Stasiland Quotes

Stasiland QUOTES

•           “it was an experiment and it failed” p13

•     “suddenly the landscape here seems crowded with victims” p84

•        “the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers” (144)

•        Word created for "facing the past" p 4

•        “the only needed a men’s bathroom. Women couldn’t get past colonel rank and there were just three of them anyway. This was a Mannerklub” (74-75)

 

Herr Bock:

•        “Herr Bock’s living room is, overwhelmingly, beige and brown” 196

•        “this was perfect dictator logic” 199

•        “we investigate you, therefore you are an enemy” 199

•        “he had to be able to adapt to new situations quickly” 200

•        “he needed to be honest, faithful and trustworthy”

•        Funder “I grab my things and leave him there, all lights out in the GDR” 203

 

Von Schinitzler

•        “he has slipped into a practised authoritarian speech rhythm with occasional startling emphases” 131

•        ‘could turn into a rebuke to the listener whose attention waned” – 131

•        “He is incandescent with rage” 132

•        “Because it prevented imperialism from contaminating the east” 134

•        “this man who could turn inhumanity into humanity”

•        “in the face of all available evidence” p 136

•        “A sign of being accustomed to such power that the truth does not matter because you cannot be contradicted” - 136

•        Funder – “this is so mad that I can’t think of a question immediately” – 134

 

Koch:

•        Koch says he is “the only person alive who can represent, in his documents and photocopies and photographs, the Wall from the eastern side. Perhaps this is because most people on that side want to forget it. “

•        “he was redrawing the limits of the free world” – 155

•        “can you rework your past, the grit that rubs in you, until it is shiny and smooth as pearl?” – 157

•        “disloyalty was calibrated in the minutest of signs” – 157

•        “ostracised by his friends” – 159

•        “Koch is talking, dipping into his document box, talking” -159

•        “to construct or confirm a story of his father’s innocence during the war?” – 160

•        “there’s clearly a portion of the past here that cannot be pinned down with facts, or documents” – 160

•        “before things could be rewritten” – 161

•        “protecting easterners from the western disease of shallow materialism” 171

•        “I am the only person who is keeping alive the sense of the Wall from the eastern side”

•        Funder – “for him the past is the Wall, and I am part of the present, whether three years ago or now”

 

Winz

•        “this is the world unfrozen. It’s black and white and snowing on my screen, but I know that it is really the bright yellow of rape, the green haziness of wheat, and the heavier green of summer oaks lining the road” – 78

•        “He speaks in authoritative barks” – 81

•        “hotel has a low-ceilinged lobby with brown booth seats and a lot of plastic plants” – 82

•        “it is more or less secret society of former Stasi men who write papers putting their side of history” – 84

•        Funder – “he looks at me as though all his suspicions are confirmed: I come from a place so remote, so primitive that the people there have not yet been labelled and numbered” – 82

 

Herr Christian

•        “I’ve always had an acute sense of duty to obey the law” – 150

•        “this, my second life” – p 151

•        “everything must be reported” – 152

•        “I remember the joy on their faces for the instant they thought they were in freedom” – 153

 

Herr Bohnsack

•        A rally cry: “the most important thing you have is power!” Hang on to power at all costs! Without it, you are nothing!” – 238

•        “the files would have to be destroyed” – p240

•        “I destroyed everything” – 240

•        “He knew everyone would read it, find his name and address on the list and feel whatever they would feel – contempt, hatred, or self-righteousness. He knew there was only one thing for him to do. ‘I would out myself before I was outed” – p 242

•        “a code of honour that rules them” -242

•        “birthday, proceedings were run like a divisional meeting from the old days” - 242

 

Miriam

•        “I tried to write your story, but I found I needed to explain other things around it” 246

•        “alone in the big city”

•        She humiliated the Stasi. It was ‘beyond comprehension that a sixteen-year-old with no tools, no training, and no help’ could scale the wall p25

•        “if she had any future it was over there, and she needed to get to it”

•        “they just want to stop thinking about the past” – 45

•        “what a revolution can do to people’s memories”  - 46

•        “it was dark and I was lucky – later I learned that they usually patrolled the gardens as well” – 21

•        “I still have the scars on my hands from climbing the barbed wire, but you can’t see them so well now” – 22

•        “the whole area was lit as bright as day” 22

•        “I was basically no longer human” 31

•        “perhaps they beat something out of her she didn’t get back” – 31

•        “the deportation came eleven years too late… and six months too early” 45

•        “For Miriam, the past stopped when Charlie died” 44

•        Funder – “all of a sudden I am very tired… I look up and it is dark outside” 33

•        “she was brave and broken all at once”

 

Julia:

•        “Julia and her family, like many others in the GDR, trod this line between seeing this for what they were in the GDR, and ignoring those realities in order to stay sane” (p96)

•        “I was living with too many things from my past that could come find me there” 246

•        “the world ‘leader’ (Furhrer) was forbidden after Hitler” – 104

•        “there are some things- she stops. I don’t think I’ll be able to remember this. I haven’t remembered this’. P106

•        “I look at the box in her arms and know that you cannot destroy your past, nor what it does to you. It’s not ever, really, over” – 117

 

Frau Paul

•        ‘Frau Paul does not picture herself as a hero, or a dissident’ p229

•        “they didn’t see or hear anything of what was going on to divide the city they woke to a changed world” – 206

•        “it was important to me to get news from outside” 208

•        “things remained close, and hard” – 210

•        “memory, like so much else, is unreliable. Not only for what it hides and what it alters, but also for what it reveals.” 216

•        “Frau Paul remembers her interrogation clearly” 219

•        “The picture we make of ourselves, with all its congruencies and fantastical edges, sustains us.” 229

Symbolisation in Stasiland.

 

Props are used to order, collect or preserve the individual’s memories.

Klaus: keeps copies of his Stasi file on his bookshelf.

Frau Paul: keeps her ‘short biographical note’.

Julia: shoebox of love letter is an ‘aide memoire’.

Miriam: her box of letters, photographs and poems.

Herr Winz: research for the Insiderkomitee (his theses).

Koch: expansive Wall archive/the plate.

Herr Christian: his itinerary of sites.