“Suddenly the landscape seems crowded with victims.”Are Stasiland’s major characters victims?

Confined within the parameters of a strict regime which role was to “know everything about everyone, using any means it chose”, Anna Funder’s ‘Stasiland’ aims to expose the Stasi for their mistreatment of many Ossi during the reign of the GDR. Through Funder’s role as both interviewer and narrator to the text, she is able to inform readers of the harsh lives led by many of the focal characters within ‘Stasiland’, also to further support the shocking accounts that these characters had with the Stasi through the use of many astonishing statistics, such as that there was an estimated “one Stasi informer for every 6.5 citizens.”

“A lonely, teary guilt-wracked wreck”, Frau Paul, although extraordinarily courageous, is a main Ossis to the text that is arguably one of the most damaged and victimised characters within ‘Stasiland’. Through her choice not to inform on her friends, thus being disallowed to see her sick baby in a West Berlin hospital, Frau Paul was literally unable to forget the trauma that she was faced with at the hands of the Stasi, described by Funder as “holding onto notes on her own life.” This supports the notion that the past is “not ever, really over.” Similarly, Miriam and Julia play fundamental roles within the text as victims of the GDR. Struggling to come to terms with her husband’s death, Miriam’s story “winded” Funder and intrigued her into researching the life behind the Berlin Wall, in a world paralleled to both ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and reality show ‘Big Brother’. Showing considerable amounts of empathy towards Frau Paul, Miriam, and Julia, who was raped by a Stasi man and prevented from getting her dream job as an interpreter, Funder educates readers on the considerable amount of damage caused to many citizens, particularly women, during the Stasi regime through sheer and unnecessary victimisation.

The Stasi were typically “a bureaucracy metastasised through East German society: overt or covert, there was someone reporting to the Stasi on their fellows and friends in every school, every factory, every apartment block, every pub.” The toxicity of a regime such as this caused friends and family to turn on one another, resulting in not only the main Ossi of the text being victims of the regime, but ultimately everybody was victimised in one way or another. As outlined by Funder, the Stasi “knew who your visitors were, it knew whom you telephoned, and it knew if your wife slept around.” In fact, the many thorough and abstract forms of surveillance the Stasi conducted on the Ossi proved that nobody could be trusted during this regime, with the Stasi oddities such as smell samples and the belief that unemployment is non-existent acting as leading evidence that the regime was “obsessed with detail.”

Funder’s ability to communicate with readers through her multiple roles within the text allow for leverage within the style of ‘Stasiland’. Through both factual and subjective forms of writing, Funder claims that ‘Stasiland’ ‘communicates something of the enormity of the

Stasi’s legacy and opens up the East German world to outsiders, giving the regime’s victims a voice and an identity in doing so.’ On both a personal level and a professional level, Funder’s style of empathetic writing allows readers to connect to both the Ossi of ‘Stasiland’ and to Anna Funder herself. Funder indicates on many occasions the utter horrors faced by citizens of the GDR, particularly the aforementioned central characters to the text. Through shedding light on the immense struggles faced by the victims of the text, Funder allows ‘Stasiland’ to have a more human feel to it, grounding the text in a place which isn’t quite generic to a typical non-fiction piece.

Through her extensive research and investigations, Funder realises that the term ‘can’t remember’ can mean one of two things: “the simple inability to recall, to string the memories together, or the choice to avoid thinking about something.” This is a constant concept throughout the text as the main characters within ‘Stasiland’ have been victimised and damaged so extensively by the Stasi that the marks made on them by the regime will arguably never fade. Funder exposes the truths behind what was essentially a nation built on lies and proves to readers, as well as to history, that the Berlin Wall and the Stasi regime were miscalculated acts of self-destruction to Germany, and that the bullying and malice towards their own citizens is an act of infamous history which should be remembered so as not to repeat itself.