47 pages • 1 hour read
Anna FunderStasiland
Anna FunderNonfiction | 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.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Berlin, Winter 1996”
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.
During this previous visit, a woman who ran the museum told Funder of another woman named Miriam, whose husband died at the hands of the Stasi in a prison cell. Funder couldn’t get the injustice out of her head, and made up her mind to speak to Miriam, “before [her] imaginings set like false memories” (9). So Funder moved to Berlin, got a part-time job in television, and began to seek the untold stories of those living under the Stasi.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Miriam”
Funder works in television service in Berlin, responding to viewers who write in with questions about the programming. She approaches her boss, Alexander Scheller, and his adjunct, Uwe, about running stories from the eastern German perspective rather than from the perspective of the West, perhaps about those who resisted the dictatorship. Her boss responds that “no-one is interested in these people” (13). The man whose correspondence prompted this responds angrily that that these personal stories need to be remembered in precisely the way that the Nazi regime was purposefully forgotten in Germany right after the war.
In the present, Funder arrives in Leipzig and meets with Miriam Weber, the widow whose story she heard about at the Stasi museum two years ago. They go to her apartment and Miriam tells her about how, at sixteen years old, she and her friend made leaflets protesting the Communist regime and placed some of them into their classmates' mailboxes. One of the parents ended up calling the police, and when the Stasi investigated, Miriam and her friend were found to be guilty. She and her friend were placed in solitary confinement for a month. Later, Miriam admitted her crime and while out awaiting trial, she attempted to cross the Berlin Wall.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Bornholmer Bridge”
Miriam continues her story. She is determined to get across the Berlin Wall, but it seems an impossible task. While riding the train back to Leipzig, she realizes she’s five stories up and sees a high wire-mesh fence, meaning that West Germany is right on the other side. She gets off and rides the train back to Bornholmer Bridge station. At the border installation, she finds a shed and uses “a step-ladder to scale one of the most fortified borders on earth” (21-22). She crosses the first fence, then a footpath and an asphalt road. After a brief, tense encounter with a dog, she scales the last fence; she is so close she can see the shining cars of the West. But she does not see the trip wire.
Sirens go off, and the Stasi catch her and take her to the Berlin Stasi HQ. They hold her in a cell in Leipzig, interrogating her at night and not allowing her to sleep during the day. They want to know how she almost crossed the Wall, and the name of the underground escape organization the Stasi assume Miriam is part of.
Miriam finally fabricates an absurd story in order to end the agony of sleep deprivation. It involves meeting some men from Berlin in a bar. Telling the story now, Miriam balks at how the interrogators could have believed it, but Funder is confused, seeing nothing too outlandish about it. Miriam explains that it is unthinkable that one would admit to escaping to strangers because everyone was suspicious of everyone else: anyone could be an informer for the Stasi.
The Stasi believe Miriam’s story and follow up on it. When they turn up nothing on these fictional men, they realize that Miriam lied and tell her she has earned herself a longer sentence. However, the episode does not go into her file, because if it came out, it would also be divulged that she was coerced into telling the story by sleep deprivation.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
We begin this book with interweaving narratives of the present and the past; in the present, Funder, the author, is making a visit to Leipzig to meet with a woman who resisted the East German Communist regime. In the past, we learn about how Funder got interested in the stories of these underrepresented people.
The divide between East and West Germany is imprinted on the country even now. It is referred to as a wound. The difference between east and west is highlighted: the cruelty and control that the East German regime exerted over its people and the paranoia and distrust that ran through daily life. Funder can’t believe how deep the paranoia (both the government’s and the people’s) ran. Of the leaflets that Miriam and her friend put into her classmates’ letterboxes, she says “Why would you call the police about some junk mail,” to which Miriam answers, “‘At that time it was not harmless. It was the crime of sedition’” (16).
Funder also doesn’t realize why Miriam’s fabricated story was so absurd, but to Miriam, who lived through life under a heightened state of paranoia, it is obvious that trusting a stranger with your plans of escape is tantamount to self-incrimination, as the government has eyes and ears everywhere. Funder’s image of the past will come into clearer focus as the book progresses.
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