Stasiland
Anna Funder
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Character Analysis: Hagen Koch
Hagen Koch is described by Funder as the “Socialist Man” due to his childhood immersion in the GDR’s efforts to indoctrinate children to blindly and obediently follow Socialism. He emphasises the importance of his childhood where “the GDR was like a religion” in shaping his actions as a member of the Stasi in later years in the retelling of his story to Funder, suggesting that he feels some level of personal guilt about his function in the GDR. Koch is also significant due to his ties with the symbolism of the Wall; he was the man who literally mapped out the division between west and east as Honecker’s personal cartographer, and now he perhaps seeks in part atonement for the damage he has helped caused – “the Wall is the thing that defined him, and he will not let it go.”
When Funder meets him, he has stuffed his little apartment full of Wall memorabilia to create a personal museum and clings on to the past, running tour guides for visitors. However, he is not simply overwhelmed by guilt, as he is rather self-important and performative in nature, “happy to have an audience to rehearse his tour of the forgotten city.” Still, Funder classifies him as different from the Westerners who attempt to capitalise on the Wall by selling trinkets or erected museums where they shut its memory away in the realm of far gone history. He is described as “a lone crusader against forgetting.”
Koch’s stolen plate serves as a symbol for both small, seemingly insignificant acts of courage and for the ridiculousness of German bureaucracy, as first, the Stasi set up a taskforce to recover an almost worthless item, signifying their deep-rooted need to possess every scrap of worthless information, and then the new Germany attempts to prosecute him for the theft occurring years earlier.
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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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