Stasiland
Anna Funder
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Character Analysis: Julia Behrend
Julia, Funder’s landlord, is significant for the strong parallels Funder sees between the two of them; they are the same age, and of similar appearance and disposition. Funder empathises so strongly with Julia partly because she serves as a reminder for Funder’s own luck in her country of birth. She is perhaps the most ‘ordinary’ East German we meet in the text as she committed hardly even the most trivial infractions, rather it would seem that she was at the receiving end of their ire mostly by chance. When she was a teenager, she began a relationship with a much older man from Italy, which although not technically illegal meant she fell under suspicion from the authorities. She was prevented from gaining employment anywhere and eventually was asked to become an informant. She refused, and in a small act of triumph against the regime, gets the Stasi men off her case by threatening to report their behaviour to Honecker. Julia also later tells Anna that she was a victim of a rape, something which has shaken her trust in the outside world and men in particular. This, when coupled with her persecution by the Stasi, has left her drifting through life, unable to commit to people or things.
Funder writes Julia’s new apartment as a metaphor for her relationship with her past, and in extension, with Germany’s own relationship with its stained history. The apartment is a “barricaded tower, full of things she can’t leave, but can’t look at either,” a protective barrier keeping her from connecting with the outside world, and with other people, and from the hurt that often accompanies these interactions. For Julia, her past is too painful to examine closely but too central to her identity to let go and instead she makes small returns into the familiar through her unorthodox visits to her old apartment.
However, unlike Miriam, Julia is able to find some measure of closure as she escapes the rigidity of German society to move to the more liberal and open San Francisco, where she confronts her past by attending anti-rape rallies.
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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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