47 pages • 1 hour read
Anna FunderStasiland
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Importance of Remembering
The impetus for writing the book was to give a voice to those who haven’t been able to be heard yet. The setup for Funder’s quest comes in the form of a piece of viewer mail from a man in Argentina, who suggests stories from the eastern point-of-view during the regime. It is clear that such stories are a rarity, with her boss claiming that “‘no-one is interested in these people’” and Uwe agreeing: “‘they were backward and they were broke, and the whole Stasi thing […] it’s sort of […] embarrassing’” (13).
But Funder sees a problem with forgetting the past because no one cares or because the past is embarrassing. Later, she considers the problem with Germany destroying all the Stasi files after the regime fell, citing “the dangers of ignoring the past and doing it all again, with different coloured [sic] flags or neckerchiefs or helmets” (70).
But this theme is interrogated and Funder struggles with it, because she sees cases (for example, Miriam Weber) where remembering the past too vividly can keep you from moving forward in the present: “As she speaks it is as if her existence is no longer real to her in itself, more like a living epitaph to a life that was” (44).
The main question that Funder begins to interrogate is whether “telling your story mean[s] you are free of it” (87). In the end, it’s not clear; it’s important to be strategic about how much one should keep of history and how much one should let go. We get a hint, with Funder’s final goodbye to Miriam, about how Miriam must go on without closure on her husband’s death: “Sometimes she can hear and smell them, but for now the beasts are all in their cages” (282).
The Danger of Manufactured Reality
Funder describes her interviews as having an effect on her: “I’ve been in a place where what was said was not real, and what was real was not allowed, where people disappeared behind doors and were never heard from again, or were smuggled into other realms” (120).
The East German Communist regime was obviously engaging in a massive reality-altering enterprise, and examples are rife throughout the book, from the potato plant propaganda, to the refusal to acknowledge unemployment or prostitution in the GDR, to the “impartial” judges taking orders from the Stasi.
But there are other instances in the book where turning a blind eye to reality is necessary, like with Julia and her family, who “like many others in the GDR, trod this line between seeing things for what they were in the GDR, and ignoring those realities in order to stay sane” (96).
The Limits of the Imagination
Funder is frequently running up against the limits of her own imagination in her effort to understand the past. Nowhere is this more obvious than with the puzzle women in Nuremberg, whom Funder imagines as an efficient and dedicated team. At the end of the book, when she visits the team, she finds the whole enterprise underwhelming; additionally, they are not even all women:
I ask him how many there are, and whether they are all women, as I have heard. ‘Oh no,’ he says, ‘but there are probably more women than men.’ He is cautious and exact, and asks his secretary to check the numbers. She comes back with a note: eighteen women and thirteen men (263-64).
This fundamental mis-imagining stands in for a similar failure of imagination with regard to those who try to imagine what life was like in the former nation of East Germany.
Funder runs into this again when Julia tells her that she looks foreign, which surprises Funder, because she always thought she could pass for German. It causes her to wonder: “I’m still gazing at her, wondering just how it is that we can have such wrong ideas of what we look like, our colour and shape and the space we take up in the world” (92).
