Stasiland

Herr Winz is the first Stasi man Funder meets with. He insists on meeting covertly in Potsdam. He seems keener on discussing the ways he is being persecuted for his affiliations with the Stasi today. He gives her a copy of The Communist Manifesto at the end of their meeting, in the hope that she will bring the good word of socialism back to Australia.

Klaus is Funder’s friend and drinking buddy. His band, the Renft Combo, was arguably the most famous group in East Germany. He was told by the head of the listening committee at one point “you do not exist anymore.”

Klaus serves as one of the book’s heroes because even when given the opportunity, he didn’t capitulate to the Stasi. Late in the book, Funder says of him: “This, I think, is his victory. This is what stops him being bound to the past and carrying it around like a wound. If there was ‘internal emigration’ in the GDR, there was also, perhaps, internal victory” (193).

Julia is the woman Funder is subletting her Berlin apartment from. Funder claims “she has an honesty I have started to think of as East German, a transparent fairness with all things that leaves her so open” (90). She provides the perspective of someone who was not a formal resister, nor someone afflicted with the regime, but rather someone who was aware of the horrors of the regime and turned a blind eye to them in order to stay sane.

She also tells Funder the story of her rape and the reason the fall of the Berlin Wall was bittersweet for her: the amnesties of the 90s resulted in so many prisoners being let free, she can’t help but imagine her rapist being let out, and her personal sense of security has felt at risk ever since.

Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler was a propagandist in East Germany. He was born in 1918 to a wealthy Berlin family who had close ties to Hitler and the Nazi regime, and profited off of it. In his interviews, he shows little remorse for his actions and seems to despise, above all else, the imperialism of the west. Of him, Funder says:

von Schnitzler is one of the cadre whose ideas were moulded [sic] in the 1920s by the battle against the gross free market injustices of the Weimar Republic and then the outrages of fascism, and who went on to see the birth and then the death of the nation built on those ideas. He is a true believer and for him my questions only serve to demonstrate a sorry lack of faith (135).

Herr Christian is an ex-Stasi man who Funder interviews. He is “in his mid-forties, with a young flat face and a nose that has been broken several times” (149). In her talk with him, Funder gets the impression that he has a “sense of fun” about what he did with the Stasi and talks to her like a “co-conspirator” (150). He worked to encode transcripts of every kind of communication that came in from the west and then sent them to Berlin, so they could know what was being said.

He talks very casually about both his time with the Stasi and his recruitment into their ranks as well: “‘I’ve always had an acute sense of duty to obey the law,’ he says, ‘and I thought it was the right thing to do’” (150).

Hagen Koch was Erich Honecker’s personal cartographer, hand-picked by Mielke. He ended up drawing the line where the Berlin Wall was to be built. In the end, Funder meets with twice in Berlin and he takes her to several sites around the city where he acts as the “lone crusader against forgetting” (259).

Herr Bock is former professor at the training academy of the Ministry of State Security. Bock taught Spezialdisziplin (the science of recruiting informers). Herr Bock is now a business adviser working for West German firms who come to buy East German assets, “once more getting the trust of his people and selling them cheap” (202).

Frau Paul, by Funder’s assessment, is “a woman utterly without irony. She seems to have, in fact, very little distance from what happened to her. Things remain close, and hard” (210). Her story is of a mother being separated from her child when he was an infant. She is also “a dental technician and a mother with a terrible family history. And she is a criminal. This seems to me the sorriest thing; that the picture she has of herself is one that the Stasi made for her” (229).