colleague conducted a complete physical search, Julia naked on the table.” She was already in such a vulnerable state. A MALE conducting the search is further traumatic. Pg. 142 • “Then they made her go through everything step by step, pressing the emergency button herself and re-enacting the attack…they were offering her no protection.” Pg. 142 • Then she went to the wedding. Funder says this very matter of factly. This emphasises her point in saying how brave Julia was, to still be able to go to the wedding and “somehow I got through it.” Pg. 142 • “There are no tears; it is as if she has no self-pity at all” Pg. 142 • Her parents didn’t know how to help her through it. • The man was caught quickly and was a serial rapist with a string of previous convictions. • “Julia became unable to continue her studies, afraid of the slightest things. She felt separated from everybody, again” Pg. 142 • At one point, she took up an offer to be a teaching assistant for a semester in San Francisco. There, she found people who talked about rape in ways that helped her. • “When she returned, she had to face him again.” Pg. 143 • Julia believes the trial was the worst thing of all. She talks in a solemn tone. • She had trouble finding legal representation and trouble affording. • While she was in America, the rapist acted again, this time worse – the girl was hospitalised. • His lawyer argued diminished responsibility on the grounds of drunkenness. • “The rapist was convicted, but Julia felt violated all over again.” • After the trial she lived on her own in Lichtenburg, East Berlin. • It was difficult for her to leave the apartment. • “If I had to buy something at the shops, I would get up in the morning and put on all the loosest clothes I had, layers and layers of them to cover my body. Then I’d drink beer – in the morning! – until I was numb enough to be able to get out the door.” Pg. 143 • “Julia was distressed, dropped out and suicidal” Pg. 143 • “I wanted to die” Pg. 143 • She considered throwing herself under a train at Lichtenburg station but the idea of her sisters reading about it in the paper horrified her. Instead, she stopped eating. • Her sister came over and watched what she ate. • “I owe her my life really” Pg. 144 • Julia believes that in the amnesties of 1990, they made a mistake and the rapist was released. • “the letting loose of the criminals affected me” Pg. 144 • “The end of the security state meant the end too of her personal security. The system which had imprisoned her had also, somehow, protected her” Pg. 144 • “She associates the fall of the Wall with the end of what had remained of her private sphere after the Stasi were finished with it” Pg. 144 • Julia to Funder: “I think it’s important what you’re doing. 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.” Pg. 144 • “…you see the mistakes of one system – the surveillance – and the mistakes of the other – the inequality – but there’s nothing you could have done in the one, and nothing you can do now about the other. And the clearer you see that, the worse you feel.” Pg. 145 • Funder describes Julia as “vulnerable as a child”. • She calls Klaus and wants to get drunk again. • Funder says that “the withered palms in the living room…reflect my inner state of being” Pg. 145 • “More awful than my headache…is a vague feeling of regret” Pg. 145 • She decides to go to the pool for a swim. • “People use the pool as a bath” • “Washing themselves in the pool” • The entire top half of page 146 is dedicated to a detailed description of the pool and her observational style of writing is ignited again. • “I am visited by a blinding question: what am I doing in this chaos anyway? In this chaotic city” Pg. 146 • “I’ve had it with this place” Pg. 146 • “What is the matter with me?” Pg. 146 • When Funder is told she can’t swim here, you can only bathe, she replies quite sarcastically: “So when can I swim then, in this swimming pool?” Pg. 146 • “So this is orderly chaos…We will allow unusual headgear and bombs, mole picking and washing babies, but no swimming. There’s order everywhere else in German life.” Pg. 147 • “This pool must be the subconscious of the country: the mess that gives rise to all that order” Pg. 147 • Funder is blatantly annoyed with this place. • “I’m making portraits of people, East Germans, of whom there will be none left in a generation…This is working against forgetting, and against time.” Pg. 147 • She is told off again – this time, about sitting in the diving pool. • “But I can’t argue with a man armed with a whistle and prepared to use it, so I get out again.” Pg. 147 • A woman in uniform tells her her bathers are dripping on the floor. • She replies in an annoyed tone. • “That’s because they’re wet” The lady comes forward to say something else but Funder walks off. “Too many rules.” Pg. 147

CHAPTER FIFTEEN – HERR CHRISTIAN

• Chapter begins with Funder’s observational style of writing (about the photographer’s studio and the pictures behind the window) • On the train, she continues to observe a beautiful young woman with her baby and a Turkish man. • She stands in the Potsdam station’s car park. • “I am alone, except for a man in jeans leaning on the bonnet of the biggest, blackest BMW I have ever seen. He waves at me. This is my lift. This is my latest Stasi man” Pg. 148 • “Herr Christian shakes my hand warmly. He has a big crooked smile” Pg. 148 • He decides to take her on a tour to show her some of the places they operated – he seems so comfortable. • He opens the car door for her – chivalry – different from the other Stasi men she’s interviewed. • She observes that his nose has been broken several times. • “He looks straight at me, smiling his lopsided smile like a gangster, or an angel” Pg. 149 • They arrive at a well-kept yellow mansion with white lintels and a hedge garden. This was the Coding Villa. • “Herr Christian used to work here, encoding transcripts of telephone conversations intercepted from car phones and police walkie talkies in the west.” Pg. 149 • They’d turn them into code and send them to Berlin. • He chuckles at the fact that they encoded every last thing that was said. “They had to know everything” Pg. 150 • “Herr Christian is chatty and at ease. He has a sense of fun about what he did with the Stasi. He talks to me like a co- conspirator.” Pg. 150 • “I was never very ideological” Pg. 150 • He was 19 and doing his military service when he was summoned to a special room for an interview. He was worried that he’d done something wrong. • They ask him what he wanted to do with his life. “Box with the Club Dynamo” Pg. 150 • Dynamo was the sporting club of the armed forces, and the Stasi. They signed him up to begin work with the Stasi • “It wasn’t a problem for me. I thought it might lead to bit of an adventure…I’ve always had an acute sense of duty to obey the law and I thought it was the right thing to do.” Pg. 150 • Funder mentions that Herr Christian drives straight through the Keep Out sign. This could be to reinforce the nature of the Stasi men who were never subject to rules and didn’t have to conform, they were conformed to. • He takes her to the bunker for the leading group of Potsdam Stasi in event of a nuclear catastrophe. He guarded it for a while. • …he points to the grey fibre-cement.”’ • The bunker has everything you can imagine inside it. • “There were many bunkers in the GDR, for the Stasi to save themselves in and repopulate the earth – if they remembered to take any women with them” Pg. 151 • Funder asks Herr Christian does for a living now. • She self-consciously replies. • “I’m a, uh, private detective. Yep, I’m pretty much doing the same job as I did back then. In this, my second life.” Pg. 151 • He explains that business isn’t so great, and that he doesn’t take on marriage work. • “When I was first with the Stasi I was married, but we weren’t happy, and I fell in love with one of my son’s teachers. We began an affair.” Pg. 152 • “I confided in my best friend, but he turned out to have what you might call an overdeveloped sense of loyalty – and he told them at work” Pg. 152 • He was in solitary confinement for three days and was demoted to working on a building site for a year. “Anyone can have an affair, but everything must be reported” Pg. 152 • “The Stasi could not bear it that one of their own has something in his life that they didn’t know about.” Pg. 152 • He was scared. “I knew so much from having been in the coding centre that I thought they’d come after me” Pg. 152 • He believes doing marriage work is beneath his dignity. • He was accepted back into the fold and was put on duty as a covert security officer on Stasi buildings. • “In my day, we had this place completely under surveillance” Pg. 152 • “We always had at least two people in civilian clothes around, for observations on the ground. That was my job. I’d have a recording device in my pocket, or if I was in the car, we’d have cameras in the headlights” Pg. 153 • His job there was to hunt out cars which might have stowaway East Germans in them trying to escape. • “The sky is the same colour as the concrete; we are sandwiched in grey.” Pg. 153 • “I saw some terrible things. People would drug their children and put them in the boot.” Pg. 153 • “I opened a boot once and found a woman with her child inside. Because I was in civilian clothes they thought that I was with the smuggling organisation. I remember the joy on their faces for the instant they thought they were in freedom.” Pg. 153 • “grey air” • “I have to say that was bitter, because I am a sensitive man. But I am also a stickler for the law, and I thought that what they were doing was wrong, and I’d been brought up to think that from my earliest kindergarten days.” Pg. 153 • The mother and child were taken into remand at Potsdam. They usually got one and a half to two years. • “There were parts of it that were fun though. I think I had the only job in the world where I got to go into a warehouse each morning and decide, ‘Who will I be today?’ he laughs.” Pg. 154 • He enjoyed it the most when he got to dress up as a blind man. • “He looks around this barren place, enjoying the memory of work well done.” Pg. 154 • “…being a blind man is the best way to observe people.” Pg. 154

CHAPTER SIXTEEN – Socialist Man

• “August 1961, a fresh Stasi recruit named Hagen Koch walked the streets of Berlin with a tin of paint and a brush, and painted the line where the Wall would go.” Pg. 155 • At age 21, he was Secretary-General Honecker’s personal cartographer. • Honecker was redrawing the limits of the free world. • Hagen Koch has this “glow about him – a bright face, receding hair and soft brown eyes. Koch smiles broadly, and shakes my hand” Pg. 155 • Welcome to the Wall archive he says, waving his arms around his home. • He has several frames of once top secret Stasi maps – “mementos of the regime” Pg. 156 • “Behind his desk a large gold plate bearing the East German hammer and compass shines out from just about head height.” Pg. 156 • The room is lined with framed newspaper articles. • Hagen Koch is comfortable with the microphone on Funder’s tape recorder. • She asks him how he applied to join the Stasi. • “It didn’t work like that. You had to be chosen” Pg. 156 • “Without understanding my childhood, you can’t see why anyone would want to join the Stasi” Pg. 156 • Funder doesn’t believe this is true. “I have given a lot of thought to why people would want to join. In a society riven into ‘us’ and ‘them’, an ambitious young person might well want to be one of the group in the know, one of the unmolested.” Pg. 156 • Why wouldn’t you opt for a peaceful life and satisfying career? • “What interests me is the process of dealing with that decision now that it is all over. Can you rework you past, the grit that rubs in you, until it is shiny and smooth as a pearl?” Pg. 157 • Hagen Koch says his upbringing was very GDR. • “Everything that was GDR positive, that was me” Pg. 157 • He pulls out a brownish photo of his father in army uniform. • He pulls out a report card. “Hagen was a diligent and orderly pupil.” Pg. 157 • The box was deep. • “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” Pg. 157 • He speaks loudly and passionately. • “I am mulling over the idea of the GDR as an article of faith, belief. It was a universe in a vacuum, complete with its own self-created hells and heavens, its punishments and redemptions meted out right here on ear. Many of the punishments were simply for lack of belief, or even suspected lack of belief. Disloyalty was calibrated in the minutest of signs: the antenna turned to receive western television, the red flag not hung out on May Day, someone telling an off-colour joke about Honecker just to stay sane.” Pg. 157 • “God could see inside you to reckon whether your faith was enough to save you. The Stasi could see inside your life too, only they had a lot more sons on earth to help.” Pg. 158 • “The GDR…tried strenuously both to create Socialist German Man and to get the people to believe him…Here now in front of me is Socialist Man.” Pg. 158 • “As Koch dips into the carton once more, I wonder whether he ever wished he had been a disruptive and disorderly pupil, instead of a diligent and orderly one; whether it would have saved him from carrying his explanatory box through life” Pg. 158 • “Heinz Koch was born in…August 1992…One day when he was sixteen years old he ran home from school, distraught, with his report card in his hand…On that day my father learnt of his illegitimacy – his big sister was his mother!” Pg. 159 • “According to the German moral code of that time, illegitimacy was terrible, shameful.” Pg. 159 • He decided to join the army, hoping that a uniform would hide the stigma of his birth. In September 1929, he signed up for a twelve year term duty. • He got more than he bargained for. He found himself stationed in France as part f the Nazi occupation force and could not be discharged. • One week after the war ended, Heinz Koch was home. • On 1 September 1945, the Soviet command issued Heinz with a Permission to Ride a Bicycle. • A permit was needed because people who rode bikes could bring messages, evade checkpoints and have secret meetings. That’s why only people who weren’t ‘evil’ could have one. • “Was Koch using the available evidence – in this case a bicycle permit – to construct or confirm a story of his father’s innocence during the war?” Pg. 160 • The English, Americans and French took over the western parts of Germany, and Russians took the eastern parts. They divided Berlin up too, with the same countries for the east/west parts. • The Russians ran the eastern parts of Germany directly until the GDR was established. • “Production was nationalised, factories and property turned over to the state, health care, rent and food were subsidised.” Pg. 161 • Almost overnight the Germans in the eastern states were made, or made themselves, innocent of Nazism. • “This sleight-of-history must rank as one of the most extraordinary innocence manoeuvres of the century” Pg. 161 • “To start a new country, with new values and newly minted socialist citizens, it is necessary to begin at the beginning: with children” Pg. 162 • Socialist teachers had to be created • Heinz Koch who hadn’t finished school himself, was a fully qualified teacher. • Election after election for forty years, the results would be broadcast on television: and always, overwhelmingly, the Communists were voted in. • “People’s dreams had been honed by suffering.” Pg. 162 • Heinz Koch had won the election to become mayor. • Paul Enke immediately called a meeting in a hall for the evaluation of the vote. • There were many women, children and elderly men in the hall, with little young or middle aged men. • Enke asked the people were their men where. • They all replied similarly – that he was a prisoner of war for serving in the forces. • “Do you think it right that your men, who served three years, five years, seven years in the armed forces, are in prison, when Master Sergeant Koch on my right here, who served that fascist imperialist army for sixteen years, gets off scot- free? Not a single day’s punishment?” Pg. 163 • Heinz Koch was sentenced to seven years in a prisoner of war camp. • Koch is agitated now. • “that was just the day is worked” Pg. 164 • It is estimated that some 43, 000 people in prisons died from illness, starvation or violence after the war. • After nearly a month in custody, Enke came to visit Koch. • By using his wife’s birthday as an incentive, he told Koch that he could be reunited with his wife and out of prison if she became a member of the Socialist Unity Party. Koch accepted. • They had Koch where they could keep an eye on him and sent Hagen to the school where all the Party member’s children went. • Heinz taught all his pupils the doctrine of Communism, including his little boy. He found himself educating good socialist citizens for a regime that had tried to ruin his family and his life (contrasts to Charlie who quit teaching for this reason) • In the late 1946 the Communists founded the Pioniere, a youth organisation designed to instil in young children a love of Marx and country. For the older ones the Free German Youth was established. • Because he refused to allow his son to join one of the organisations, Heinz Koch was arrested and taken into custody. • “So, as a result…I was the first child to wear this kerchief around my neck.” Pg. 165 • “This is how Hagen Koch became… a poster boy for the new regime” Pg. 165 • Posters saying “STOP THE AMERICAN BEETLE!” were all over his school. The beetle had a human face, human teeth and an American flag jacket. PROPAGANDA • In 1948 the Russians decided they had has enough of the small island of capitalist imperialism that was West Berlin. • The West Berliners were to be starved out in the dark. • The Allies would not give up on the 2 million West Berliners and for almost a year they kept the city alive by plane. • “In that time American and British planes made some 277,728 flights through Soviet airspace to drop bundles of food, clothing, cigarettes, medicine, fuel and equipment, including components for a new power station, to the people of West Berlin.” Pg. 166 • In the east, Koch and his classmates were told the enemy planes sprayed potato beetles over East German crops as they flew over, in order to spoil the harvest. • “This is how they gave us a picture of the enemy: in a place where people get no news from outside, they have nothing else to believe.” Pg. 166 • East Germans knew America as “clearly evil” • “I am telling you how propaganda works. This is how I grew up” Pg. 167 • There was an incentive scheme for children. • “For every beetle we collected we could redeem a penny. For larva, a halfpenny. Anf for every hundred we got ten ration cards for sugar! So we children went into the fields every spare minute we had…” Pg. 167 • “In Koch’s mind, the sweet taste of reward is connected with foiling the American plot to spoil the potato crop ad starve his people. This story – of insects and sweets and the making of an enemy – is the story of the making of a patriot” Pg. 167

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN – Drawing the Line

• “So it was that I came on 5 April 1960 to the Ministry of State Security” Pg. 168 • Koch gave his maiden speech: why he wanted to protect and defend his homeland. • “By order of the workers’ and farmers’ state, I promise if necessary to lay down my life…to protect against the enemy…obediently and everywhere…” Pg. 168 • Mielke asks Koch what his training is in –“Technical draftsman” Pg. 169 • Mielke to Koch’s commandant – “I want you to look after this one. His career. This is the kind we need.” Pg. 169 • “great grey mass” Pg. 169 • He was immediately made the director of the Drafting Office for Cartographies and Topography. • He didn’t have a clue of what he was doing – “My training was as a technical draftsman for machines. I knew nothing about maps” Pg. 169 • Koch fell in love with a girl from Berlin. • She wasn’t a member of the Pionere, Free German Youth or the Party, but she wasn’t radical either. • He chose his wife for her looks, not her political opinions. • “The Stasi knew everything. Koch’s boss called him in and told him, ‘That girl is inappropriate. We have plans for you, and that little one, she is GDR negative” Pg.169 • Her parents were horrified – “he was one of them” Pg. 169 • There is reference made to the significance of the naked girl calendar on Koch’s wall. • “That calendar was printed in mid-1990. After the Wall came down. It was printed because, even at that late stage, people here could not believe that the nation would simply cease to exist. Despite all the evidence, they thought the GDR would go on as an independent country, with any army and a border guard of its own. And that border guard would need its own girly calendar.” Pg. 169 • “When the Wall was built in 1961 I thought it was something we had to do because they were robbing us blind. The GDR was compelled to protect itself from the swindlers and parasites and black marketeers of the west.” Eastern opinions and thoughts of West Germany were often negative, like this quotation proves. Pg. 170 • Prices were lower in the east, but so were wages. • People thought: why should I work in the east when I could earn more in the west? • So they went across to them each day and offered them their labour, when the East so badly needed it there to rebuild. • They’d go to the east and do their shopping there, for themselves and friends. • “…our bread, our butter, our milk, eggs, meat. Something had to be done to stop people fleeing through his mouse hole in the GDR” Pg. 170 • Later, thousands of refugees started leaving the eastern sector for good. • “By 1961, 2000 people were leaving the east each day through West Berlin.” Pg. 170 • Koch says his thinking was orthodox for the time. • “These people were shirking the hard work that had to be done here in order to rebuild a better future for themselves – they wanted to enjoy their lives right here, right now.” Pg. 170 • It was as if that were a moral failure. • “The GDR was haemorrhaging” Pg. 170 • “And it wasn’t just the ordinary workers who were leaving! It was the doctors, the engineers, the educated people.” Pg. 170 • “The GDR had paid for their education and then they allowed themselves to be seduced by the lure of the west.” Pg. 171 • Ulbricht, the head of the state, decided he needed to build an ‘anti-fascist protective measure’ • Funder: “I have always been fond of this term which has 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” Pg. 171 • August 1961, the East German army rolled out barbed wire along the streets bordering the eastern sector” • “At daylight people woke to find themselves cut off from relatives, from work, from school. Some made a dash through the wire. Others who lived in apartments overlooking the borderline started to jump from the windows into blankets held out by westerners.” Pg. 171 • They made residents brick up their own windows. • Koch was called to the garrison the day the Wall went up. • He was told his boots were too shoddy for the mission and he was ordered to buy new boots. • “He ordered me to accompany a group, including Honecker, along where they had rolled out all the barbed wire, where the Wall was starting to be” Pg. 171 • “…crowds of protesters on the western side shouting at us. I had my left leg in the east, my right leg in the west, and I drew my white line across the street.” Pg. 171 • “I thought to myself that those in west were enemies, looters and profiteers” Pg. 171 • Koch then walked with Honecker the length of the border through the city, nearly 55 km. • “…beginning of his life’s obsession…” Pg. 172 • The next day he could hardly stand – new boots. • Why didn’t he cross the line when he was drawing it along the streets? “Because I was in love! I’d been married three weeks. So of course I went back to my young wife.” Pg. 172 • “Just like my father: he went back to his wife, and I went back to mine.” Pg. 172 • Koch didn’t need to be threatened like his father: trained by his father, he had become a socialist man. • He believes he is the only person alive who can represent (in his documents, photocopies and photographs) the Wall from the eastern side. • “Perhaps this is because most people on that side want to forget it. In fact, it seems now most people on both sides want to pretend it was never there” Pg. 172 • “…like a gaudy headstone.” – Wall remnants in the present time. • Because Koch was with the Stasi, his father, aged 54 was thrown out of his job. • “I wondered what it would feel like to find out that you had been brought up by your parents as a paragon of a regime they did not believe in” Pg. 173 • “He thought: if my working here is a reason my father can’t meet with his father, I don’t want to be here anymore” He handed in his letter of resignation Pg. 173 • The same day, he was arrested and put into a cell. Criminal charges were laid for the ‘Preparation and Reproduction of Pornographic Material’ • He enjoys Funder’s surprised reaction. • Koch had made a dozen copies of a booklet to celebrate a friend’s wedding…”very far from pornography” • “The Stasi had even developed a science of connecting individual typewriters to the print they made, as if to fingerprint thought” Pg. 173 • They kept him in a cell for two nights and didn’t tell his wife where he was. • Mrs Koch experienced a “strange mixture of relief and focused terror: so that’s where he was” Pg. 173 • They asked her about their sex life. • “It might account for why your husband has taken up as a pornographer” Pg. 173 • She started to cry. • They ask her, “is there anyone who could look after your little boy for the next five years or so?” Using the most important/valued thing to make them do things against their will Pg. 174 • “Because I’m afraid, Frau Koch, that, as the instigator of a pornographic scheme, the penalties for you are severe” Pg. 174 • “I don’t understand! What do you want from us? What do you want from me? Don’t take my child from me, please!” Obviously distraught. Pleads with them. Pg. 174 • “distance yourself from you husband” • “All you need to do is sign this application for divorce” Pg. 174 • “I feel a mild physical shock” Pg. 174 • “She signed it, he says quietly, she signed it out of fear they’d take the child away” • He is disgusted again in the telling. • “It would appear you wife wants nothing more to do with you” Pg. 174 • “my world broke apart” Pg. 174 • Three days later, his Party secretary came. “you were always so punctual and reliable. So diligent and orderly” Pg. 175 • “Either you understand you have made an error in thinking by trying to resign, or you will be locked up for four and a half years so that your knowledge stays here anyway” Pg. 175 • “you’ve really only got one chance left: you have to take back your resignation, and, as proof that you have understood the error in thinking you’ve made, you will renew your pledge to life-long service” Pg. 175 • The two dot points above prove the extent the Stasi go to, for them to always end up being right. Even some Stasi were victims of the state. • Funder asks if he believed his wife would leave him. • “I had it in writing!” He repeats this three times. Pg. 175 • “This is a man who believes in documents.” Pg. 175 • “You’ve got rid of this wife, this negative influence…” Pg. 175 • “Who thought up these black-mail schemes?” Pg. 175 • “‘Approved’: the ruining of a marriage, the destruction of a career, the imprisonment of a wife, the abandonment of a child?” Pg. 175 • “Five new and different ways to break a heart” Pg. 175 • It clearly upset him to be telling me. • They were divorced. • “I try to think myself into his place” Pg. 176 • The story came out and a year after his imprisonment and six months after their divorce, Mr and Mrs Koch remarried.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN – The Plate

• In 1985 Heinz Koch died. • Because Hagen Koch’s aunty was granted permission from the west to come to his funeral, Hagen was forbidden to attend. • “This was more than he could take” Pg. 177 • He applied to leave his regiment. • “He would have liked this to be a small defiance, a little signal of ‘up yours’ at a time when no harm could come to his father, and he didn’t have much to lose” Pg. 177 • They were going to let him leave, “and it made him feel empty” Pg. 177 • “It made him angry to think he would leave no mark here, and it made him angrier still that, even if he had his time again, he suspected he wouldn’t have had the guts” Pg. 178 • The Plate was an award for cultural work by his unit, third place. • “Koch closed his office door, got up on his chair and slid the plate from its hooks” Pg. 178 • “He walked out of his office, said goodbye to the assistant and didn’t come back” Pg. 178 • “My little private revenge. That plate was all I had the courage for” Pg. 178 • Three weeks later, the head of Koch’s old Stasi section and told him the plate is gone. • Koch acts surprised. • “What do you know? As soon as I’m gone, the whole place falls apart. As long as I sat in that chair, that plate hung on the wall” Pg. 178 • “At the Ministry for State Security nothing just disappears!” Pg. 178 • He hid the plate in his kitchen and was summoned back to the headquarters for interviewing and to give his statement. • A short time later the district attorney came by to ask for the plate. • They asked for a sworn affidavit from Koch and nothing further happened. • 1989 came, the Wall fell, and Koch started to build his archive. • “He retrieved the plate from behind the sink pipe and pinned it up to his study. Now it was a real trophy” Pg. 179 • In 1993 a television crew came to interview him. “Germany was reunited and East Germany was a place in the past” Pg. 179 • They asked him the usual questions: “Do you regret working with the Stasi? What is your connection to the Wall? Is that was made you establish this ‘Wall archive’?” Pg. 179 • “Stasi man keeps Wall alive at home…” Pg. 179 • “He thought how easy for an interviewer to assume moral superiority by virtue of the fact that he gets to ask the questions” Pg. 179 • They asked for the plate to be removed because of it reflecting in the lens. • Koch stood up. “He tells it to me as a moment of glory.” No, he said. • “I don’t care what you want from me. I will do whatever you ask – I will turn everything in this apartment upside down, I will sing the national anthem If you want. But that…plate…stays…there” Pg. 179 • “Here was a man who had worked for the Firm for 25 years and who now had the gall to try to make a living talking about it; a shameless moral gymnast re-performing his capitulations for the camera. And he was drawing the line at a plate?” Pg. 180 • Koch sits down and begins to explain the whole story about the plate. The program is made and broadcast. • Several days later, people have come from Treuhand (a body set up after the regime collapsed to oversee the fire sale of East German state-owned enterprises to the private sector) for the plate. • “This was unified Germany, westernised and democratic Germany, and still someone wanted the plate.” Pg. 180 • “…all property belonging to the latter is vested in the former. That plate was rightfully the property of the GDR and is now property of the Federal Republic of Germany.” Pg. 180 • He tells them to get out. • Provided he returns it immediately, they were willing not to press charges on how the plate came into his possession. • Koch was incensed. “Get out of my apartment. If you want the plate, go get a court order for it. Without an order, you’re not coming in. No-one takes the plate” Pg. 180 • Criminal proceedings were issued against him. • “The indictment charged him with theft of GDR property. Still Koch did nothing” Pg. 180 • Not long afterwards the same men returned. “Excuse us, Herr Koch. I am pleased to inform you that the allegation of theft has been withdrawn.” Pg. 181 • They believed the act was trivial, as the plate was worth only 16 eastern marks. Secondly, the allegations concerned an act which took place 8 years ago and therefore barred. • New proceedings had been issued against him – for perjury. • His sworn affidavit to the Ministry of State Security for the former GDR about not knowing the whereabouts of the plate was a crime. • “I am laughing by now” Pg. 181 • “Can’t you people make up your minds? Do you want to see me punished because I worked for the Firm, or do you want to see me punished because I worked against the Firm?” Pg. 181 • “He’s laughing too now. This is his moment. The man who drew the line, and who sat on the fence, pulls some righteousness from the post-Wall rubble” Pg. 181 • The trial didn’t proceed but it caused quite a bit of damage. • His wife lost her job because of them. • “The rumours were pretty bad, and they took on a life of their own – you know, Koch is a thief, a liar, a perjurer” Pg. 181 • “You know though, it was worth it. All the courage I had is in that plate. The whole shitty little skerrick of it. That’s all I had. That plate stays there” Pg. 182 • Anna calls Miriam again. • “Just thought I’d call to say hello. I’d love to catch up. I’ve been having some odd adventures in your old country! Curiouser and curiouser – I’ve a lot to tell you. Anyway, I’ll call you, or you can reach me. See you” Pg. 182 • Herr Koch gave her Stasi diagrams and photographs of the ‘border installation’ at Bornholmer Strasse. “Top Secret! He cried gleefully” Pg. 182 • Funder walks from her apartment to “where Miriam climbed over” She doesn’t refer to the bridge from its actual name, she relates it back to Miriam Pg. 182 • “I also have the sketch she drew; the place she was caught is marked with a gash of blue ink. 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” Pg. 182 • “It’s muggy today. Everyone has been burning their heaters without pause for weeks and the clouds are low and tinted with coal dust. I take breaths of this orange sky as I walk” Pg. 182 • The first thing she reaches in the garden colony. • At the end of page 182 are detailed descriptions of the garden. • She climbs a fence. “I wonder whether it was the same on Miriam climbed” Pg. 183 • “To my left is the bridge where she thought the guards were watching her, and where, twenty years later, ten thousand people thronged on a single night to get through to the west” Pg. 183 • “I want to see where the second fence, the sand strip, the tank traps, the guard towers, the light-pylons, the dog run and the trip-wires were. They are all gone” Pg. 183 • “I put my fingers through the wire, and hang onto the fence for a while” Pg. 183

CHAPTER NINETEEN – Klaus

• Chapter begins with Funder calling Klaus up. • “I think I’ve woken him up. It’s one o’clock in the afternoon” Pg. 184 • “I need to get out of the house” Pg. 184 • “What I need, in fact, is becoming a habit…I need to feel good, temporarily, about plates and walls, old men and rules, bakeries and rug-work and corridor after corridor of rooms sealed with secret purpose.” Pg. 184 • “I need to see a survivor” Pg. 184 • They’re on to their third beer and its only 6pm. • “squinty, smiley eyes” Pg. 184 • He has the hands of a dedicated smoker. • He is grumpy and friendly at the same time. • She wants to hear Klaus’ story – “He grumbles at fist – what self-respecting icon needs to say how they got that way?” Pg. 185 • Funder describes the state of his house in detail on page 185 • “This room is Klaus’ life. It’s the inside of his head” Pg. 185 • The early photographs show Klaus Jentzsch, before he took his mother’s maiden name as his stage name: a clean-cut young man in 1958 wearing a suit and pencil tie. Does Funder describe his earlier stage where he was more presentable to compare where he is now to emphasise the effect the regime had on him. • The photo’s track his development • “Klaus Renft is the bad boy of East German rock’n’roll. • The Klaus Renft Combo became the wildest and most popular rock band in the GDR. • Often, records including Pink Floyd, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, were banned outright so Klaus and his friends listened illegally to western radio and recorded to songs. • “His laugh is deep and innocent; he is a man with the gift of pleasure. His smile heats the room” Pg. 186 • Over time, they played more songs of their own. Their lyrics suggested rebellion, poignancy, hope, soul, frailty and pain. • “In the ersatz world of the Lipsi, Renft was something authentic and unauthorised.” Pg. 186 • There was only one recording company and the lyrics to their lyrics to every one of their songs were changed before they could be recorded. • “They wanted to scratch the GDR at its marrow” Pg. 186 • “I’m trying think what it would mean to have all you experience of rock music brought to you live, but second-hand” Pg. 186 • “…as soon as Klaus puts the music on, I’m a believer” Pg. 186 • “Klaus sits down again and puffs happily” Pg. 187 • The band was prohibited from playing in towns, so they played to enormous crowds which came out to villages. • “You know for us the GDR wasn’t just Stasi, Stasi, Stasi…I mean we really lived and it was fun” Pg. 187 • “This society, it was built on lies – lie after lie after lie.” Pg. 187 • “…singing the truth guaranteed them both hero and criminal status” Pg. 187 • “…they were way too explosive for the regime” Pg. 187 • “he was offered a passport, hard currency and a smooth ride through life – here or in the west – if he would separate from the two of the most politically outspoken band members” Pg. 187-188 • He refused – “I knew then, that was a death sentence for us” Pg. 188 • “It must have taken guts to turn that down” Pg. 188 • With reference to prisons: “people there were treated worse than animals” Pg. 188 • He has the file the Stasi kept on him. “He has the documents from his file he can see the sequence of events from the other side” Pg. 188 • He has a note from Honecker to Mielke. • “Dear Erich, Please attend to the case of Jentzsch, Klaus as speedily as possible. Regards, Erich” Pg. 188 • From one Erich to another. • Mielke asks why they weren’t liquidated but they “were too famous to handle so directly” Pg. 188 • “Klaus is the only person I know who gets such distinct pleasure from the story-telling in their life” Pg. 188 • They both laugh at the silly notes the Stasi has under Klaus’ file. • “While they were setting up to play for the committee he turned the cassette recorder on and hid it…” Pg. 189 • Reason: “…the lyrics have absolutely nothing to do with our socialist reality…the working class is insulted and the state and defence organisations are defamed” Pg. 189 • They are told “that you don’t exist anymore” Pg. 189 • “We didn’t say you were banned. We said you don’t exist” Pg. 189 • Klaus managed to pass the tape to his girlfriend. • Klaus had made a recording of the decree of the licensing committee and that “if anything happened to them it would be broadcast” Pg. 190 • Renft records disappeared from the shops overnight. • Renft regrouped as Karussell and went on to record Renft songs ‘note for note’. • “They copied us” Pg. 190 • “Someone else might have found this a betrayal, reason to dwell on this part of their life” Pg. 191 • “But he has a gift for taking things easy…He seems incapable of regret, and anger evaporates off him like sweat” Pg. 191 • “we’d become a cult band in the GDR – our records were more expensive than a Pink Floyd album” Pg. 191 • The Stasi File Authority began to investigate the possible use of radiation against dissidents. • “What it uncovered shocked a people used to bad new” Pg. 191 • The Stasi had used radiation to mark people and objects it wanted to track. • They had personal Geiger counters that could be strapped to the body • “reckless disregard for people’s health” Pg. 192 • The Klaus Renft Combo began to tour again and the crowds were “hungry for something that was theirs” Pg. 192 • In reference to Klaus’ courage to turn down the offer earlier mentioned to him: “I don’t know where it was courage. More like some kind of naivety, that protected me.” Pg. 192 • Funder: “naivety that is carefully nurtured and maintained, and innocence that he did not let them damage” Pg. 192 • He didn’t get villas and become extremely rich (like he could have if he took up the offer), “but I can look at myself in the mirror in the morning and say ‘Klaus, you did all right” Pg. 192 • Klaus believes “the Stasi people have been punished enough…if they’ve got any conscious at all” Pg. 192 • Funder begins to think of Herr Winz, Herr Christian and Herr Koch and the different kinds of conscience there are. • “I didn’t let them get to me” Pg. 193 • “This, I think, is his victory” Pg. 193 • “This is what stops him being bound to the past and carrying it around like a wound” Pg. 193 • Some lyrics from a song Pannach wrote shortly before he died: “And do you want to know what’s left of that man’s dreams? Then ask the walls of Cell 307 in Hohenschonhausen.” Pg. 193 • “You can’t let it eat you up, you know, make you bitter. You’ve got to laugh where you can” Pg. 193 • In the end, Funder mentions that she “doesn’t feel much” Pg. 194

CHAPTER TWENTY – Herr Bock of Golm

• The phone calls keep coming • Herr Bock is calling. “Before I can explain what I’m doing he says...” A.P. again, before readers are properly introduced to Bock, he comes off as very authoritarian, like most of the Stasi officers. Pg. 195 • “I can tell you all there is to know about the Ministry of State Security. Everything you need…I can give you, because I was a professor at the training academy of the ministry.” Pg. 195 • He taught spezialdizsiplin – the science of recruiting informers. “Spezialdizsiplin is the art of the handler” Pg. 195 • He tells her to meet him at his house. “It’s directly opposite the academy of Golm.” Pg. 195 • Funder has a 1986 map of Potsdam in which areas where there were Stasi buildings…are left blank. • Stasi areas are not represented. • “I look up Golm, and find that it is a gap on the map” Pg. 196 • It seems to be there only street that exists there. • “The houses are covered in rough grey concrete, knobbly all over as if from cold. None of them…look inhabited” Pg. 196 • Herr Bock’s living room is overwhelmingly beige and brown. • “His voice is so soft I have to lean in to hear him” Pg. 195 • “You must not use my name” Pg. 195 • He says that the ministry was divided into two main sections: internal (defence) and external (counter-espionage). • He taught a course for Stasi officers destined to work in Defence. • “This title is euphemistic. The internal service of the Stasi was designed to spy on and control the citizens of the GDR.” Pg. 196 • “The only way to make sense of its name is to understand the Stasi defending the government against the people” Pg. 196 • Herr Bock outlines each department of the Defence including: Economy, State Apparatus, Church, Sport, Culture, and Counter-terrorism. • “In every corner of the nation, every aspect of your life had its mirror nemesis in a department” Pg. 197 • They infiltrated churches – “We went into the theological colleges and recruited the students themselves!” They were supremely effective Pg. 197 • 65% of the church leaders were informers for the regime and the rest of them were under surveillance. • “In one of the most beautiful ironies I have ever seen, he dutifully noted that, by having swelled the ranks of the opposition, the Stasi was giving the people heart to keep demonstrating against them” Pg. 198 • It’s getting dark at Bock’s house. • There were four main working methods: Exposing moles, recruitment of Informers, Operational Control of Persons (Surveillance) and Security Checks. • Herr Bock’s passion is for recruitment. • “We had to decide where in society, on objective principles, there was a need for an informer” Pg. 198 • “Most often, people we approached would inform for us. It was very rare that they would not.” Pg. 198 • Just in case, they knew where the informers weak points were e.g. if they wanted a pastor, they’d find out if he had an affair or a drinking problem – “things we could use as leverage” Pg. 198 • “They were controlled using …all the means and methods allowable…to control them” Pg. 199 • “It got pretty tough for some people” Pg. 199 • The allowable means and methods include: telephone tapping, mobilisation of informers, shadow surveillance by observational forces, use of investigative forces (bugs in living quarters of subject) and post and parcel interception. • Funder asks if they used smell sampling – “that was for criminals” Pg. 199 • “Well who were the people you were doing the operation control on?” Pg. 199 • “They were enemies” Pg. 199 • “Once an investigation was started into someone that meant there was suspicion of enemy activity.” Pg. 199 • “This was perfect dictator-logic: we investigate you, therefore you are an enemy” Pg. 199 • “…as time went on there was more and more work to do because the definition of ‘enemy’ became wider and wider” Pg. 199 • Professors at the academy spent their careers expanding the reach of the paragraphs of the law so as to be able to encompass more enemies in them. In fact, their promotions depended on it. • “And I don’t mind telling you that some of us actually thought the paragraphs became a little too wide” Pg. 200 • Informers needed to be able to adapt to new situation, to be a stable character and to remember that they were reporting to the regime. • “He needed to be honest, faithful and trustworthy. I mean only to the ministry, of course. We weren’t interested if he betrayed anyone else…” Pg. 200 • “This ability is not a great quality in a human being. But it was vital for our work.” Pg. 200 • Herr Bock believes this was the case in all secret services. • Funder’s rebuttal: “But it is not. Few secret services have informers reporting meticulously on activities at kindergartens and dinner parties and sporting events across the nation.” Pg. 200 • Funder asks what the informers gained for doing their job. • “It was pitiful actually. They were hardly paid at all.” Pg. 200 • Funder: “So why did they do it?” Pg. 201 • “Well, some of them were convinced of the cause. But I think it was mainly because informers got the feelings that, doing it, they were somebody…They felt they had it over people” Pg. 201 • “One can more easily understand a desire for cases stuffed with money and drugs, for women and weapons and blood” Pg. 201 • “These obedient grey men doing it with their underpaid informers on a weekly basis seem at once more stupid and more sinister. Betrayal clearly has its own reward: the small deep human satisfaction of having one up on someone else.” Pg. 201 • Every meeting with an informer was done in a covert place. Herr Bock is proud that one covert place was upstairs in his house. • He is now working as a business adviser. Pg. 201 • “I work for West Germans firms who come here to buy up East German assets. I mediate between them and the East Germans, because the westerners don’t speak their language.” Pg. 201 • Funder A.P. “Terrific. Here he is once more getting the trust of his people and selling them cheap” mockery, ridicule, critical, attack. • “We never thought, no-one ever thought, that it would all come to an end.” Pg. 202 • “…at the end of 1989 we used to joke around. We’d say, ‘Last one here turns the lights out’ because, at the need there’d be no-one left in the GDR” Pg. 202 • Funder packs her things and leaves. While waiting at the bus stop, she explains that it’s extremely dark and if she waits there for 10 more minutes (there’s 45 for her bus to arrive) for the cold to be through her bones. • She goes back to Herr Bock’s house to call a taxi and wait. • “It is dim inside. He had turned off the lamp to watch television, and now he switches that off too.” Pg. 202 • “I don’t know anything about taxis. I don’t think they come here.” Pg. 202 • “He is enjoying himself; here in the dark…you are not afraid of the dark are you?” Pg. 203 • She is tired and hungry and the language isn’t coming easily anymore. • She is buying time to avoid peering at him. • “I resent his enjoyment in having me at his mercy” Pg. 203 • Funder is frightened and uncomfortable. • She is thinking of ways out in case the taxi sees no lights and turns back around. • The taxi comes. Herr Bock seems disappointed as to how quick it came.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE – Frau Paul

• Funder states that the main reason she is meeting with Sigrid Paul is because “the guide at the Stasi HQ was so adamant I needed to speak with her that I just called and made a time” Pg. 204 • The GDR imported North Vietnamese ‘socialist brothers’ as workers, and treated them badly. They lived in camps and we bussed to work in factories each day as to avoid contact with the locals. • Frau Paul is described as “a large woman in her early sixties” Pg. 205 • “Everything here is…’spic and span’, and so is Sigrid Paul.” Pg. 205 • “…mournful Magdalene…She is already holding a pressed handkerchief” – as if she is getting ready to wipe away her tears. Pg. 205 • “…a woman holding on to notes on her own life.” Pg. 205 • It’s titled “The Wall went straight through my heart” Pg. 205 • It is true that she loses her thread and sometimes repeats herself, but she tells her story well. • January 1961 Frau Paul (who used to go by her married name Ruhrdanz), a dental technician, gave birth to her first child. • The labour was difficult – a breech birth. • There was a delay in attending to her and they performed an emergency caesarean. • Torsten Ruhrdanz spat blood and couldn’t feed at all. • He was keeping very little nourishment down and was still spitting blood when he was sent home. • She took him to a hospital in the eastern part of the city and they couldn’t find what was wrong with him. • “This made me very nervous. For my husband and me he was the child of our dreams” Pg. 206 • They took him to the western sector hospital and were given a diagnosis within 24 hours. • The fact that Funder contrasts between the two sectors emphasises her preference to the west (they got the job done) and also establishes the fact that the west had more to offer. • Torsten had suffered a ruptured diaphragm during delivery. His stomach and oesophagus were damaged; there was inflammation and internal bleeding. • The condition was life threating, so they operated immediately. • He became well enough to be taken home, with strict instructions for his feeding and medication. • Frau Paul and her husband Hartmut were to collect special formula and medicines regularly from the Westend hospital. • Although there was no wall, the sector border was controlled, and they needed permission to bring over the medicine. • “Torsten made slow but undeniable progress” Pg. 206 • With his medicine and formula, he was likely to develop normally. • “She starts to cry, so silently it is more like leaking” Pg. 206 • Frau Paul lived deep in the eastern sector. • They woke up to a changed world. • The next time she went to the ministry for permission to collect formula and medicines, it was refused. • She pleaded with the official and explained how sick her baby was and how without these provisions he might die. • “If your son is as sick as all that, it would be better if he did” So cold. No sympathy. Pg. 207 • “Frau Paul’s tears have stopped now…her face is hot with anger” Pg. 207 • Torsten was switched back to normal formula and began spitting blood again. • They took him to an eastern hospital (the Charite) and the doctors kept him under observation and sent Frau Paul home. • “The next morning…he wasn’t there” Pg. 207 • When they realised they couldn’t help him, the eastern doctors managed to have the baby spirited across the new border, back to the Westend hospital. • Frau Paul says this saved his life and that she holds nothing against the doctors at the Charite. • “Her baby was now on the other side of the Wall” Pg. 207 • She got a day pass to be at his emergency christening. • Her husband was denied access, in case they tried to stay in the west together. • “She is weeping again, as if she is overflowing” Pg. 207 • “…the image of Torsten’s small sick body flooded into her mind” Pg. 208 • His condition wasn’t improving. • He was operated on four times and had an artificial oesophagus, diaphragm and pylorus inserted. He had to be artificially fed. • His parents were told he might die. • Frau Paul puts it, in the language of the authorities, “My husband and I decided to attempt illegally to leave the territory of the GDR…I am not a criminal” Pg. 208 • She believed the RIAS (western radio) saved her in the end. • Her husband was a boat builder. • Small communities of interest were forming in Eastern Germany; “people united by nothing more than tenuous acquaintance and a desire to get out” Pg. 208 • Dr Hinze and his wife wanted to join their son Michael in the west. • Michael Hinze was studying sociology at the Free University when the Wall went up, and decided to stay. • Michael and some of his friends were involved in a scheme to get people out. • He is softly spoken and humble. “He doesn’t speak of what he did as f it were risking his own freedom to free others” Pg. 208 • “He doesn’t even sound like a modest man uncomfortable with suggestions of heroism.” Pg. 208 • Where the Wall was built, the GDR tried to block every avenue of escape. It altered bus routes, prevented its trains from stopping at stations in the western sector, set up road blocks along the border and stepped up patrols in the waters of the Baltic Sea. • A person with a West German passport and transit visa could board a train in East Berlin and ride out of there. • Eight or ten students who were doing this. The scheme was clever and simple. • “People were more than willing to help others get out of there” Pg. 209 • They put western toothpaste and cigarettes into their luggage, and cut off tags on their clothes that read ‘People’s own Manufacture’ to seem western and to fit in with their passport. • “The East Germans, with a case no bigger than for a holiday, prepared to leave for their new lives.” Pg. 210 • Michael’s father and step mother were safely in West Berlin. • Dr Hinze told Frau Paul his son would help them get out. • “She seems to have, in fact, very little distance from what happened to her. Things remain close, and hard” Pg. 210 • Frau Paul and her husband gave away their car and discreetly sold some of their belongings. • “It was a terrible, uncertain time” Pg. 211 • “We learned the appropriate story by heart: who we were – name, date of birth, where we were going on our holiday and so on.” Pg. 211 • On the appointed day the five people attempting to escape when to the railway station. • The student would phone Copenhagen to make sure the group before them had arrived safely. Then he would give the signal to go ahead. • There came a sign from a student that meant they shouldn’t get on the train. If they did, they would be arrested. They went straight home. • The group before them were all arrested and jailed. • The western student with them was arrested and served a two year sentence in an eastern prison. • The Stasi had become suspicious and overnight instituted a new stamp as part of the transit visa. This stamp, unknown to the little group, was necessary. • They took the passports home and burnt them. • “Then we just hoped that our son would get better…We thought: we’ve tried it once and it didn’t work. We’ll not try that again” Pg. 212 • She is adamant that she and her husband Hartmut, then and there, gave up trying to get out. • A year after the passport attempt, the three students asked if they might come come to stay for a few nights in Berlin. • They said yes. • She claims she didn’t know at the time or couldn’t have suspected. • She trusted the students and gave them keys to her home. • Frau Paul and Hartmut were nervous Coch says. He says it was a tense atmosphere. • “The students were back to try again” Pg. 212

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO – The Deal

• The students waited at Frau Paul’s apartment for word to come from a courier. • This attempt was being organised by western students who’d tell the easterners where the tunnel was and when and how they could enter. • The instructions were to go to a particular street near the Rosa Luxemburg Theatre. • Hartmut Ruhrdanz and Coch went to check it out the afternoon before hand. • Hartmut was around 100 metres behind Coch on their way to 45 Brunnenstrasse • “…in less than one generation this scar will be invisible.” Pg. 214 • Funder states that the street is close to where she lives so she decides to take a look at the place. • “I don’t think either of us thought we’d find a tunnel.” Pg. 215 • “…I thought of the 29 people who left their country from here, and of Werner Coch and the others” Pg. 215 • The code words to enter the tunnel where “”Does Herr Lindemann live here?” Pg. 215 • When no one replied to the code words, Coch thinks “something’s not right here. Please God, just let me get out in one piece” Pg. 216 • “And that’s when they got me – Stasi in civilian clothes” Pg. 216 • They took him away, first to the police station, then into custody at the Stasi HQ in Berlin, and finally to prison at Hohenschonhausen. • Hartmut watched the whole thing from the other side and then went home terrified. • They would stay in the East, wait until their baby was well enough to come home, and hoped he would survive. • “Memory, like so much else, is unreliable. Not only for what it hides and what it alters, but also for what it reveals” Pg. 216 • “Frau Paul must have known why the three students had come to stay…If she does not admit to having known, it is because for this knowledge she was made a criminal in the GDR, and because, saddest of all, she still feels like one” Pg. 216 • Frau Paul shows Anna the Stasi report on the tunnel. • From that time on, Frau Paul and her husband were followed around. • “someone close behind me” Pg. 217 • “A man would come with me from my door onto the bus and train and then home again.” Pg. 217 • “a simmering, non-specific anxiety” Pg. 218 • “Like most things, until it happens to you, you don’t think it will” Pg. 218 • “I was kidnapped right off the street” Pg. 218 • Her interrogation was at Magdalenenstrasse, part of Normannenstrasse at Stasi HQ • “…it lasted twenty-two hours” Pg. 218 • “things that happened to Frau Paul are so extreme to her way of thinking and to her sense of what life should be like, that she wants to make sure she doesn’t, on any account, exaggerate” Pg. 218 • At the interrogation, they wanted to get information about the students who stayed with Frau Paul. • “I could hardly speak anymore. I was finished” Pg. 218 • “they liked to do it when one was sleep deprived” Pg. 218 • The interrogator offered her a deal. • When they offered Frau Paul the ability to see her son, Funder “imagine the huge hope in her then, swelling her heart as she sat on that stool” Pg. 219 • They wanted Frau Paul to arrange a meeting with Michael Hinze. • “One good turn deserves another” Pg. 219 • “Her tone is a mixture of horror and triumph” Pg. 219 • “they were going to use me as bait in a trap to kidnap Michael Hinze” Pg. 220 • “Frau Paul – then Ruhrdanz – is a very brave woman” Pg. 220 • “…her soul bought with a visit to her critically ill son” Pg. 220 • Frau Paul describes her feelings as an “absolute no” with regards to helping kidnap Hinze. • “I had to decide against my son, but I couldn’t let myself be used in this way” Pg. 220 • “I can sleep at night with what I have done” Pg. 220 • She draws in breath in a spasm of pain, “decide against my son” Pg. 221 • “Her decision took a whole new fund of courage to live with.” Pg. 221 • “lonely, teary guilt wracked wreck” Pg. 221

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE – HOHENSCHONHAUSEN

• Frau Paul and her husband were held at Hohenschonhausen prison for 5 months, and then transported to Rostock on the Baltic Sea for trial so the case didn’t get publicity. • They were offered the services of a lawyer but “they mistrusted the arrangement and turned it down” Pg. 222 • Ruhrdanz, Sigrid, is accused of inducing or, at the least aiding and abetting citizens of the German Democratic Republic to illegally leave the GDR. • “Frau Paul reads this to me, and maintains, at each point, her innocence” Pg. 223 • The judges wrote that her attitude of rejection towards out State had been exacerbated through the fact that the accused has been a constant listener to the NATO smear-radio. • “I would not let myself be misused as bait in their trap” Pg. 223 • Frau Paul was given four years of hard labour. • “Werner Coch got one year and nine months in ordinary prison, because the penalties for being an accessory to the attempt to flee the country were greater than the crime of trying to flee itself” Sarcastic, mocking, ridiculing, attacking, criticising. Pg. 223 • “Hohenschonhausen was a prison for political prisoners” Pg. 223 • “ordinary grey residential street…cluster of grey and white multi-storey buildings” Pg. 224 • Hohenschonhausen had been closed for several years and people are now fighting to preserve it as a museum of the regime. • “towering grey steel entry gates” Pg. 224 • “I hate this place, but I’m still here” Pg. 224 • “It had a tiny corridor and six internal cells each with a lockable door. These were not big enough to stand upright in, and contained only a cross board to sit on” Pg. 224 • Frau Paul gets Anna to go inside the cell and closes it, “It’ll give you a feel for what it was like” Pg. 225 • “Everything was pitch black and horrible” Pg. 225 • “A huge studded metal door slid sideways to reveal a long linoleum corridor” Pg. 225 • “I don’t imagine this easy for her” Pg. 225 • “Here she is in the place that broke her, and she is telling me about it. It is part bravery...and part, perhaps, obsession, caused by what they did to her” Here, Funder compares her own experience in not being able to even drive by places with bad memories, to Frau Paul who it walking around in this place talking about it. Pg. 226 • U-boat: “purpose built by the Russians in 1946 as a series of torture chambers” Pg. 226 • “This U-boat smelt of damp and old urine and vomit and earth: the smell of misery” Pg. 226 • There were many compartments including: “a compartment so small a person could only stand. It was designed to be filled with icy water up to the neck. There were 68 of these.” Pg. 226 • “Then there were concrete cells with nothing in them where prisoners would be kept in the dark amid their own excrement” Pg. 226 • With reference to the rubber cell: “She remembers hearing the prisoner inside the rubber cell gradually lose his mind…she was ordered in to mop up his vomit and blood” Pg. 226 • The strangest cell: wooden yoke arrangement. “Frau Paul explained that the prisoner would be barefoot, yoked into position. The ridges would bite into the soles of his feet. Then water dripped from a pipe hanging through the ceiling, onto his head.” Pg. 227 • “Eventually, the prisoner would be in such pain that he would lose consciousness, and his head would slump. It would hit the water in the bucket in front of them, and he would either revive into pain again, or drown” Pg. 227 • Michael Hinze “had no idea that Frau Paul was in any way connected with his continuing freedom” Pg. 228 • “How could he have imagined that someone else was being asked to pay a price for his liberty?” Pg. 228 • “She’s a very courageous woman” Pg. 228 • He has “a great deal of respect for her. I am also grateful to her” Pg. 229 • He says he doesn’t feel guilty and doesn’t think he needs to. • “Frau Paul does not picture herself as a dissident. She is a dental technician and a mother with a terrible family history. And she is a criminal. This seems to me the sorriest thing; that the picture she has to herself is the one that the Stasi made for her” Pg. 229 • “…There are not many people who have the courage she did…She behaved with such great humanity” Pg. 229 • Torsten: “When he came home to East Germany he was nearly five, small and bent and very polite” Pg. 230 • “she’s crying now, hard” Pg. 230 • “They made our boy a stranger to us” Pg. 231 • “She is weeping and weeping” Pg. 231 • “I’m upset too” Pg. 231 • “The idea of nurses and doctors in West Berlin trying to tell a little boy what a family was…The idea that in justifying her decision of more than thirty years ago to me here today, there is no peace for Frau Paul” Pg. 231 • Torsten enters the house and “he does not seem to be surprised to see his mother has been crying” Pg. 231 • “I have never looked at my parents and thought they made the wrong decision, or looked at them like the Stasi did, as criminals” Pg. 231 • “I admire them for what they did” Pg. 232 • “Despite his family history, the Stasi went after Torsten to see if he would inform for them” Pg. 232 • “There are no people who are whole…the main thing is how one deals with them” Pg. 233 • “I’m happy that it’s gone, and I’m happy too that there’s so little of it left to see. It would remind me that it could come back. That everything that’s happened might be reversed” Pg. 233 • “The Wall persists in Stasi men’s minds as something they hope might one day come again, and in their victims’ minds too, as a terrifying possibility” Pg. 234

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR – Herr Bohnsack

• Herr Bohnsack is Anna’s last Stasi interview • “He looks me straight in the eye and smiles a warm smile” Pg. 235 • There are little pubs “where everyone knows everyone…I felt I had walked into someone’s living room uninvited” Pg. 235 • Herr Bohnsack requests to sit in the room inside, where they can talk in private. • Gunter Bohnsack • “He is not a man with anything to prove” Pg. 236 • “The only Stasi man I have ever met who outed himself.” Pg. 236 • “A lieutenant colonel, he worked in one of the most secret divisions of the overseas spy service…the HVA” Pg. 236 • Herr Bohnsack was in Division X, responsible for disinformation and psychological warfare against the west. • The HVA was the overseas espionage service of the Stasi. • “they wore suits instead of uniforms, were highly educated and enjoyed a privileged existence” Pg. 236 • “we could travel and we were quite different” Pg. 236 • He trained as a journalist and worked for twenty six years in disinformation • “It collected sensitive or secret information from agents in the west and leaked it to cause harm; it manufactured documents and spliced together recordings of conversations that never took place in order to damage persons in the public sphere…spread rumours” Pg. 237 • Division X worked simply as an attempt to turn the wheels of history. • “He leans back and smiles, like an uncle with a secret” Pg. 237 • “But the worst Mielke ones weren’t jokes, they were true” Pg. 238 • He was invited to the party the Stasi threw for themselves to celebrate the forty years of the GDR. • “two thousand people at the part” Pg. 238 • “For four hours he spoke on and on” Pg. 238 • “The most important thing you have is power! Hang on to power at all costs! Without it, you are nothing!” Pg. 238 • With reference to Mielke: “he must…have felt the end coming” Pg. 238 • “When Mielke finally finished there was a banquet…Mielke would quickly pick up the microphone to say ‘a few more idiotic words’” Pg. 238 • “The whole occasion was insane” Pg. 238 • His entire division was ordered to stay home so as not to provoke the demonstrators. • At 3am they would receive a call ordering them to drive to Normannenstrasse, parking some way away so the demonstrators wouldn’t know the buildings were occupied. • They lay down on their desks and slept. • “They were pretending World War Three had broken out” Pg. 239 • “simulating a war condition” Pg. 239 • “we’d play war” Pg. 239 • “And we knew the GDR was lost, so it was a circus” Pg. 239 • “Herr Bohnsack’s greatest fear…would be ordered to shoot the demonstrators outside their building” Pg. 239 • Mielke became more direct. “He told them that they – he meant the people – were the enemy. He said, ‘It’s them or us” Pg. 239 • “most terrifying thing” Pg. 239 • “And we knew, just like under Hitler, that if we refused we’d be taken off and shot ourselves” Pg. 239 • There was another fear too, “If we lose they’ll string us all up” Pg. 240 • “If someone points you out, five minutes later you’ll be swinging” Pg. 240 • Not being able to seize control and Mielke already having stood down “is what saved us. Us and the people” Pg. 240 • “Totally privately and personally, without any permission and without any command. I destroyed everything, all day long. There was so much paper to burn the oven nearly collapsed” Pg. 240 • “A cloud of black smoke hung over him in the sky. Herr Bohnsack stood for three days, feeding the files into the fire” Pg. 240 • “smiles gently at me” Pg. 240 • With reference to drinking: “You are utterly without need?” Pg. 241 • “I was always a regular… Before 1989 I was always just Gunter…People didn’t know what I did” Pg. 241 • The first time her visited the pub after the Wall fell, someone slowly turned around and pointed at him saying “Stasi out! Everyone shut up and turned to have a look at me” Pg. 242 • He couldn’t move. • “I can’t stand here before you all and undo it, take it all back” Does he feel regret? If so, he seems to be the only one that does Pg. 242 • “What could I do?” Pg. 242 • “It took nearly three years until no one was aggressive any more” Pg. 242 • “I would out myself before I was outed” Pg. 242 • He arranged to tell everything to the famous West German news magazine. • “When I got the edition in my hand I felt sick. There was a photo and everything” Pg. 242 • “It have to say it was a bit strange for me here, he pats his heart” Pg. 242 • “Omerta, a code of honour that rules them” Pg. 242 • “…the old Stasi leaders have now found a new enemy: the media” Pg. 243 • “…he got death threats over the phone” Pg. 243 • He has no friends • Funder gets a call at 3am. Its home. She finds out her young mother had four tumours in her head, “secondaries from cancer we all hoped was gone” Pg. 243 • “I’m not even hoping that I’ll get a live voice on the line” She calls Miriam before she leaves. Pg. 244 • She tries again the next morning and the phone doesn’t even ring. • “After she died, grief came down on me like a cage” Pg. 244 • She mentions that it took her eighteen months before she could focus on anything outside an immediate area of sadness. • Three years later she returns to Berlin.

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE – Berlin, Spring 2000

• “Berlin is green, a perfumed city…I have never been here in full spring” The chapter begins with positive connotations rather than negative “grey” spectrum! Does Funder’s perspective change? Pg. 245 • “the chest-nuts are magical” Pg. 245 • Anna writes a letter to Miriam • “I tried to write your story, but found I needed to explain other things around it, so the work took a course of its own. I wrote about the GDR and about the Stasi…” Pg. 246 • “I was trying, I think, to get a perspective on this lost world, and the kinds of courage in it” Pg. 246 • “No reply came, but the letter didn’t return to me either” Pg. 246 • Anna emails Julia. • “I am in San Francisco…I was just living with too many things from my past that could come find me there” Pg. 246 • “doing great” Pg. 246 • “Reclaim the Night march recently, something that made me feel real positive, and far away from Thüringen and everything that happened there. They honour their victims here” Pg. 246 • “am much more at home than in my own country” Pg. 247 • “It’s very early but light already, an exquisite day” Pg. 247 • “…bottom lies the pond, which I knew before as a black and dead thing” Pg. 247 • With reference to Heine and his poem: “Heine…would be turning in his grave to see the sort of enslaving and forcing and fighting that has gone on here…” Pg. 247 • With reference to the drunks in the neighbourhood, who she would refer to in a negative tone earlier: “There are polite greetings and handshakes all round” Pg. 248 • “Some kind of madness, some kind of madness, some kind of generosity” Pg. 248 • “get into the days drinking” Pg. 249 • “Or perhaps reality has been so strange here that anything else is welcome to take its place” Pg. 249 • The man offers her to come mushrooming with them. • “when it comes to mushrooms, in that field I am a professor” Pg. 250 • “I’m glad to be here. It strikes me as absurd to have never spoken with these men before who have been, after all, my neighbours” Pg. 250 • “This Kapitalismus, you can’t imagine the sort of shit it’s building.” Pg. 251 • “It was so much better before” Pg. 251 • “bring back the Communists” Pg. 251 • “but I think it has coloured a cheap and nasty world golden; a world where there was nothing to buy, nowhere to go and anyone who wanted to do anything with their lives other than serve the Party risked persecution, or worse” Pg. 251 • “an ache for a lost time when things were more secure. In a security state, after all, the least the authorities could do when they were incarcerating so many innocents was to clean up the criminals at the same time” Pg. 252 • “Before we had that, the Wessis flocked over here and bought up all our stuff! We put up the Wall so we could go shopping in our own shops!” Pg. 252 • “I mean they should have all sat here on their arses – then then wouldn’t have got them shot full of lead!” Pg. 252 • “If you didn’t buck the system, then it wouldn’t harm you” Pg. 252 • “But from what I have seen, it probably would” Pg. 252 CHAPTER TWENTY SIX – The Wall

• Chapter begins with a more positive outlook of Germany, in contrast to how she began the book with negative connotations, “grey” connotations. • She is confronted by a drunken man in front of her apartment. • “I don’t want to be German anymore! His face is tracked with silver tears” Pg. 253 • “We are terrible. They are terrible. The Germans are terrible” Pg. 254 • “Are they really so bad? Or are they worse than he thought?” Pg. 254 • A friend of Anna’s who works at the File Authority calls her. • Mielke requested to see his file. • “Mielke must think the apparatus he created was so thorough, with an administrative impetus of all its own, that somewhere, someone was keeping tabs on him” Pg. 254 • Anna calls Frau Paul. • “She is active in an organisation for those persecuted by the regime – taking tours of Hohenschonhausen prison …and campaigning for compensation for victims.” Pg. 254 • Frau Paul claims to be followed the other night from a public meeting on compensation. • “There are a lot of people who don’t want us to raise out voices, to fight for what we deserve” Pg. 255 • Mielke dies, age 91. • “Most hated man now dead” Pg. 255 • Anna calls Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler – “he tells me he’s not well, and that things are getting worse. By ‘things’, he means the world around him” Pg. 255 • “People are still spreading lies about my dear friend Erich Mielke and he’s under the ground!” Pg. 255 • He claims he was “desecrated” right under the noses of the police guarding it. • “hoarse, old and angry” Pg. 255 • “unlikely to be the work of the westerners…it is only the product of capitalism in that capitalism does not protect, or not adequately to his mind, the former leadership of the former GDR from what their people thought of them” Pg. 255 • There is a new museum: “full size reconstructed section of the Wall…for tourists” Pg. 256 • “a sanitised Disney version; it is history, airbrushed for effect” Pg. 256 • She bumps into Hagen Koch at the museum. • “For him the past is the Wall, and I am part of the present” Pg. 256 • He’s “taking a busload of tourists tomorrow along the route where the Wall was…” Pg. 256 • They drive “along the municipal boundary where the Wall was built” Pg. 257 • “tour of the forgotten city” Pg. 257 • “Apparently, the border guards working on the death strip preferred no evidence of death in it” Pg. 257 • “The Wall is the thing that defined him, and he will not let it go” Pg. 257 • “Frau Paul…will also not let it go” Pg. 257 • “Will they let it go? Or, will it let them go?” Pg. 257 • “It is hardly a thing of joy, but Herr Koch’s face is shiny with delight” Pg. 258 • He finds a homeless man inhabits the tower so no one knocks it down. • “Herr Koch is a lone crusader against forgetting” Pg. 259 CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN – Puzzlers

• “I thought of Uwe and Scheller and our puzzle women conversation so long ago” Pg. 262 • The Stasi File Authority office where the puzzle women are housed is in Zirndorf, a village outside Nuremberg. • Director – Herr Raillard. • “I have been thinking about this place for so long as the focus of Miriam’s hopes.” Pg. 263 • “I want them to find out what happened to Charlie Weber” Pg. 263 • He tells her that this work started in 1995, after the sacks of material sat around in berlin for five years. • “Fifteen thousand sacks were found at Normannenstrasse in January 1990” Pg. 263 • She is keen to meet the puzzle people. • He tells her that there is some controversy because the victims want the work here to go more quickly. • “They just want to know what happened in their lives” Pg. 264 • She panics when there are pieces of paper on the tables with the window open. • “there is nothing to stop them flying around the room and out of the window” Pg. 264 • “It’s painstaking work. The most pieces in one page so far has been 98” Pg. 265 • “That Stasi man would have hardly been able to move his finger the next day” Pg. 265 • “Everyone who works here, including the cleaning staff, is checked to make sure they have had no involvement with the Stasi in the past” Pg. 265 • It is somewhere between a hobby farm for jigsaw enthusiasts and a sheltered workshop for obsessives. • She asks them how they go about their work each day. • The sacks are over a metre tall and as paunchy as a person. • “Sometimes, the satisfaction is in knowing that when people find out what happened to them it might give them some peace of mind…it gives those affected an insight into their own lives” Pg. 266 • One of the workers “is most shocked by how the Stasi used people’s own distress against them.” Pg. 267 • “When they were in prison, for instance, offering them out on condition that they spy for the Stasi” Pg. 267 • Anna thinks of Koch’s father, Frau Paul and Julia. • “It is about a system that so manipulated people that it drove them to do these things. It shows how people can be used against one another” Pg. 267 • The woman working there believes “there were advantages over there” She is a single mother and remembers how the rent was lower and kindergartens for the children Pg. 267 • “The kindergartens were there because they wanted to get to the children early to bring them up loyal to the state” Pg. 268 • “They wanted to put everything into their own narrow scheme, but life simply didn’t fit into it” Pg. 268 • “I think we need to remember that they came here for the freedom” Pg. 268 • Herr Raillard hands Anna a copy of a memo he wrote. • “this means that to reconstruct everything it would take 40 workers 375 years” Pg. 269 • Funder claims she is speechless. • “the resources united Germany is throwing at this part of reconstructing the lives of its former East German citizens are pitiful” Pg. 269 • “almost totally symbolic act” Pg. 269 CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT – Miriam and Charlie

• The train back to Berlin passes through Leipzig and Anna gets off. • Near the exit there’s a display of photographs of the demonstrations ten years ago. • “New facades of buildings in sun-yellow and dusty pink, some even gilded, have been revealed from behind scaffolding” Pg. 270 • “Federally funded effort to put the history of the separation of Germany behind glass” Pg. 270 • “I am the only visitor” Pg. 271 • “I am annoyed that this past can look so tawdry and so safe, as if destined from the outset to end up behind glass, securely roped off and under press-button control” Pg. 271 • “Isn’t a museum a place for things that are over?” Pg. 271 • Funder pays a visit to the Runden Ecke • “…here, in this building where people were held and interrogated, and where upstairs, their stolen biographies were filed away…For me, this is where it all began” Pg. 272 • “Sixteen was when she got on a train from here to Berlin and climbed the Wall” Pg. 273 • She calls Miriam who comes to get her. • “I’ve moved house since you were last here” Pg. 273 • “Once more, her apartment is on the top floor” Pg. 274 • “It is as if she always expected us to see one another again, almost like friends. What are a few missed calls between friends?” Pg. 274 • Funder explains what she’s been doing for the past three years (regarding her book: talking to Stasi men, other victims, puzzle people). • “I find I can’t say, ‘three hundred and seventy-five years” Pg. 274 • Miriam now works at a public radio station. • “Recently, she was asked to make a program on Ostalgie parties” Pg. 275 • “Things like this feed into a crazy nostalgia for the GDR – as if it has been harmless welfare state that looked after people’s needs” Pg. 275 • She works with ex-Stasi workers. • “He can’t look at me” Pg. 275 • “You know what your problem is? Your problem is you don’t identify with the culture of the station.” Pg. 275 • “Miriam rolls her eyes at the ridiculousness of the former Stasi man recycling Stasi threats” Pg. 275 • “I understand perfectly the impulse not to file him away under plastic in an album” Pg. 276 • Suddenly, it becomes clear to Anna why the new museum was so irritating. “Things have been put behind glass, but they are not yet over” Pg. 276 • “I thought of it last time you were here…I don’t think I’d looked through that stuff since Charlie died” Pg. 276 • “It was hard for me to dig up” Pg. 277 • “I reacted extremely when I got out of there. I just couldn’t plan ahead. I couldn’t say to someone, ‘I’ll meet you on Sunday’ – I found that sort of things an unbearable obligation” Pg. 277 • She is really pleased to see Anna • “She got my messages and my letter and, from impulse I now understand, did not tie herself down with a response” Pg. 278 • After they wrote their applications to leave, “things got pretty awful”. Pg. 278 • They were harassed on the street and followed around by car “to make life unpleasant for us” Pg. 278 • Dimitroffstrasse was the police building, “but Charlie came to know that Room 111 meant an appointment with the Stasi” Pg. 278 • “The district attorney’s office here just want to cover up everything that happened then” Pg. 278 • The DA has found a witness to what happened in the cells the day Charlie died: another prisoner. • According to the persons account: “there was a commotion in Charlie’s cell early in the morning. Something happened and the guard called others who came running” Pg. 279 • Miriam has lost faith in this investigation • She is hoping the puzzle people with aid her quest. • Charlie would refuse to cooperate. • They probably roughed him up and he hit his head against the wall. • “frail comfort of theories” Pg. 280 • “this terrible game of waiting keeps her suspended from her life with Charlie, still in contact” Pg. 280 • “the need to know, is the need for justice” Pg. 280 • “The regime may be gone, but the world cannot be set to rights until Miriam has some kind of justice” Pg. 280 • Miriam asks Anna to stay and insists of giving her her bed. • Miriam takes Anna to the station. • “I like the freedom of being suspended between two places” Pg. 281

CHARLIE’S POEM:

In this land That this land howled back at me

I have made myself sick with silence As hideously

In this land As it builds its houses

I have wondered, lost In this land

In this land I have been sown

I hunkered down to see Only my head sticks

What will become of me Defiant, out of the earth

In this land But one day it too will be mown

I held myself tight Make me, finally

So as not to scream Of this land

But I did scream, so loud

• “children spin on wings and roundabout I never noticed were there” Pg. 282