Stasiland Exam Prep Flashcards
In Northern German I inhabit the
grey end of the spectrum: grey buildings, grey earth, grey birds, grey trees.”
“Sometime I wonder
what it would be like to be German.”
“You know, they just
want to stop thinking about the past. They want to pretend it all didn’t happen.”
“I am curious about what
it must have been like to be on the inside of the firm, and then to have that world and your place in it disappear.”
“Does telling you story
mean you are free of it? Or that you go, fettered into your future?
“It’s the total surveillance that
damaged me the worse. I know how far people will transgress over your boundaries - until you have no private sphere left at all. And I think that is a terrible knowledge to have.”
“He is, once more
a true believer: the Wall is the thing that defined him and he will not let it go.”
“Things have been
put behind glass, but they are not yet over.”
“In the GDR
people were required to acknowledge an assortment of fictions as fact.”
“They sheltered their
secret inner lives in an attempt to keep something of themselves from the authorities.”
“The people trod this
line between seeing things for what they were in the GDR, and ignoring those realities in order to stay remain sane.”
“I see a woman
who leaves her past in a box, then comes to collect it…part attached to the world.”
“It was a condition of
sanity to both accept and GDR logic and to ignore it. If you took things as seriously as people in the West think we must have, we would have all killed ourselves.”
“….but we also felt that
our own country was feeding us lies and that our futures depended on seeming to agree with it all.”
“Her belief
in things that were hard to remember, because they were not real.”
“Julia had fallen
into the gap between the GDR’s fiction and its reality. She no longer conformed to the fiction.”
“This afternoon
has not occurred.”
“In a place
where people got no news from the outside, they have nothing else to believe.”
“To start a
new country, with new values and newly minted socialist citizens, it is necessary to begin at the beginning: with children.”
“People were
crazy with pain and secrets.”
“Whatever their personal histories
and private allegiances, the people living in this zone had to switch from being….Nazis one day to being communists and brothers with their former enemies the next.”
“and almost overnight
the Germans in the eastern states were made, or made themselves innocent of Nazism…..history was quickly remade.”
“It was a condition of
sanity to both accept and GDR logic and to ignore it. If you took things as seriously as people in the West think we must have, we would have all killed ourselves.”
“….but we also felt that
our own country was feeding us lies and that our futures depended on seeming to agree with it all.”
