Stasiland
Anna Funder
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Character Analysis: Miriam Weber
Miriam is seemingly the most important person Funder interviews, as evidenced by the placement of their two meetings bookending the text. Her story, which involves her attempted escape, capture and interrogation, release and then the possible killing of her husband has a huge emotional effect upon Anna. She is perhaps the person who still hurts from the wounds the Stasi has given her – her prison time, the loss of her husband. She constantly downplays the extent of her trauma as a method of self-protection, such as telling Anna “prison has left [her] with some funny tics... it’s not that she has anxiety about small spaces... it’s just that she starts to sweat and grow cold,” when they are precisely symptoms of anxiety. Her character arc also expresses the theme of the human perception of time in response to trauma, as she is thoroughly stuck in the past; “for Miriam, the past stopped when Charlie died”.
When the story returns to Miriam in the final chapter, we expect, as we have been conditioned to by narratives, an answer to the mystery of Charlie’s death and closure for Miriam. Yet, as this is real life, this does not happen. “The regime may be gone, but the world cannot be set to rights until Miriam has some kind of justice.” This heart-breaking and unsatisfying conclusion is a metaphor for the fact that history is a living thing, not a chapter in a book that can be closed shut and tied up neatly at will. When a cruel, brutal era of history ends, Funder implies, the suffering does not disappear with it.
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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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