The Stasi is an “internal army” (5)
Hagen Koch, General Honecker’s personal cartographer: when he sketched the outline of the Berlin Wall in 1961, he was “redrawing the limits of the free world”.
Puzzle women : if the documents were laid “upright and end to end” they would “form a line 180 kilometres long.”
As Mielke comments, “hang on to power at all costs. Without it you are nothing.” Herr Bohnsack is forced to recognise that “it’s them (the people) or us”. (238-9)
Funder compares the “leap of faith” one must make to that of Catholicism; “The Stasi could see inside your life too, only they had a lot more sons on earth to help.”
Interrogation cells: Funder returns with Frau Paul to the site of torture. Funder notes, “it was in offices that the Stasi truly came into their own: as innovators, story-makers, and Faustian bargain-hunters. That room was where a deal was offered and refused, and a soul buckled out of shape, forever.” (226)
Although Funder states that there are places she anxiously avoids, she is in awe of Frau Paul’s brave and resilient stance in revisiting the place that “broke her”
Funder comments: “Sleep deprivation can mimic the symptoms of starvation, particularly in children – victims become disorientated and cold. They lose their sense of time, becoming locked in an interminable present. Sleep deprivation also causes a number of neurological dysfunctions, which become more extreme the longer it continues.” (25)
the past is “never really, over”
Julia states that her “soul buckled out of shape, forever”. Likewise, Miriam claims: “when I out of prison I was no longer human”.
Julia relates, “the typical thing that could happen to you in my day in the GDR – that your career was broken before it was begun- that had already happened to me! (108). Julia states, from the time “we woke up… they were aware of what “could be said outside the home (very little) and what could be discussed in it (most things)” (95)
Informers: it is simply the power of “having one up on someone”;
Whilst there is officially “no unemployment in the GDR”, those who resist the powerful masters often have their careers “broken before they had begun”. For Julia, it is not just her career. She suspects that her life has been “broken” at every turn: “the boarding school, the headmaster’s visit, the constant street searches, the failed exam, the friend’s warning, the cruising Lada, the extraordinary unemployment.” (108)
the informers are trained in the art of convincing someone to do things “against their own self interest” (202). The Stasi operators were skilled at finding personal weaknesses, things they could “use as leverage” (198).
The Behrends “weren’t dissidents; we weren’t in church groups or environmental groups or anything life that… We were an ordinary family.” (95) Frau Paul was “not your classic resistance fighter”. She did not even belong to a political opposition. (200)
According to the Stasi’s “dictator logic” or mentality, “we investigate you, therefore you are an enemy” (199).
As a 16 year old school girl, Miriam and Ursula instinctively knew that there was something unjust about Stasi police “dousing people with fire hoses”, “roughing people up” and bringing in the horses during the demonstration sparked by the demolition of the OId University Church in Leipzig in 1968.
Charlie: He is possibly one of the victims of Southern General Cemetary, for whom the cremator leaves the oven open “so that the Stasi could do their business” (74.) she presumes more likely he was being uncooperative and was “roughed up in the cell, leading to a fatal fall” (279).
Miriam committed a “crime of sedition”
- Frau Paul: Her pain is that she decides “against my son”.
- “Shell-like” internal migration: Julia states, from the time “we woke up… they were aware of what “could be said outside the home (very little) and what could be discussed in it (most things)” (95) Julia describes her father, Dieter, as one who is defeated by this constant intrusion. He is depressed and needs constant medication. “Living for so long in a relation of unspoken hostility but outward compliance to the state had broken him” (96) Julia is like a “hermit crab”, ready to “whisk back into its shell at the slightest sign of contact” (90)
- Julia has no “private sphere left at all” (113) During interrogation: She recalls, “it was the loss of everything until I had disappeared too.” (115)
Many of the “enemies” or victims display symptoms of phobia and anxiety. Julia also feels suffocated. After she is raped, she reacts “extremely” to men and the constant “invasion of my intimate sphere” (113) This situation is ironically exacerbated after the fall of the security state because criminals were hastily released during the amnesties of 1990.
Julia cannot open the box of letters from her boyfriend. The past is “never really, over” she states as there are always things she can’t look at, but “can’t leave either”. (117)
Miriam is reluctant to “tie herself down” (p. 278)
Klaus, the musician: He concludes, “I didn’t let them get to me”. Perhaps he was naïve, but in a way, Funder suggests it is a form of “naivety” that was “nurtured and maintained” as a form of protection. (192) It revealed an “innocence that he did not let them damage”. (192)
- Michael Hinze describes Frau Paul as an incredibly brave woman because she refused to reveal his identity; she also refused to be “bought” like so many of the GDR citizens. She knows that if she betrayed him she would be “theirs forever; a stool pigeon and a tame little rat”(220) and so clings to a shred of dignity owing to her private rebellion.
- Against orders, Julia told her family about Room 118 (114). “We had never really known where the battle was … but we knew we’d won”. It was one of the rare occasions when the “bluff” had been called and she had won, despite herself. Eventually, Julia gains a job as a receptionist at a hotel. (117)
Herr Koch the plate symbolises his defiance and his small triumph affords him a “moment of glory”. The fact that the Stasi set up a “Working Group on Plate Re-Procurement” highlights the lengths the Stasi party employ to subjugate and crush individuals. Although trivial (the plate is only worth 16 eastern marks); it is a powerful symbol of state control. (180)
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