Stasiland Quote Help Flashcards
“Does telling your story mean you are free of it?
Or that you go , fettered, into your future?”
“It’s the total surveillance that damaged me the worst.
I know how far people will transgress over your boundaries, until you have no private sphere left at all.”
“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.”
“Sometimes 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.”
“In northern Germany I inhabit the grey end of the spectrum:
grey building, grey earth, grey birds, grey trees.”
“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. “
“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 allegiance,
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
we’re 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.”
“I had my left leg in the East,
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.”
“Why are some things easier
to remember the more time has passed since they occurred.”
“History is made
up of personal stories.”
“It was a condition of sanity both to accept the 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.”
“Her belief in things
that were hard to remember, because they were not real.”
“Julia had fallen into the gap
between the GDR 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.”
“In the GDR people were required
to acknowledge an assortment of frictions 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 remain sane.”
“I see a woman
who leaves her past in a box, then comes to collect it…..part attached to the world.”
“…..but we also felt that it ur own country
was feeding us lies and that our futures depended on seeming to agree with it all.”
“Miriam is upset.
Her voice is stretched and I can’t look at her. Perhaps they beat something out of her she didn’t get back.”
“When I got out of
prison, I was basically no longer human.”
“A small
still woman.”
“10 years
too late and 6 months too early.”
“They break you,
just like fiction.”
Koch says he is
“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.”
“Koch is talking,
dipping into his document box, talking.”
“I am the only person
who is keeping alive the sense of the Wall from the Eastern side.”
“lone crusader
against forgetting.”
“Julia and her family, like many others in the GDR,
trod this line between seeing things for what they were in the GDR, and ignoring those realities in order to stay sane.”
“I don’t think I’ll be able
to remember this. I haven’t remembered this.”
“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.
“Julia had fallen into the gap
between GDR fiction and its reality. She no longer conformed to the fiction.”
“He is
incandescent with rage.”
“This man who could
turn inhumanity into humanity.”
“A sign of being accustomed to such power
that the truth does not matter because you cannot be contradicted.”
“He speaks in
authoritative barks.”
“He has slipped into a
practiced authoritarian speech rhythm with occasional startling emphasis.”
“Frau Paul does not
picture herself as a hero or a dissident.”
“They didn’t see or hear anything
of what was going on to divide the city, they woke to a changed world.”
“Memory, like so much else,
is unreliable. Not only for what it hides and what it alter, but also for what it reveal.”
“Frau Paul remembers
her interrogation clearly.”
“This picture we made of ourselves,
with all its congruencies and fantastical edges, sustains us.”
“There are no people who are whole.
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.”
“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
