Stasiland

Funder is at the train station, headed to Leipzig, in what was formerly East Germany. Using the bathroom, she notes that the smell of disinfectant is almost worse than what it’s meant to mask. The restroom madam tells her a story about meeting a prince who invited her to see his palace, but she couldn’t go because that was before the Berlin Wall fell, and crossing from East to West Germany was impossible then. The madam says she hasn’t travelled much since the Wall came down, but she’d like to go to China one day to see “that Wall of theirs” (3).

As the train travels through northern Germany, Funder recalls her efforts to learn German in her homeland of Australia. She was fascinated by the way simple words could be put together to form complex ideas. She projected that order and directness of the language onto the people who spoke it.

Funder first visited Leipzig in 1994, five years after the Wall fell. It was the site of the peaceful revolution against the Communist dictatorship. Back then, she visited the Stasi museum and saw all the artifacts of the East German Ministry of Security, a spy agency that attempted to catalogue as much information on the citizens of East Germany as possible, right down to a collection of jars that contained smell samples of their political opponents.