Stasiland Characters

Question 1

Anna funder

Answer 1

• narrator
• goes to Berlin 1996-2000
• investigates Stasi and former people’s lives living under the GDR

Question 2

Miriam

Answer 2

• enemy of the state at 16 and incarcerated for 18 months
• nearly successfully escapes over the wall
• Miriam and Charlie continuously hassled by Stasi
• determined to uncover the truth about her husbands death
• lives in a secure apartment (scarred) “from here you could see anyone coming”
• only hope was in the puzzlers

Question 3

Mielke and Honecker

Answer 3

• leaders of the Party ruling the GDR
• “mielke was invisible, but Honeckers picture was everywhere”
• funder doesn’t meet them

Question 4

Herr Winz

Answer 4

• From the “insiderkomitee” - “a secret society of former Stasi men who write papers putting their side of history”
• intent on putting forward the Stasi side of history
• still wants to play spy games seven years after the fall, telling funder he will hold a rolled up magazine as a signal when they meet

Question 5

Herr Bock of Golm

Answer 5

• a Stasi officer who taught how to recruit informers

- reveals that people wanted to become informers because “they felt they had it over other people”

Question 6

Julia Behrend

Answer 6

• Funder’s landlord in Berlin
• had an Italian boyfriend which got her into trouble
• refused employment and spied on relentlessly
• raped just after the wall fell and feels even more d’état he’d from the world
• ironically she believed in the GDR and had no wish to leave
• somewhat nostalgic about the past rather than bitter
• “by no fault of her own , Julia Behrend had fallen into the gap between the GDRs fiction and its reality”

Question 7

Von Shnitzler

Answer 7

• Stasi chief propagandist. Researched, wrote and presented “the black channel”
• believed the wall was “the most useful construction in all of German history”
• no compassion for those shot trying to escape “it was absolutely necessary”
• nickname is “filthy ed”

Question 8

Herr Christian

Answer 8

• young border guard for Stasi
• happy go lucky character joining the Stasi for “adventure”
• ## love for surveillance work, including wearing disguises “yes, being a blind man is the best way to observe people”154

Question 9

Hagen Koch

Answer 9

The complete “socialist man”

• poster boy for the new regime
• father was not a Stasi man but forced to raise him so
• after resigning, he is charged with making pornogrphic material and put in prison unable to contact his wife and son. “At that moment my world broke apart”
• he steals a plate as “my little private revenge”178
• tour guide celebrating the historical happening

Question 10

Frau Paul

Answer 10

• her clinically Ill son needed supplies and hospital treatment in the west.
• get involved with a group who smuggle easterners to the West
• husband is caught and she is investigated
• held in prison for 5 months before trial
• offered a deal to act as bait
• “memory, like so much else, is unreliable”
• her “soul was buckled out of shape, forever” in that prison

Question 11

Major N

Answer 11

• makes Julia realise she has no private sphere at all

- knows everything about julia including her sisters desire to play piano at the conservatory

Question 12

The puzzlers

Answer 12

• volunteer group who piece together the ripped up files

- “would take 40 workers, 375 years”