Stasiland: Quotes

Question 1

Quotes describing East Germany.

Answer 1

“I sit on a green bench. I look at green tiles, breathe green air.” - Chapter 1 page 2

“This feeling needs a stickleback word: I can only describe it as horror-romance” - Chapter 1 page 4

“For East Germany, trading in humans was a source of hard currency and at the same time a means of getting rid of those who would not conform.” - Chapter 4 page 38

“I have had to prove my identity so frequently that I now carry my passport around with me like a fugitive.” - Chapter 8 page 82

“History was so quickly remade, and so successfully, that it can truly be said that the easterners did not feel then, and do not feel now, that they were the same Germans as those responsible for Hitler’s regime. This sleight-of-history must rank as on of the most extraordinary innocence manoeuvres of the century.” - Chapter 16 page 161

“People here could not believe that the nation would simply cease to exist. Despite all the evidence they thought the GDR would go on as an independent country, with an army and a border guard of its own. And that border guard would need its own girly calendar.” - Chapter 17 page 170

Question 2

Quotes revealing things about Funder.

Answer 2

“I remember learning German - so beautiful, so strange.” - Chapter 1 page 4

“My family was nonplussed about me learning sun an odd, ugly language and, though of course too sophisticated to say it, the language of the enemy.” - Chapter 1 page 4

Question 3

Quotes showing how meticulous East Germany/The Stasi was.

Answer 3

“I’ve heard stores of German babies having their input in food and their output in faeces weighed, in some attempt to get the measure of life.” - Chapter 1 page 2

“After the Wall fell the German media called East Germany ‘the most perfected surveillance state of all time’. At the end, the Stasi have 97,000 employees.” – Chapter 6 page 57

“Anyone can have an affair, but everything must be reported.” - Chapter 15 page 152

“The Stasi could not beat it that on of their own had something in his life that they didn’t know about.” - Chapter 15 page 152

“The Stasi knew everything.” - Chapter 17 page 169

“It is about a system that so manipulated people that it drove them to do these things. It shows how people can be used against one another.” - Chapter 27 page 267

Question 4

Quotes showing Funder’s curiosity.

Answer 4

“I wondered long and hard what went on behind that Wall.” - Chapter 1 page 4

“I could not get Miriam’s story, the strange second-hand take of a woman I had never met, out of u mind.” - Chapter 1 page 9

“I found a part-time job in television, and set about looking for some of the stories from this land gone wrong.” - Chapter 1 page 9

“I think that there is no parallel in history where, almost overnight the offices of a secret service have gone from being so feared they are barely mentionable, to being a museum.” - Chapter 7 page 73

Question 5

Quotes showing Stasi activities.

Answer 5

“The files the Stasi kept on their countrymen do women would form a line 180 kilometres long.” - Chapter 1 page 5

“A choreography for very nasty scouts.” - Chapter 1 page 7

“The Stasi had developed a quasi-scientific methods, ‘smell sampling’, as a way to find criminals.” - Chapter 1 page 8

Question 6

Quotes about the Wall.

Answer 6

“Along with the Great Wall of china, it was on of the longest structures ever built to keep people separate from one another.” - Chapter 1 page 3

“Something had to be done to stop people fleeing through this mouse hole in the GDR.” - Chapter 17 page 170 (Hence the creation of the wall - reasons for the wall)

“Anti-fascist protective measure.” - Chapter 17 page 171 (the Wall)

“When the wall was built, the GDR tried to block every avenue of escape.” - Chapter 21 page 208

“The Wall Went Straight through My Heart.” - Chapter 21 page 205

“They didn’t even or here anything of what was going on to divide the city but they woke to a changed world.” - Chapter 21 page 206

Question 7

Quotes about East Germany.

Answer 7

“It is a country which no longer exist, but here I am on a train hurtling through it - it’s tumbledown houses and bewildered people.” - Chapter 1 page 4

“East Germany has disappeared, but its remains are still at site.” - Chapter 1 page 4 (Skeleton of GDR)

“On 3 October 1990, the day of German reunification and the day that the GDR ceased to exist.” - Chapter 7 page 71

“The GDR, in its forty years, tried strenuously both to create Socialist German Man and to get the people to believe in him. Socialist German Man was to be different from Nazi German Man, and different from Western German Man.” - Chapter 16 page 158

“No-one ever thought, that it would all come to an end.” - Chapter 20 page 202

“This is orderly chaos” - Chapter 14 page 147 (swimming pool - represents GDR)

Question 8

Quotes about love.

Answer 8

“Miriam didn’t believe it.” - Chapter 4 page 37

“After she died, grief came down upon me like a cage.” - Chapter 24 page 244 (Shows that Funder is human)

Question 9

Quotes about oppression and control.

Answer 9

“As the government controlled the newspapers, magazines and television, training as a journalist was effectively training as a government spokesperson. Access to books was restricted. Censorship was a constant pressure on writers, and a given for readers, who read between the lines.” - Chapter 2 page 17

“In the GDR a great swathe of geography remained theoretical because people couldn’t grave outside the Eastern Bloc.” - Chapter 8 page 80

“It was during one of these sessions that they offered Frau Paul the deal.” - Chapter 22 page 218

“I knew: they were going to use me as bait in a trap to kidnap Michael.” - Chapter 22 page 220

“Overt attempt to manufacture a trend for the masses.” - Chapter 12 page 127 (the Lipsi - attempts to control)

Question 10

Quotes depicting Socialism/communism as a religion.

Answer 10

“An article of faith.” - Chapter 8 page 86

“Waiting for the second coming of socialism.” - Chapter 8 page 86

“Capitalism will not last! The revolution is coming.” - Chapter 9 page 87

“The GDR was like a religion. It was something I was brought up to believe in.” - Chapter 16 page 157

“But I’m mulling over the idea of the GDR as an article of faith.” - Chapter 16 page 157 (more quotes from below this???)

“God could see inside you to reckon whether your faith was enough to save you. The Stasi could see inside your life too, only they had a lot most sons on earth to help.” - Chapter 16 page 158 (scary truth)

Question 11

Quotes depicting the physical environment.

Answer 11

“At ground level Alexanderplatz is a monstrous expanse of grey concrete designed to make people feel small. It works.” - Chapter 1 page 3

“In north Germany I inhabit the grey end of the spectrum: grey buildings, grey earth, grey birds, grey trees.” - Chapter 1 page 3

“Cranes are picking over holes open as wounds.” - Chapter 2 page 14

“This linoleum palace continues to contain all the necessities for life, at the same time as it refuses to admit a single thing, either accidently or arranged, of beauty of joy. In this, I think, it is much like East Germany itself.” – Chapter 5 page 51

“They look like tattered faces after plastic surgery.” – Chapter 5 page 52 (physical environment – buildings) maybe get more physical environment stuff

“It’s cold in here, and the tastes recycled.” - Chapter 7 page 73 (Stasi headquarters)

“The smell of misery.” - Chapter 23 page 226 (the u-boat)

Question 12

Quotes about conscience.

Answer 12

“I think the Stasi people have been punished enough … Well, if they’ve got ay conscience at all.” - Chapter 19 page 192 (klaus quote - unexpected)

“I think of Herr Wins and Herr Christian and Herr Koch and the different kinds of conscience there are.” - Chapter 19 page 193

“I had to decide against my son, but I couldn’t let myself be used in this way” - Chapter 22 page 220

“It is so hard to know what kind of mortgage our acts on our future.” - Chapter 22 page 22

Question 13

Quotes depicting lack of conscience.

Answer 13

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Question 14

Quotes depicting courage/bravery.

Answer 14

“When she got home Miriam thought, there’s no way they’re going to put me back in that place.” - Chapter 2 page 18

“Frau Paul is a very brave woman.” - Chapter 22 page 220 (Michael Hinze)

“It was illegal, but everyone did it.” - Chapter 21 page 208 (Listening to western radio - Frau Paul said this - sort of rebellion)

Question 15

Quotes about forgetting of the past.

Answer 15

“No one here is interested - they were backward and they were broke, and the whole Stasi thing…. It’s sort of embarrassing.” - Chapter 2 page 13

“He said that the issues were being swept under the carpet in East Germany, and people along with them” - Chapter 2 page 13 (Argentinean man)

“Will it be 2010 or 2020 before what happened there is remembered?” - Chapter 2 page 14

“You know they just want to stop thinking about the past. They want to pretend it all didn’t happen.” - Chapter 4 page 45

“Like so many other things here, no-one can decide whether to make the Palast der Republic into a memorial warning from the past, or to get rid of it altogether and go into the future unburdened of everything, except the risk of doing it all again.” – Chapter 5 page 51

“The mayor said, perhaps in another 50 years people would be able to decide what to do. To remember or forget – which is healthier?” – Chapter 5 page 52

“Streets near here are being renamed … in a massive act of ideological redecoration.” – Chapter 5 page 52

“Stasi officers were instructed to destroy files, starting with the most incriminating - those naming west ended who spied for them, and those that concerned deaths. They shredded the files until the shredders collapsed.” - Chapter 7 page 67

“Debate raged hot in Germany as to what to do with the Stasi files. Should they be opened or burnt? Should they be locked away for fifty years and then opened, when the people in them would be dead or, possibly, forgiven?” - Chapter 7 page 70

“Almost overnight the Germans in the eastern states were made, or made themselves, innocent of Nazism.” - Chapter 16 page 161 (forgetting the past)

“It seems now most people on both sides want to pretend it was never there. The Wall has been erased so quickly that there is hardly a trace of it in the streets. Only a small part of the most colourful section remains, like a gaudy headstone.” - Chapter 17 page 172 (forgetting the past)

“I imagine they are in a hurry to get back to the international-style West Berlin hotel that reminds them of nothing, and I don’t blame them.” - Chapter 7 page 71 (Even tourists trying to forget)

Question 16

Quotes about remembering the past.

Answer 16

“It is part of the nostalgia for the East (Ost) which has given rise to a new stickleback word: Ostalgie.” - Chapter 12 page 123

“The only Stasi man I have ever met who outed himself.” - Chapter 24 page 236 (Herr Bohnsack)

“It was so much better before.” - Chapter 25 page 251 (People in the park)

“I don’t doubt this genuine nostalgia, but I think it has coloured a cheap and nasty world golden.”- Chapter 25 page 251 (like the plate)

“If you didn’t buck the system, then it wouldn’t harm you.” - Chapter 25 page 252

“It would take 40 workers 375 years” to reconstruct the files. - Chapter 27 page 269

Miriam has not sorted her pictures yet and Funder says that she understands that Miriam is not about to ‘file [Charlie] away under plastic in an album or in a frame…it is clear to [Funder] why the new museum was so irritating. Things have been put behind glass, but they are not yet over” - Chapter 28 page 276

Question 17

Quotes about justice.

Answer 17

“For instance, to find out what it’s like to wait for part of your file to be pieced together.” - Chapter 2 page 12

“The regime may be gone, but the world cannot be set to rights until Miriam has some kind of justice. Things have been put behind glass, but it is not yet over” - Chapter 28 page 280

Question 18

Quotes about injustice.

Answer 18

“Judges often got their instructions from the Stasi which, in turn, passed them on from the party.”
Chapter 4 page 37

“There is no room for a person to defend themselves against the State because all the defence lawyers me all the judges were part of it.” - Chapter 4 page 37

Question 19

Quotes about guilt.

Answer 19

“I am outraged for her, and vaguely guilty about my relative luck in life.” - Chapter 11 page 109

“At that time it was the right decision, and even later too, I could always say to myself, ‘I did not make my self guilty. I can sleep at night with what I have done.’” - Chapter 22 page 220

“I don’t want to be German anymore! … We are terrible.” - Chapter 26 page 253 (said by a random drunk man outside Funder’s building)

“It is true that I didn’t burden myself with this on my conscience, but I did decide against my son.” - Chapter 22 page 221

Question 20

Quotes about effects on victims.

Answer 20

Quotes about victims.

Question 21

Quotes about political ideology.

Answer 21

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Question 22

Quotes about propaganda.

Answer 22

The foe has made a propaganda war against us, a slander and smear campaign.” - Chapter 8 page 86 (Herr Winz)

“STOP THE AMERICAN BEETLE.” - Chapter 16 page 166

Question 23

Quotes about surveillance.

Answer 23

“Looking back on it, it’s the total surveillance that damaged me the worst. I know how far people will transgress over the boundaries - until you have no private sphere left at all.” - Chapter 11 page 113 (Julia quote)

Question 24

Quotes about power.

Answer 24

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Question 25

Quotes about truth vs lies.

Answer 25

“Ten days is a very long time. Q: What does the human spirit do after ten days without sleep, any ten days of isolation tempered only by nocturnal threat sessions? A: it dreams up a solution.” - Chapter 3 page 26

“I cooked them up a story I would not have believed myself, even then. It was utterly absurd. But they were so wild about getting an escape organisation that they swallowed it. All I wanted to do was sleep.” - Chapter 3 page 27

“I don’t believe he would have killed himself. I don’t think he did. Of the two of us, he was always more worried it’d b me who would crack under all that pressure.” - Chapter 4 page 44 (truth vs lies)

“In the GDR people were required to acknowledge an assortment of fictions as fact.” - Chapter 9 page 96 (lies)

“the Main Street would have its buildings painted only halfway up.” “the butchers’ shops full of small goods for the drive-by, which would vanish again.” - Chapter 19 page 187 (Like the gold plate, painted over to look better - lies)

“This society, it was built on lies - lie after lie after lie.” - Chapter 19 page 187

“You are not unemployed! You are seeking work! There is no unemployment in the German Democratic Republic!” - Chapter 10 page 104

“I’ve been in a place where what was said was not real, and what was real was not allowed, where people disappeared behind doors and were never heard from again, or were smuggled into other realms.” - Chapter 12 page 120

Question 26

Quotes about deceit.

Answer 26

“There is no unemployment in the German Democratic Republic.” - Chapter 11 page 108

“To my mind, there is something warmer and more human about the carnality of other dictatorships … These obedient grey men doing it with their underpaid informers on a weekly basis seem at once more stupid and more sinister. Betrayal clearly has its own reward: the small deep human satisfaction of having one up on someone else. It is the psychology of the mistress, and this regime used it as fuel.” - Chapter 20 page 201

Question 27

Quotes showing realisations.

Answer 27

“Essentially, the deportation came eleven years too late, and six months too early.” - Chapter 4 page 44

“It’s amazing what a revolution can do to people’s memories.” - Chapter 4 page 46

“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.” - Chapter 11 page 117 (Getting over the past)

“By no fault of her own, Julia Behrend had fallen into the gap between the GDR’s fiction ad it’s reality. She no longer conformed to the fiction. Loyal and talented as she was, she was now being edged out of reality.” - Chapter 10 page 105 (realisation)

“I realised for the first time that it wasn’t the really good father state you have in the back of your mind. I saw it can be so dangerous, so very dangerous, without me having done nothing at all.” - Chapter 11 page 114 (Julia’s quote)

“This, I think, is his victory. This is what stops him being bound to the past and carrying it around like a wind. If there was ‘internal emigration’ in the GDR, there was also, perhaps, internal victory.” - Chapter 19 page 193

“You see the mistakes of one system - the surveillance - and the mistakes of the other - the in quality - but there’s nothing you could have done in one, and nothing you can do now about the other.” - Chapter 14 page 145

“I see now a more literal meaning: the Wall and what it stood for do still exist. The Wall persists in Stasi men’s minds as something they hope might one day come again, and in their victims’ minds too, as a terrifying possibility.” - Chapter 23 page 234 (Religious sounding - second coming of communism) (Funder’s realisation)

“If she accepted, they would have her then, her soul bought with a visit to her critically ill son. She would be theirs forever: a stool pigeon ad a tame little rat.” - Chapter 22 page 220

Question 28

Quotes about hope.

Answer 28

“There must be people who stood up to the regime somehow, or who were wrongfully imprisoned.” - Chapter 2 page 12

“Miriam Weber was going over the Wall.” - Chapter 2 page 18

“I thought: this cannot be for real, somewhere or other you just must be able to get over that thing.” - Chapter 3 page 19

“I am really hoping that the puzzle women in Nuremberg find out something about Charlie in all those pieces of files.” - Chapter 4 page 44

“I was growing up in the 1980s at the height of the Cold War… I was sort of naïve but I thought that by facilitating, even in a small way, communication among peoples I could make a contribution. - Chapter 9 page 97 (hope)

Question 29

Quotes about life before the wall fell.

Answer 29

“There were no drunks before the Wall came down.” - Chapter 9 page 90

“No-one was homeless as they are now.” - Chapter 9 page 90

“The definition of ‘enemy’ became wider an wider.” - Chapter 20 page 199

Question 30

Quotes showing the negativity between East and West Germany.

Answer 30

“They are just Germans who had Communism for forty years and went backwards, and all they want now is the money to have big TV sets and holidays in Majorca like everyone else. It was an experiment and it failed.” - Chapter 2 page 13 (Negativity - Scheller)

“They just had the rotten luck to end up behind the iron curtain.” - Chapter 2 page 13

“You know there’s no real unity in this country.” - Chapter 7 page 74 (tour guide)

“In the suburb of Kreuzberg in West Berlin they wanted the Wall back! To protect them from us.” - Chapter 7 page 74

“It only took forty years to create two very different kinds of Germans, and it will be a while before those differences are gone.” - Chapter 7 page 74 (Sad effects)

Question 31

Quotes showing the awful things the GDR/Stasi did to its people.

Answer 31

“They break you. Just like fiction.” - Chapter 2 page 17

“The pills accelerated growth and strength, but turned little girls halfway into boys.” - Chapter 4 page 34

“Thy rounded up and locked away anyone who might protest, or might in some way embarrass the government.” - Chapter 4 page 35

“The Stasi had used radiation to mark people and objects it wanted to track.” - Chapter 19 page 191 (Effects - victims getting cancer - taking monitoring way to far)

Question 32

Quotes showing irony.

Answer 32

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Question 33

Quotes which are metaphorical.

Answer 33

“The whole strip was lit by a row of huge laps on poles, their head bent in submission at exactly the same angle.” - Chapter 3 page 21

“A Pierrot doll.” - Chapter 3 page 22 (Miriam)

Question 34

Quotes showing desperation.

Answer 34

“Just RUN before they get you.” - Chapter 3 page 23

“They bandaged her hands and legs, and that was the first time she noticed her blood or felt any pain.” - Chapter 3 page 23

Question 35

Quotes showing regret.

Answer 35

“She marks and re-marks the X till I think the pare will tear.” - Chapter 3 page 23

Question 36

Quotes showing disappointment.

Answer 36

“She came so close.” - Chapter 3 page 23 (disappointment - Miriam)

“The end of the security state meant the end, too, of her personal security. The system which had imprisoned her had also, somehow, protected her.” - Chapter 14 page 144

Question 37

Miriam Quotes.

Answer 37

“I became, officially, an Enemy of the State at sixteen.” - Chapter 2 page 14

“At sixteen you have an idea of justice, and we just thought it was wrong.” - Chapter 2 page 15

“It was the crime of sedition.” - Chapter 2 page 17

“We both like the girl she was, and I like the woman she has become.” - Chapter 3 page 22

“Having had her every move anticipated for so long, these days she just wants to let things unroll.” - Chapter 28 page 278 (Miriam’s scars - unable to make any plans now)

Question 38

Quotes showing Miriam’s awful experiences.

Answer 38

“Both girls were placed in solitary confinement for a month.” - Chapter 2 page 17

“It was sleep deprivation. A hungry man can still spit bile, but a zombie is remarkably pliable.” - Chapter 3 page 24

“She was not permitted to sleep during the day. A guard watched through the peephole, and banged on the door if she nodded off.” - Chapter 3 page 25

“When I got out of prison I was basically no longer human.” - Chapter 4 page 31 (Miriam - effected)

“Prison left me with some strange little tics.” - Chapter 4 page 32

“The baptism of welcome.” - Chapter 4 page 31

“When she came up the insults were what she breathed. She thought they would kill her.” - Chapter 4 page 31

“The cemetery people started piling on the earth and it was too quick. I was just too quick.” - Chapter 4 page 41 (Miriam’s struggles)

Question 39

Quotes showing the mistrust present in the GDR.

Answer 39

Everyone suspected everyone else, and the mistrust this bred was the foundation of social existence.” - Chapter 3 page 28

“You might have your doubts about the west - I sure did - but we also felt that our own country was feeding us lies and that our futures depended on seeming to agree with it all.” - Chapter 10 page 101 (Julia said this)

Question 40

Quotes about the Stasi.

Answer 40

“The Stasi was the internal army by which the government kept control. Its job was to know everything about everyone, using any means it chose.” - Chapter 1 page 5

“The Stasi’s brief was to be ‘the shield and sword’ of the Communist Party, called the ‘Socialist Unity Party of Germany’ (Sozialistsche Einheitspartei Deutschlands) or SED.” - Chapter 6 page 56 (Irony)

“Unlike secret services in democratic countries, the Stasi was the mainstay of State power. Without it, and without the threat of Soviet tanks to back it up, the SED regime could not have survived.” - Chapter 6 page 59

“It arrested, imprisoned and interrogated anyone it chose.” - Chapter 6 page 59

“Back then we thought that the Party and the state were one thing, and the Stasi another.” - Chapter 11 page 115

“The Stasi were, in effect, trained for them, schooled in the art of convincing people to do things against their own self interest.” - Chapter 20 page 202

“I look up Golm, and find that it is a gap on the map, on the outskirts of Potsdam.” - Chapter 20 page 196

“I grab my things and I leave him there, all lights out in the GDR.” - Chapter 20 page 203

“No one in the west had imagined the extent of the Stasi’s ambitions.” - Chapter 7 page 72

Question 41

Quotes showing Funder’s methods when interviewing people.

Answer 41

“I want to ask but I sit tight.” - Chapter 4 page 33 (Funder’s patience)

“To listen to her is to witness the process, almost mechanical, of pulling things up from the past.” - Chapter 11 page 113 (Funder describing how Julia opens up - investigator/interviewer stuff)

Question 42

Quotes showing what Funder notices about victims.

Answer 42

“Perhaps they beat something out of her she didn’t get back.” - Chapter 4 page 31

“I can’t subject myself to any sort of authority.” - Chapter 14 page 140 (Julia)

“Does telling your story mean you are free of it? Or that you go, fettered, into your future?” - Chapter 8 page 87

Question 44

Quotes which inspire Funder.

Answer 44

“You won’t find the great story of human courage you are looking for - it would have come out years ago, straight after 1989.” - Chapter 2 page 13

“For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories or ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists of the famous writers.” - Chapter 14 page 144 (Julia tells funder how important what she’s doing is)

“What am I doing here?” - Chapter 14 page 147

Question 45

Quotes showing Funder’s reaction to stories.

Answer 45

“Miriam’s Story has winded me.” – Chapter 5 page 47

“I look at Herr Winz and suddenly the landscape here seems crowded with victims: of the Nazis, of Stalin, of the SED and the Stasi; and now this lot, wannabe victims of democracy and the rule of law.” - Chapter 8 page 84 (Not sympathetic - hard nosed)

“Everyone, always, is claiming innocence here.” - Chapter 12 page 119

“No-one can tote up life’s events and calculate the damages; a table of maims for the soul.” - Chapter 11 page 117

“There was no right answer here, no good outcome.” - Chapter 22 page 221 (Funder’s thoughts about Frau Paul’s former situation)

“The resources united Germany is throwing at this part of reconstructing the live of its former East German citizen are pitiful, some kind of Sisyphean joke. What he is running he is totally a symbolic act.” - Chapter 27 page 269 (Funder and others think this)

Question 46

Quotes showing Funder’s curiosity.

Answer 46

“I think about Miriam and I think about Stasi men. I am curious about what it must have been like to be on the inside of the Firm, and then to have the world and your place in it disappear.” – Chapter 5 page 53

“I visited it only long enough to wonder what was being kept from me.” - Chapter 8 page 83 (Funder’s curiosity when she was in west Germany)

“I was trying, I think, to get a perspective on this lost world, and the kinds of courage in it.” - Chapter 25 page 246 (in Funder’s letter to Miriam)

Question 47

Quotes from former Stasi men.

Answer 47

“We are discriminated against and ripped off blind from one minute to another, in this – Kapitalismus. But we learn fast: so I ask you, how much you are prepared to pay for my story.” – Chapter 6 page 54

“Authoritative barks.” - Chapter 8 page 81 (how Herr Winz speaks)

Question 48

Quotes about informers.

Answer 48

“These informers reported on family and friends without them knowing.” – Chapter 6 page 55

“Informers routinely argue that their information didn’t harm anyone … it is as if they have all been issued with the same excuses manual.” – Chapter 6 page 55

“Terrific. Here he is once more getting the trust of his people and selling them cheap. Stasi men are by and large less affected by the unemployment that has consumed East Germany since the Wall came down.” - Chapter 20 page 202 (These people haven’t changed, have no conscience/shame and have breezed by)

Question 49

Quotes about/from Mielke, Honecker and Gorbachev.

Answer 49

“The name Mielke has now come to mean ‘Stasi.’” – Chapter 6 page 56

“It is said that psychopaths, people utterly untroubled by conscience, make supremely effective generals and politicians, and perhaps he was one.” – Chapter 6 page 57 (Erich Mielke)

“All this blithering about to execute or not to execute, for the death penalty or against - all rot, comrades. Execute! And, when necessary, without a court judgement.” - Chapter 6 page 56

“Mielke was an invisible man, but Honecker’s picture was everywhere.” - Chapter 6 page 58

“Mielke and Honecker grew up fighting the real evil of Nazism. And they kept on fighting the west, which they saw as Naziism’s successor, for forty-five years after the war ended.” - Chapter 7 page 60

“He had spoken openly about the dangers of not ‘responding to reality’” - Chapter 6 page 64 (Gorbachev said this - warning)

“Gordy, help us!” - Chapter 6 page 64

“City of heroes.” - Chapter 6 page 64 (Leipzig)

Question 50

Quotes showing the paranoia of the Stasi.

Answer 50

“For the Stasi it was beyond comprehension that a sixteen-year-old with no tools, no training, and no help, could crawl across their ‘Anti-Fascist Protective Measure’ on her hands and knees.” - Chapter 3 page 25

“She could have been responsible for the outbreak of civil war.” - Chapter 3 page 29

“Juvenile Accused Number 725, you realise that your activities could have started World War III.” - Chapter 3 page 30 (Miriam became simply a number)

“The atmosphere of paranoid control had set in early under the Russians.” - Chapter 16 page 160

Question 51

Quotes depicting socialism fanatics.

Answer 51

“Nothing, can hinder the progress of socialism.” - Chapter 6 page 63 (Honecker)

“We try to present an objective view of history, to combat the lies and misinterpretation in the western media.” - Chapter 8 page 84 (When Herr Winz is asked what the Insiderkomitee do)

“I am here to tell you about the excellent work - the masterful work - of the Stasi in counter-espionage.” - Chapter 8 page 85 (Herr Winz)

“It is humane to have created and built this! It is human to strengthen and protect it! It is humane to guard the German Democratic Republic against these people who would most like to eat it for breakfast.” - Chapter 12 page 125 (Trying to convince people - von Schnitzler propaganda)

Question 52

Quotes about Julia.

Answer 52

“I am hoping Julia will not slip back inside her shell.” - Chapter 9 page 92

“Long story.” - Chapter 9 page 93 (code for no story)

“It seems to me she is never going to leave. I’m curious about her: a single woman in a single room at the top of her block, unable to go forward into her future.” - Chapter 9 page 94 (Julia)

“There are things I don’t remember.” - Chapter 9 page 94 (Julia)

“Now Julia had withdrawn from him, withdrawn into her home, and withdrawn from hope. This was more than an integral emigration. It was exile.” - Chapter 10 page 105

“I think, as Julia rides back to her barricaded tower, full of things she can’t leave, but can’t look at either.” - Chapter 11 page 117 (Both Julia ad Miriam in tower, good way to link them)

“Tiresias on a bike.” - Chapter 14 page 145

“Something he minds keeps returning to which she veers away from telling.” - Chapter 10 page 97

Question 53

Quotes showing Julia’s awful experiences.

Answer 53

“Major N preceded through her relationship, one letter at a time.” - Chapter 11 page 110

“You just discuss our little talk with anyone … If you do, we will know about it.” - Chapter 11 page 112

“I was raped.” - Chapter 14 page 141

“It was as if they didn’t believe me.” - Chapter 14 page 142
“I wanted to die, I could not see how I could go on an live a life in this world, let alone a normal life.” - Chapter 14 page 143 (Julia)

“I was so disturbed, so right at the end of what I could manage.” - Chapter 14 page 143 (Julia at breaking point - find others at breaking point and put in flashcard - people who have done terrible things don’t feel like this)

Question 54

Quotes about Hagen Koch.

Answer 54

“Trained by his father, he had become a Socialist Man.” - Chapter 17 page 172

“He was interchangeable … it made him angry to think he would leave no mark here, and it made him angrier still that, even if he had his time again, he suspected he wouldn’t have the guts.” - Chapter 18 page 178 (Hagen Koch)

“It shine like gold but it was made of plastic, covered in metallic paint like a cheap toy.” (Represents GDR - linking woo - trying to make thing seem better than the are - lies) - Chapter 18 page 178
“My little private even, that plate as all I had the courage for.” - Chapter 18 page 178 (Hagen)

“The man who drew the line, and who sat on the fence, pulls some righteousness from the post-Wall rubble.” - Chapter 18 page 181 (Hagen Koch)

“Heinz taught his pupils the doctrine of Communism, including his little boy.” - Chapter 16 page 165

“A poster boy for the regime.” - Chapter 16 page 165 (Hagen Koch)

“One must not see things from one side.” - Chapter 26 page 259 (Hagen Koch)

Question 55

Quotes about Klaus.

Answer 55

“Became the wildest and the most popular band in the GDR.” - Chapter 19 page 185 (the Klaus Renft Combo)

“Lyrics suggested rebellion, poignancy and hope.” - Chapter 19 page 186

“Renft was something authentic and unauthorised.” - Chapter 19 page 186 (unlike the Lipsi)

“Renft took the ‘holy things’ of the GDR - the army and the Wall - and sang about them, because they wanted to ‘scratch the GDR at its marrow.’” - Chapter 19 page 186 (rebellion)

“You no longer exist.” - Chapter 19 page 189 (what Klaus was told)

“In the end it was as they had said: we simply did not exist any more, just like in Orwell.” - Chapter 19 page 190

“I’m not that interested, I didn’t let them get to me.” - Chapter 19 page 193

“You can’t let it eat you up, you know, make you bitter. You’ve got to laugh where you can.” - Chapter 19 page 193

“The table is covered in ashtrays and beer cans - the same scene in two different sizes.” - Chapter 19 page 194 (So is the cd - at klaus’ place)

“I think of my friends in his room, singing himself happy.” - Chapter 19 page 194

Question 56

Quotes about Von Schnitzler.

Answer 56

“Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler became is one-man institution and the most hated face of the regime.” - Chapter 12 page 121

“This is how the man with the ridiculously noble name became the media face of the regime. ‘The Black Chanel’ aired until the very end in October 1989.” - Chapter 13 page 131(Some quotes before this)

“Nothing angers me!” - Chapter 13 page 132

“I think he may not be so much afraid of death itself but that it will eliminate, finally, his powers of rebuttal.” - Chapter 26 page 255 (Maybe his grave will be desecrated too)

Question 57

Quotes about Herr Christian.

Answer 57

“I’ve always had an acute sense of duty to obey the law, and I thought it was the right thing to do.” - Chapter 15 page 150 (Herr Christian)

“I am a sensitive man. But I am also a stickler for the law.” - Chapter 15 page 153 (Justifying what he did - believed that GDR and wall wasn’t harmful - just don’t touch and you’re fine - like professor mushroom)

Question 58

Quotes about Frau Paul.

Answer 58

“She seems wobbly, a woman holding onto notes on her own life.” - Chapter 21 page 205

“Her baby was now on the other side of the Wall.” - Chapter 21 page 207

“I hate this place, but I’m still here.” - Chapter 23 page 224 (Frau Paul at her prison)

“Here she is in the place that broke her, and she is telling me about it. It is part bravery, like the bravery that made her refuse the Stasi deal, and it is part, perhaps, obsession, caused by what they did to her after that.” - Chapter 23 page 225 (Resilience - Frau Paul)

“Of course he didn’t recognise him as his mother.” - Chapter 23 page 230

“They made our boy a stranger to us.” - Chapter 23 page 231

“From then on her conversation becomes muddled, peppered with statements of what she ‘didn’t know at their’ or ‘couldn’t have suspected.’” - Chapter 21 page 212

“She remember hearing the prisoner inside the rubber cell gradually lose his mind. At the end the only words he had left were: ‘Never…Get…Out!’” - Chapter 23 page 226 (Can’t escape from cell or GDR - eery link) (Memories - Frau Paul)

Question 59

Quotes about Torsten.

Answer 59

“His body is small and hunched and his arms and legs seem crooked, spidery.” - Chapter 23 page 231 (Torsten - represents how many people are effected by GDR)

“I have never looked at my parents and thought they made the wrong decision.” - Chapter 23 page 231

“I’m happy that it’s gone, and I’m happy too that there’s so little of it left to see. It would remind me that it could come back. That everything that’s happened might be reversed.” - Chapter 23 page 233 (Torsten - fear)

“The hospital was the only home and its staff the only people Torsten Rührdanz knew.” - Chapter 23 page 227 (Torsten - Frau Paul didn’t get to see her son grow up)

Question 60

Quotes about Herr Bohnsack.

Answer 60

“We were all reduced to playing soldiers. And we knew the GDR was lost, so it was a circus.” - Chapter 24 page 239 (Herr Bohnsack)

“Instead if shooting cardboard figures we’d have to shoot our own people.” - Chapter 24 page 239 (Herr Bohnsack)

“I’ve fallen between two stools.” - Chapter 24 page 243 (Herr Bohnsack)

Question 61

Quotes showing unexpected things.

Answer 61

“But that couldn’t be possible!” - Chapter 23 page 233 (Funder - Naivety)

“But anything is possible, one can never say something is not possible.” - Chapter 23 page 233 (Torsten)

“Who would’ve thought that the wall could be built! That was also impossible! And who would have thought at the end that it might ever fall! That was also impossible!” - Chapter 23 page 233 (Frau Paul)

“The window is wide open, a white curtain moves in the breeze and I am panicked.” - Chapter 27 page 264

“This is not what I expected.” - Chapter 27 page 265 (Funder when seeing the puzzlers)