Stasiland
Anna Funder
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Character Analysis: Klaus Renft
Klaus is Anna’s personal friend and their relationship, which is centred upon drinking together, seems to be used by both of them as a balm against loneliness. Klaus is a minor celebrity who once fronted the biggest rock’n’roll band in the GDR: Klaus Renft Combo, which was eventually made to “disappear” by the authorities for promoting anti-GDR messages. Although the GDR took away his fame, his music (although, ironically, the band became a cult classic) and his band members, Klaus is remarkably calm about his losses, although it is implied that he could perhaps be overly dependent upon alcohol and other vices. As Funder words he “seems incapable of regret, and anger evaporates off him like sweat.” Klaus’s resilience and courage allowed him to make a small gesture of resistance like Koch’s plate – the secret recording and distribution of the recording of the licensing hearing where the band were told that they were to “disappear”, and now, he says, “I can look at myself in the mirror in the morning and say “Klaus, you did alright... ” I didn’t let them get to me.” He symbolises the theme of emotional resistance against oppression, as Funder deems, in reference to Klaus, that “if there was ‘internal emigration’ in the GDR, there was also, perhaps, internal victory.”
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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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