An overview of key ideas : Stasiland Year 12

Stasiland by Anna Funder

In Stasiland, Anna Funder recounts the horrors faced by the East German citizens under the control of the German Stasi. In order to understand the extent of the personal damage and despair suffered by people on a daily basis, Funder interviews a range of East German citizens, including ordinary people, unwilling informers and the Stasi operators obsessed with power and control.  The use of the first-hand narrative enables her to capture the effects of the excessive surveillance employed by the Stasi as well as other psychological tactics that enabled them to skilfully prey on people’s vulnerabilities. As she personally sits in the torture rack, develops relationships with her interviewees, and organises “secret” meetings with former Stasi operators, Funder invites readers into their world to share their despair and triumph.

Power of the state

When Hagen Koch, General Honecker’s personal cartographer, sketched the outline of the Berlin Wall in 1961, he was “redrawing the limits of the free world”.  Eventually as Funder shows, each and every one, whether victim or perpetrator, were in the end defined by the physical and psychological restraints of the wall (234/256).  In other words, the Berlin Wall becomes a physical and symbolic representation of power.

The purpose of the wall was to divide the communist east from the free west. After World War two, the Potsdam agreement relegated the administration of Germany to the United States, France, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union. After two years, it gradually disintegrated as the Soviets took action to separate the East from the West. The Berlin Wall, erected in 1961, controlled by vicious guards and equally vicious dogs, reminded East German citizens of the brutality of the Stasi regime and the price of communism.

Reminiscent of George Orwell’s fictional “Big Brother”,  Funder explores the pervasive nature of state control and the effect of ubiquitous surveillance on the lives of ordinary citizens.  In fact, the power of the state is so intrusive, and surveillance mechanisms so widespread, that the files the Stasi kept on their countrymen and women if laid “upright and end to end” would “form a  line 180 kilometres long.”  The records on each suspect’s actions and transgressions are so extensive that Funder evaluates that it would take 40 puzzle women 375 years to reconstruct the documents. The motto of communist leaders is particularly insidious. As Mielke comments, “hang on to power at all costs. Without it you are nothing.” As the end approaches, even Herr Bohnsack is forced to recognise that “it’s them (the people) or us”.  (238-9) From the inception of the GDR after the end of World War II, power, to the communist leaders, becomes an important end in itself which captures and motivates its 20,000 party members.

The Stasi turn surveillance into an artform and penetrate every aspect of a person’s life.

The variety of surveillance measures includes:

• telephone tapping;
• mobilisation of informers;  post and parcel interception
• use of investigative forces and technical forces including installation of technology.
• a large number of people were informers: 1 to every 60.  (199)

One of the most powerful analogies used by Funder to describe the pervasive extent and ideological significance of state power, is her comparison of the Stasi with the Catholic church. Koch states that members were “chosen” to belong to the elite group (156) to which exclusion exacted a high cost. Just as omnipotent as God, the Stasi also created its own system of heaven and hell on earth. It meted out punishment and rejection; people were punished for “lack of belief” or even more insidiously “suspected lack of belief”. Likewise, Funder compares the “leap of faith” one must make to that of Catholicism; someone is constantly looking inside the people to evaluate whether their faith was strong enough.  “The Stasi could see inside your life too, only they had a lot more sons on earth to help.” Ironically, Funder draws attention to the fact that the East Germans so easily absolved themselves of any traits of Nazism and yet there became many of the “chosen”;   “this sleight of history must rank as one of the most extraordinary innocence manoeuvres of the century” (161)

Just as the infamous torture Room 101 becomes the site of Winston’s capitulation at the hands of O’Brien in 1984, so too, do the instruments of torture loom large in Room 118 in one of the Stasi’s most infamous prisons, Hohenschonhausen. Using the primitive technique referred to euphemistically these days as waterboarding, the barefoot prisoner is “yoked into position” and water drips onto his head. It causes such pain that the prisoner would lose consciousness and his “head would slump”. He would either revive from the water or drown (226).

Not surprisingly, this is the place of Frau Paul’s worst nightmares: the place that broke her spirit.  Funder returns with Frau Paul to the site of torture. Funder notes, “it was in offices that the Stasi truly came into their own: as innovators, story-makers, and Faustian bargain-hunters. That room was where a deal was offered and refused, and a soul buckled out of shape, forever.” (226)  In Frau Paul’s case, witnesses the prisoners being tortured, knowing that you could suffer a similar fate, almost breaks her spirit.  Funder also notes that none of the torturers had been brought to justice.

Funder attempts to experience first-hand the psychological terror that many victims endured in order to give readers a more accurate, dramatic and horrifying picture of the fear that would have gripped many prisoners as they sat in the room, disoriented and in a state of shock. Funder climbs into one of the very “tiny cells’ and Frau Paul asks her to imagine that “someone is sitting there with a machine gun”. Although Funder states that there are places she anxiously avoids, she is in awe of Frau Paul’s brave and resilient stance in revisiting the place that “broke her”

Miriam, who was kept in solitary confinement for her assumed role in an escape organisation suffers from sleep deprivation.  As Funder comments: “Sleep deprivation can mimic the symptoms of starvation, particularly in children – victims become disorientated and cold. They lose their sense of time, becoming locked in an interminable present. Sleep deprivation also causes a number of neurological dysfunctions, which become more extreme the longer it continues.” (25)

After some time, the party stopped direct action such as arrest, incarceration and torture against its people. It opted instead for subtler methods. Julia relates, “the typical thing that could happen to you in my day in the GDR – that your career was broken before it was begun- that had already happened to me! (108). Likewise, Hagen Koch’s father was sentenced to seven years as a prisoner of war for being in the armed forces. He is released and allowed to go home on the condition that he quits the Liberal Democratic Party and joins the Socialist Unity party. Heinz Koch was forced to teach his son (Hagen Koch) socialist values, or he would be deported back to the POW camp.  Typically, separating families, Hagen Koch was prevented from attending his father’s funeral as people from the west were attending.

Funder draws attention to the fact that constant intrusive nature of state control and the lack of freedom of speech resulted in almost a permanent psychological state of almost schizophrenic compartmentalisation.  As Julia states, from the time “we woke up… they were aware of what “could be said outside the home (very little) and what could be discussed in it (most things)” (95)

The informers

For some who choose to become informers, it is simply the power of “having one up on someone”; for others, it is a necessary survival tactic in a regime that pits informers against enemies. Whilst informers and party members renounce their independence, their honour and in many cases their heart and soul, Funder points to practical reasons as to why people would become informers; one joins not only the “group in the know” but becomes one of the “unmolested” who have the chance to enjoy a “peaceful life” and a “satisfying career”. Whilst there is officially “no unemployment in the GDR”, those who resist the powerful masters often have their careers “broken before they had begun”. For Julia, it is not just her career. She suspects that her life has been “broken” at every turn: “the boarding school, the headmaster’s visit, the constant street searches, the failed exam, the friend’s warning, the cruising Lada, the extraordinary unemployment.” (108)

The Stasi does not only make life difficult – practically impossible. They also target the individual’s most vulnerable trait and exploit their weaknesses, such as romantic or family failings. People are often placed in compromising situations and then encouraged to inform to redeem the situation.  Psychologically, the informers are trained in the art of convincing someone to do things “against their own self interest” (202). The Stasi operators were skilled at finding personal weaknesses, things they could “use as leverage” (198).

The enemies

Funder deliberately focuses on “ordinary people” to reinforce her point that mostly innocent people are forced into very difficult situations; they do not begin with an obvious anti-government stance.  They often become “enemies of the state” despite themselves, often because they have simply refused to inform on their neighbour or family member.   For example, the Behrends “weren’t dissidents; we weren’t in church groups or environmental groups or anything life that… We were an ordinary family.”   (95) Frau Paul was “not your classic resistance fighter”. She did not even belong to a political opposition.  (200)

Once an investigation was launched, people were labelled and treated as enemies. According to the Stasi’s “dictator logic” or mentality, “we investigate you, therefore you are an enemy” (199). The problem was that the definition of “enemy” becomes increasingly wider and soon encompasses most daily life activities.  Minor transgressions and shortcomings, or the most insignificant foibles turn citizens into enemies. For example, if one’s antenna is tuned into western television or one fails to hang the red flag on May Day or one tells an “off colour” joke about Honecker, then one becomes an enemy and a target of suspicion and surveillance. (157) The state searches for enemies in factories, in the state apparatus, in the church, in the schools. As Herr  Bock explains (197) the church was a chief bastion of “oppositional thought” and therefore a prime target for infiltration, so theology students were recruited. So successful were the recruitment methods, that up to 65 per cent of the church leaders were informers and the rest were under surveillance. Ironically, the informers swelled the ranks of the church, inflated numbers at demonstrations so that it appeared there may have been greater opposition than there actually was.

As a 16 year old school girl, Miriam and Ursula instinctively knew that there was something unjust about Stasi police “dousing people with fire hoses”, “roughing people up” and bringing in the horses during the demonstration sparked by the demolition  of the OId University Church in Leipzig in 1968. Thus began a personal rebellion that demanded a great deal of courage.  From erecting posters, Miriam seeks to stage an escape and, within a few metres from liberty. She decided to go over the wall on New Year’s Eve in 1968 rather than await the trial resulting from her “crime of sedition” (circulating leaflets).  She is caught and thus begins a series of imprisonment, interrogation sessions. Kafkaesque, she searches for answers, especially about her lost husband, Charlie, and does not find the answers. He is possibly one of the victims of Southern General Cemetary, for whom the cremator leaves the oven open “so that the Stasi could do their business” (74.) she presumes more likely he was being uncooperative and was “roughed up in the cell, leading to a fatal fall” (279).

Miriam also suffers from the constant intrusion, to an extent that Funder realises they circulated leaflets – it was a “crime of sedition” – all the classmates were questioned.  – girls placed in solitary confinement for a month. They broke them down, separating and dividing the two girls. Miriam decided to go over the Wall on New Year’s Eve 1968 – did not want to await the trial and possibly return to prison.  She made it to within four steps of the wall – but fell on some trip wire. (23) “She came so close.”

Victims: short and long term impacts

Funder depicts people in ordinary situations caught up in extraordinary times so that readers can understand the extent of their human dilemmas, problems, foibles, fears and phobias.  They are grappling with ordinary concerns revolving around a secure career and a secure lifestyle. Just a minor infraction leads to the label of enemy. As Miriam states, once you do something against the will of the Stasi, they will hate you for life and pursue you forever.

The citizens were generally under a permanent state of surveillance which becomes very stressful for those who disagree or seek to resist the tyranny of the state.  As mentioned previously,  the definition of an “enemy” is very broad and many people either knowingly or inadvertently become suspicious targets of the state. Eventually, the physical and psychological intrusion takes a severe toll on many individuals; they sanity buckles under the strain.

Physical consequences

• People suffered a great deal both physically and psychologically. Many made difficult decisions that affected their loved ones, which continue to haunt them. Miriam is obsessed with the loss and probably death of her husband, Charlie, whose remains she never finds. She will never know the truth about his death. She can only imagine the worst. 
• Frau Paul lives with a sense of regret that she was not able to provide her son, Torsten Ruhrdanz, with a decent home and loving parents. He comes home a stranger. (To her chagrin, her son is transferred from, Charite, a hospital in the East, to Westend Hospital in West Berlin, the fateful night of the erection of the Berlin Wall (12-13 August 1961). Through unfortunate circumstances, she now must seek permission (and numerous passes) to visit him.) She wonders whether it would have been different if she had made the decision to visit him on that vital day when she was asked to betray Michael Hinze.  Her pain is that she decides “against my son”. Whilst she was able to maintain a clear conscience, she is forever haunted by the fact that she gave up the chance to see him and became forever imprisoned by her choices.
• Herr Koch lives with a sense of regret and anger at the State which broke his marriage. He was imprisoned and blackmailed about the evil influence of his wife and the abandonment of his son. Funder uncovers the extent of his pain in an interview at the fact that he questioned his wife’s loyalty and rejected her. Funder states, “it clearly upsets him to be telling me” (175). When Frank was five they were divorced. However, fortuitously Frank reveals to Herr Koch that the state officers had blackmailed his wife and threatened to take her son.   (176)

Psychological problems
 

• “Shell-like” internal migration: Funder draws attention to the constant intrusive nature of state control and the lack of freedom of speech, which resulted in a psychological state of compartmentalisation. For example, the author metaphorically refers to Julia’s outer crust or shell as an example of “internal migration” (96)  This shell or façade is necessary for those who wish to keep a secret inner life safe from state intrusion. It is perhaps the only way that “enemies” can maintain some dignity, but even this will exact a price. As Julia states, from the time “we woke up… they were aware of what “could be said outside the home (very little) and what could be discussed in it (most things)” (95)   Julia describes her father, Dieter,  as one who is defeated by this constant intrusion. He is depressed and needs constant medication.  “Living for so long in a relation of unspoken hostility but outward compliance to the state had broken him”  (96)  Accordingly, Funder is aware of the need to be sensitive in her relationship with the “victims” because they often withdraw unpredictably. Julia is like a “hermit crab”, ready to “whisk back into its shell at the slightest sign of contact” (90)
• The constant violation leads to an irrevocable loss of dignity: Julia finds that there is not even a kernel of self she can keep intact. In fact the violation is so thorough, the intrusion so deep, that she soon realises that she has no “private sphere left at all” (113)   In Room 118 Major N. interrogates Julia about her love letters to her Italian boyfriend. They have all been tampered with.  Not only do they know more information about the Italian boyfriend than Julia did (110) but they also want Julia to continue her relationship with him in order to extract information. Not only do they inveigle her into acts of deception and betrayal against her boyfriend, but they threaten her to conceal the interrogation process itself. She felt incredibly separated from everyone; disappointed in the “good father state” and experiences an acute sense of danger “without me having done anything at all”. She refused to become an informer and courageously entertains plans of writing to Mr Erich Honecker. As she recalls, “it was the loss of everything until I had disappeared too.” (115)
• Many of the “enemies” or victims display symptoms of phobia and anxiety. Julia also feels suffocated.  After she is raped, she reacts “extremely” to men and the constant “invasion of my intimate sphere” (113)  This situation is ironically exacerbated after the fall of the security state because criminals were hastily released during the amnesties of 1990.
• Julia cannot open the box of letters from her boyfriend.  The past is “never really, over” she states as there are always things she can’t look at, but can’t leave either.  (117)
• Miriam continues to suffer from the constant intrusion, to such an extent that the writer realises that she will never secure a commitment from Miriam. She had been under surveillance for so long that she was forever reluctant to “tie herself down” (p. 278)
•  The people – either victims or oppressors – were brainwashed to such an extent that the fall of the wall and the fall of the dictator state, did not ease their anxiety and conditioned behaviour. Owing to the depth of the intrusion and the reach of the surveillance mechanisms, the victims forever remain under a permanent state of siege. Funder’s depiction and her first-hand relationships suggest that that the “victims” are forever damaged.

The Stasi-operators: When Funder sets up meetings with ex-Stasi operators, they are still implementing their spy tactics.  Herr Winz sets up the meeting as he would have at the height of the Stasi regime – he is still playing “spy games” seven years after the fall of the wall (81).   Likewise, many of the generals still run their meetings like divisional meetings as they did during the Stasi regime (242)

Some appear to escape unscathed:

For example, during her interview with Herr Christian, Funder not only presents a rather human side to the Stasi officer who takes her on a “tour” as if he is proud or obsessed with his former role, but he still appears caught up in the spying games. The fact that he is grinning and “leaning on the bonnet of the biggest, blackest BMW I have ever seen” suggests that he has not been affected or damaged, or hindered by his involvement. Funder highlights the fact that he is still trying to find similar work as a “private detective” and sets him up for ridicule with the confession that there were even aspects of his job that he enjoyed such as disguising himself as the “blind man”, giving Funder a “mock punch” as if she should also enjoy the joke.

Small triumphs

Despite the fact that Funder shows the overwhelming negative effect of surveillance and the psychological disruptions, she also shows people who have survived and who have made significant choices in their lives; some even have scored “internal victories” (193) They are the ones who refuse to be bought. As Funder states, even thought there was “internal emigration”  there was also “internal victory” (192.

She names Klaus, the musician, in particular because he tried to protect himself and refused to be compromised. He concludes, “I didn’t let them get to me”.  Perhaps he was naïve, but in a way, it is a form of “naivety” that was “nurtured and maintained” as a form of protection. (192)

• Michael Hinze describes Frau Paul as an incredibly brave woman because she refused to reveal his identity; she also refused to be “bought” like so many of the GDR citizens. She knows that if she betrayed him she would be “theirs forever; a stool pigeon and a tame little rat”(220) and so clings to a shred of dignity owing to her private rebellion.
• Against orders, Julia told her family about Room 118 (114). Despite the threats — that there were will be “serious repercussions for her, and possibly for her family, from this break of undertaking of silence” (116) — she does score a victory. They threatened to send a letter to Erick Honeger and so called the Major’s bluff. “We had never really known where the battle was … but we knew we’d won”.  It was one of the rare occasions when the “bluff” had been called and she had won, despite herself.  Eventually, Julia gains a job as a receptionist at a hotel. (117)
• Miriam who remains loyal to the memory of Charlie, and who is obsessed with discovering his fate.
• Klaus, perhaps thanks to his brand of naivety, was able to protect his integrity. He states that he does not carry the past around like a wound; he scored an “internal victory”, maintaining a clear conscience.

Herr Koch refuses to hand over his precious plate to the Stasi operators. The plate (172) was an award for cultural work undertaken by Herr Koch’s unit (third place) when he was working with the Ministry for State Security. It was not a personal award but he decided to claim it at a time when he was frustrated that he was so easily replaced and had sacrificed so much for the State. (It was sheer coincidence that they did not break his marriage.)  Specifically, Herr Koch refused to take the plate down during an interview, as the photographer was annoyed that it was shining in his lens.  A court order was sent in the mail reminding of Herr Koch that all possessions were the property of the Federal Republic of Germany.  He is charged with perjury because he swore an affidavit to the Ministry that he did not know where the plate was.  The plate becomes a powerful symbol of state control; for Herr Koch the plate symbolises his defiance and his small triumph affords him a “moment of glory”. The fact that the Stasi set up a “Working Group on Plate Re-Procurement” highlights the lengths the Stasi party employ to subjugate and crush individuals. Although trivial (the plate is only worth 16 eastern marks); it is a powerful symbol of state control. (180)  He is one of the untold heroes; those who could not be bought (266)