Stasiland
Anna Funder
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Character Analysis: Karl-Eduard Von Schnitzler
Before he is introduced, Funder describes Karl-Eduard Von Schnitzler as a “one-man institution and the most hated face of the regime.” He was a television propagandist for the GDR, a man who aimed to quash all beliefs in the superiority of the West, a man who through words could turn “inhumanity into humanity deaths into symbols of salvations.” Funder visits him at his apartment and finds that although the GDR may be gone, Von Schnitzler has not relinquished any of his ideology. He is controlling, argumentative, and self-important, yet is well-versed in the manipulation of his audience through his words; as in “this is a tantrum engineered to frighten me.” Unlike some of the other ex-Stasi men, Funder paints an unflattering portrait of Von Schnitzler intended to illicit only disgust from the reader. She describes him as a bully, noting that she “recognise[s] this pattern of unpredictable shouting followed by bouts of quiet reason from other bullies [she has] known.”
Von Schnitzler, like Herr Winz, is a man still utterly, self-righteously convinced of the rightness of his own actions, and we can observe the word games and logical leaps he has to take to convince himself of this. Now, he is left unchanged and bitter and ranting, one of the most hated names and faces in the new Germany, where people do have the power to speak up against him.
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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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