Stasiland: Stories From Behind
The Berlin Wall
by
Anna Funder
In
1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, I was only six years old. I remember
very little about it happening — bits of news stories, our teacher
mentioning it in class — and the next year, I knew a girl who had a
piece of the Wall because her father had been stationed in Germany
with the Air Force. In history classes over the years, we only ever
made it as far as Watergate, so I didn't know a great deal about the
rise and fall of Communist Germany going into Stasiland.
What made me pick up the book was my friend, Karo.
Not
to speak on her behalf, but Karo is a longtime friend of mine who
was seven and living in East Germany when the Wall came down. She
doesn't recall a lot about those days, and understandably, it's a
difficult subject for her family members. Because I find that
existence an interesting thing about her — being the age that I am
and having always lived in America, one doesn't usually have too many
German friends — I wanted to better understand it. Anna Funder's
Stasiland
makes for a good introduction.
The
book is not exactly a history book, as it is just as much about
Funder's process of interviewing people, and her living in Germany for a
time. Though she grew up in Australia, she wanted to learn German
because she found it to be a beautiful and strange language — "I
liked the sticklebrick nature of it, building long supple words by
putting short ones together." In 1994, while visiting the Stasi
museum in Leipzig (a building which used to be the Ministry of State
Security), Funder speaks with the museum director, Frau Hollitzer.
Later,
Frau Hollitzer told me about Miriam, a young woman whose husband had
died in a Stasi remand cell nearby. It was rumoured the Stasi
orchestrated the funeral, to the point of substituting an empty
coffin for a full one, and cremating the body to destroy any evidence
of the cause of death. I imagined paid-off pallbearers pretending to
struggle under the weight of an empty coffin, or perhaps genuinely
struggling beneath a coffin filled with eighty kilos of old
newspapers and stones. I imagined not knowing whether your husband
hanged himself, or whether someone you now pass on the street killed
him. I thought I would like to speak to Miriam, before my imaginings
set like false memories.
I
went home to Australia, but now I am back in Berlin. I could not get
Miriam's story, the strange secondhand tale of a woman I had never
met, out of my head. I found a part-time job in television and set
about looking for some of the stories from this land gone wrong.
While
she begins her research by interviewng people
who suffered at the hands (silent or otherwise) of the Stasi, it
occurs to her to ask questions of former Stasi officers themselves.
She contacts them through, of all things, a newspaper ad. The results
are mixed, as far as the intentions of these former officers go, but
all of them leave her feeling unsettled. The men are all eager to
show off the various ways they were "right" in doing
whatever they did.
"What
is it you do now, Herr Bock?"
"I
am a business adviser."
I
don't say anything.
"You
look surprised," he says. "You are wondering what I could
possibly know about business."
"Yes,
I am."
"I
work for West German 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. The easterners are wary
because of their fancy clothes, their Mercedes Benzes, and so on."
Terrific.
Here he is once more getting the trust of his people and selling them
cheap. Stasi men are by and large less affected by the unemployment
that has consumed East Germany since the Wall came down. Many of them
have found work in insurance, telemarketing and real estate. None of
these businesses existed in the GDR. But the Stasi were, in effect,
trained for them, schooled in the art of convincing people to do
things against their own self interest.
Stasi who tried to leave the service received no special treatment,
sometimes even after Germany began the reunification process. Several
chapters are dedicated to Herr Koch, a man whose father also worked
for the Stasi. It is a lengthy, complex, and at times absurd
story — funny in that way that distance and time allow. There's too
much to properly summarize here, but it's definitely one of the most
interesting portions of the book.
Also
complex, yet even more heartbreaking, is the story of Frau Paul,
separated by the wall from her infant son, Torsten. Because of
medical problems immediately after his birth, Torsten was sent to
West Berlin, where the hospital there could better treat him. She and
her husband were denied passage to see him, and when they planned to
sneak across the border, they were imprisoned.
"This
is where I was brought," she said [of Hohenschönhausen].
"I had no idea where I was. For all I knew, I could have been
taken from Rostock to any place in the GDR. I certainly didn't know I
was right in the heart of Berlin." The paddy wagon and the truck
bay were designed so that the prisoners could be let out one at a
time, and never see each other, or day light, or a street, or the
entrance to the building.
[…]
It
is not the first time Frau Paul has been back, but I don't imagine
this is easy for her. I know there are places that I don't visit,
some even that I prefer not to drive past, where bad things have
happened. But here she is in the place that broke her, and she is
telling me about it.
Frau
Paul and her husband are not reunited with their son until he is
nearly five years old.
The
urge to forget, to not "drive past" the reminders of the
GDR remains an understandable yet frustrating fact of life in the
area. This is very, very recent history, yet little of the
physical wall remains, and the blank spots are barely noted as having
once been anything but what they presently are. At the time Funder
was gathering information for Stasiland,
less than a decade had passed, and the book was originally released
in 2002. (Why it took until 2011 to be released in the US, I don't
know.)
Some,
like Frau Paul are involved in museum-like preservation projects of
certain buildings, so that it is not as easy to forget what happened.
With the people who were directly involved, Funder notes how many
"different kinds of conscience there are." While some want
to erase the memories, others swing the opposite direction and
fervently obsess over the details. What went wrong when?
Funder
does not claim to offer a full history or even necessarily a balanced
one, apart from interviewing people who came from different sides.
The subtitle of Stasiland
— "Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall" — is an
important distinction. These are individual
stories. To encompass everyone, I imagine, would be impossible.
The
book is also a bit like memoir in that Funder is a character in her
own work. Her experience as an outsider trying to understand is the
reader's way in as well. I won't pretend to know the accuracy in her
observations, nor can I personally attest to the stories she hears.
When dealing with a period of time where information was a commodity,
one does have to wonder, especially with the Stasi men, what (if any)
underlying motivations are at play. I don't know. I can only take
them at their word.
I
do think, however, that Stasiland
is a valuable documentation of East Germany and its lasting effects.
We, as humans, are often not very good at learning from our own
history, but I'm not one of those who thinks it's hopeless to try.
The more opportunity we have to learn from, and therefore not repeat, the
more deplorable things we have done, the better. Though Stasiland's
purpose is not a grand manifesto, it is an introduction. It is there
to bear witness. By bearing witness, we begin.
Full
Disclosure: Harper Perennial sent me this book. I thank them for the
gesture and I will continue to be fair with my reviews.
ETA: Karo herself tried to comment on this post, but Blogger kept eating the comment, so I'll just add her thoughts myself here:
"Wonderful review, I really have to read that book now. I had no idea Funder was Australian... I does make a lot of sense to see the whole thing through the eyes of many different people. Things changed so unbelievably fast - one day people were protesting, the next they were on their way to the West for the first time, and a few months later we were all West Germans. It must have been incredibly scary for most people to have their country erased from history at such a speed, no matter how horrible a system it was. It does feel like all that remains are stories. Literature took its time, but I would say it plays a major, if not the biggest, part in coming to terms with GDR history now. There's so much catching up to do for me, and how strange that it will be mainly through literature, while my own family was a part of it all. Lots of food for thought. I'll keep you posted x"
