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.”
“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.”
The GDR was like
a religion. It was something I was brought up to believe in.”
“The sense of having someone
examine your inner worth, the violence of the idea that it can in fact be measured was the same. God could see inside you to reckon wether your faith was enough to save you. The Stasi could see inside your life too, only they had a lot more sons on earth to help.”
“I had my left
leg in the east, my right leg in the west and I drew my white line down the street. I concentrated on the line and not what was happening around me.”
“It took forty
years to create two very different kinds of Germans and it will be a while before those differences are gone.”
“Why are some
Things easier to remember the more time has passed since they occurred.”
“History is
made up of personal stories.”
“Straight
backed into the sunlight.”
“A
small still woman.”
“There are no
people who are whole. Everyone has issues of their own to deal with. Mine might be a little bit harder, but the main thing is how one deals with them.”
“Ten days
is time enough to die, to be born, to fall in love and to go mad. Ten days is a very long time.”
“Everyone
suspected everyone else.”
“Sometimes
I wonder what it would be like to be German.”
“Koch
is talking dipping into his document box, talking.”
“They break
you, just like fiction.”
“Koch says
he is he only person alive who can represent the Wall from the eastern side. Perhaps this is because most people on that side want to forget it.”
“Perhaps they
beat something out of her she didn’t get back.”
“Lone
crusader against forgetting.”
“I look at the
box in her arms and know that you cannot destroy your past, nor what it does to you. It’s not ever, really, over.”
“I don’t think
I’ll be able to remember this. I haven’t remembered this.”
“He
is incandescent with rage.”
“This man
who could turn inhumanity into humanity.”
“He speaks
in authoritative barks.”
“This picture
we made of ourselves, with all its congruencies and fantastical edges, sustains us.”
“Frau Paul
remembers her interrogation clearly.”
“Everyone
suspected everyone else.”
“Memory,
like so much else is unreliable. Not only for what it hides and what it alters, but also for what it reveals.”
“Frau Paul does
not picture herself a hero or a dissident.”
“He has slipped
into a practiced authoritarian speech rhythm with occasional startling emphasis.”
