Stasiland

“‘You won’t find the great story of human courage you are looking for—it would have come out years ago, straight after 1989. They are just a bunch of downtrodden whingers, with a couple of mild-mannered civil rights activists among them, and only a couple at that. They just had the rotten luck to end up behind the Iron Curtain.’”

Funder’s boss, Alexander Scheller, says this to her during an argument where Funder is advocating for digging into the stories of the resistance in East Germany. This goes to the thematic core of the book: the importance of remembering the stories of those who are underrepresented.

“It took twenty years after the war, he said, for the Nazi regime even to begin to be discussed in Germany, and that process is repeating itself now. ‘Will it be 2010 or 2020 before what happened there is remembered?’ he wrote. And, ‘Why are some things easier to remember the more time has passed since they occurred?’”

The writing of this book is, in a sense, Funder’s rebuttal to this assertion. Stasiland was written soon after the fall of the Communist regime. Additionally, this sort of amnesia is not limited to any one group; we see it even within East Germany, in the way they absolved themselves of Nazism.

“The German Democratic Republic paid lip service to the institutions of democracy. There were district attorneys, whose job it was to administer justice, and lawyers, whose job it was to represent clients, and judges, whose job it was to pass judgment. There were, at least on paper, political parties other than the ruling Socialist Unity Party. But really there was just the Party, and its instrument, the Stasi.”

A concise reference to the insidious way the Stasi ran their government: it was a dictatorship dressed up to resemble a democracy, and we see it most potently in the book in Miriam Weber’s search for the truth about her husband’s death, and in her sensing that the defense lawyers and judges are taking orders from the Stasi.