Stasiland Quote Help

Question 1

“Does telling your story mean you are free of it?

Answer 1

Or that you go , fettered, into your future?”

Question 2

“It’s the total surveillance that damaged me the worst.

Answer 2

I know how far people will transgress over your boundaries, until you have no private sphere left at all.”

Question 3

“He is once more a true believer:

Answer 3

the Wall is the thing that defined him, and he will not let it go.”

Question 4

“Things have been put behind glass,

Answer 4

but they are not yet over.”

Question 5

“Sometimes I wonder

Answer 5

what it would be like to be German.”

Question 6

“You know they just want to stop thinking about the past.

Answer 6

They want to pretend it all didn’t happen.”

Question 7

“In northern Germany I inhabit the grey end of the spectrum:

Answer 7

grey building, grey earth, grey birds, grey trees.”

Question 8

“I am curious about what it must have been like to be on the inside of the firm,

Answer 8

and then to have that world and your place in it disappear. “

Question 9

“To start a new country, with new values and newly minted socialist citizens,

Answer 9

it is necessary to begin at the beginning; with children.”

Question 10

“People were crazy

Answer 10

with pain and secrets.”

Question 11

“Whatever their personal histories and private allegiance,

Answer 11

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.”

Question 12

“and almost overnight the Germans in the Eastern states

Answer 12

we’re made, or made themselves innocent of Nazism…. history was quickly remade.”

Question 13

“The GDR was like a religion.

Answer 13

It was something I was brought up to believe in.”

Question 14

“I had my left leg in the East,

Answer 14

my right leg in the West and I drew my white line across the street. I concentrated on the line and not what was happening around me.”

Question 15

“Why are some things easier

Answer 15

to remember the more time has passed since they occurred.”

Question 16

“History is made

Answer 16

up of personal stories.”

Question 17

“It was a condition of sanity both to accept the GDR logic and to ignore it.

Answer 17

If you took things as seriously as people in the West think we must have, we would have all killed ourselves.”

Question 18

“Her belief in things

Answer 18

that were hard to remember, because they were not real.”

Question 19

“Julia had fallen into the gap

Answer 19

between the GDR fiction and its reality. She no longer conformed to the fiction.”

Question 20

“This afternoon

Answer 20

has not occurred.”

Question 21

“In a place where people

Answer 21

got no news from the outside, they have nothing else to believe.”

Question 22

“In the GDR people were required

Answer 22

to acknowledge an assortment of frictions as fact.”

Question 23

“They sheltered their secret-inner

Answer 23

lives in an attempt to keep something of themselves from the authorities.”

Question 24

“The people trod this line

Answer 24

between seeing things for what they were in the GDR, and ignoring those realities in order to remain sane.”

Question 25

“I see a woman

Answer 25

who leaves her past in a box, then comes to collect it…..part attached to the world.”

Question 26

“…..but we also felt that it ur own country

Answer 26

was feeding us lies and that our futures depended on seeming to agree with it all.”

Question 27

“Miriam is upset.

Answer 27

Her voice is stretched and I can’t look at her. Perhaps they beat something out of her she didn’t get back.”

Question 28

“When I got out of

Answer 28

prison, I was basically no longer human.”

Question 29

“A small

Answer 29

still woman.”

Question 30

“10 years

Answer 30

too late and 6 months too early.”

Question 31

“They break you,

Answer 31

just like fiction.”

Question 32

Koch says he is

Answer 32

“The 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.”

Question 33

“Koch is talking,

Answer 33

dipping into his document box, talking.”

Question 34

“I am the only person

Answer 34

who is keeping alive the sense of the Wall from the Eastern side.”

Question 35

“lone crusader

Answer 35

against forgetting.”

Question 36

“Julia and her family, like many others in the GDR,

Answer 36

trod this line between seeing things for what they were in the GDR, and ignoring those realities in order to stay sane.”

Question 37

“I don’t think I’ll be able

Answer 37

to remember this. I haven’t remembered this.”

Question 38

“I look at the box in her arms

Answer 38

and know that you cannot destroy your past, nor what it does to you. It’s not ever, really, over.

Question 39

“Julia had fallen into the gap

Answer 39

between GDR fiction and its reality. She no longer conformed to the fiction.”

Question 40

“He is

Answer 40

incandescent with rage.”

Question 41

“This man who could

Answer 41

turn inhumanity into humanity.”

Question 42

“A sign of being accustomed to such power

Answer 42

that the truth does not matter because you cannot be contradicted.”

Question 43

“He speaks in

Answer 43

authoritative barks.”

Question 44

“He has slipped into a

Answer 44

practiced authoritarian speech rhythm with occasional startling emphasis.”

Question 45

“Frau Paul does not

Answer 45

picture herself as a hero or a dissident.”

Question 46

“They didn’t see or hear anything

Answer 46

of what was going on to divide the city, they woke to a changed world.”

Question 47

“Memory, like so much else,

Answer 47

is unreliable. Not only for what it hides and what it alter, but also for what it reveal.”

Question 48

“Frau Paul remembers

Answer 48

her interrogation clearly.”

Question 49

“This picture we made of ourselves,

Answer 49

with all its congruencies and fantastical edges, sustains us.”

Question 50

“There are no people who are whole.

Answer 50

Everyone has issues of their own to deal with. Mine might be a little harder, but the main thing is how one deals with them.”

Question 51

“Ten days is time enough to die,

Answer 51

to be born, to fall in love and to go mad. Ten days is a very long time.”

Question 52

“Everyone suspected

Answer 52

everyone else.”

Question 53

“Sometimes I wonder

Answer 53

what it would be like to be German