Stasiland
Anna Funder
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Character Analysis: Frau Paul
Frau Paul is the last woman interviewed as a main feature by Funder and it is interesting to note that all the women she talks to were civilians in the GDR, as it was almost impossible for woman to progress up the ranks of the Stasi. Like Julia and Miriam, Funder paints Frau Paul in a highly sympathetic light, although unlike the others she does not seem to find Frau Paul completely reliable in her retelling. Frau Paul denies helping the students who stayed in her apartment in their attempt to escape across the border, although the accounts of Michael Hinze and Werner Coch contradict that, commending her bravery. She does come across as one of the most quietly courageous and morally sound people in the text, yet she constantly seeks to downplay this, as reflected in her anguish over her decision to not betray Hinze when tempted with a visit with her son.
Despite Frau Paul’s bravery, she constantly bears the trauma of her distressing choice, and “she is, for her principles, a lonely, teary, guilt-wracked wreck.” Frau Paul’s position serves to represent how the Stasi engineered a society that was supposed to be built upon Socialist principles of equality and security, yet prevented most of its citizens from succeeding. Here, Frau Paul could choose between her love of her son or moral integrity and she could not win. She still bears the mental scars of the Stasi’s psychological torture and is left crippled with regret and self-hatred, as Funder muses “this seems to me the sorriest thing; that the picture she has of herself is one that the Stasi made for her.”
Frau Paul’s efforts to preserve the memory of those detained at the Hohenschönhausen through her work signify that the original spirit which led her to defy the Stasi is still present in some form.
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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.
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