Stasiland
Anna Funder
Free Sample Essay Download
Please enter your details below to get your free sample essay delivered straight to your inbox.
Character Analysis: Anna Funder
Anna is in a way, the protagonist of the story. Funder mixes a memoir structure with a more factual non-fiction style of writing to both engage readers more personally with the story and communicate meaning, as it is her opinions and observations on what is told to her by the other characters that creates some of the most thematically rich material in the text.
She allows herself to connect with those she is interviewing on an emotional level, such as with Julia, whose musings on her Italian boyfriend prompt Anna to think of her own ex-partners. Although she is careful not to let herself intrude inappropriately into the lives of those she interviews and into the writing itself (indeed, we do not get many details about what she does outside of her investigating), small moments such as this humanise her, allowing us to make an emotional connection with her as a character and thus making the story she is telling us more poignant.
Her presence as an Australian newcomer to Germany (“sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to be German”) also serves to heighten the relatability of the often shocking and almost unbelievable nature of life in East Germany for her readers, who would come from a predominantly Western, English-speaking context. We mirror her journey from a curious unfamiliarity with the GDR, to shock at the horrors it perpetrated, such as in her initial interview with Miriam, where she “can’t stay focused on the awfulness of it all,” to a more jaded understanding of mankind’s capacity for systemic cruelty, as seen in Funder’s acknowledgement that, supposedly, “if you didn’t buck the system, then it wouldn’t harm you. But from what I’ve seen, it probably would.”
Download a free Sample Essay
Stasiland
Sample Essay
Published in 2002, Stasiland is a piece of literary non-fiction examining the lives of Germans living in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) under its state security service, the infamous Stasi. Stasiland is particularly interesting because of the ways it subverts many of the conventions of the non-fiction genre, with Australian author Anna Funder inserting herself into the text, so that we experience the stories of those she interviews and share her emotions of shock, disbelief, and sadness alongside her.
In brief, Stasiland follows Funder through three separate journeys to Germany taking place after reunification as she interviews a wide variety of those who lived in the former GDR. This cast of characters includes Miriam, a woman who suspects that her husband was murdered by the Stasi and whose story perhaps affects Funder the most. They meet twice, once at the very beginning and again at the very end, providing narrative resolution. Among others, Funder meets ex-Stasi men, a GDR rock star, and ordinary citizens who simply longed to escape. Mostly, the narrative is episodic, consisting of twenty-eight chapters with each chapter telling a different person’s story, although some more significant tales are given two or three chapters, and some chapters are dedicated to Funder telling a more personal story.
The majority of the narrative is linear, although Funder does sometimes jump back in time to flesh out the story with a memory of her own (e.g. her own brief visit to East Germany in the 80s). She also recalls the visit to the Stasi offices in Leipzig in 1994 which is where her interest in East Germany and its citizens really began. The bulk of the narrative concerns her 1996 and 2000 visits to Germany, the former ending with her return to Australia after news of her mother’s brain cancer. Although Funder doesn’t allow her own presence in the text to dominate the stories she recounts, the personal nature of the narration does let her predominantly non-German, English speaking audience connect with her experiences in the strange foreign world of Stasiland.
Get this free Sample Essay delivered straight to your email, instantly.
Free Sample Essay Download
Please enter your details below to get your free sample essay delivered straight to your inbox.