"I am hungover and steer myself like a car
through the crowds at Alexanderplatz station. Several times I miscalculate my
width, scraping into a bin, and an advertising billboard. Tomorrow bruises will
develop on my skin, like a picture from a negative."
And so we begin. Caught inside a
"headspace." Having trouble with our borders, as if the damaged
compass of our narrator will map its own unpleasant realities across us the
further as we move into her story. Bruises of another kind.
In the company of the Australian writer Anna
Funder words have a cool poeticism and metaphoric sharpness that prick deep,
reflective emotions inside the reader. It is the language of ice, winter,
enclosure, and, of course, death.
So it is that you don't just browse through the
Stasiland's pages on some idiosyncratic tour of present-day, techno-grooving
Berlin (as the sexy cover art for the Australian edition might suggest);
instead you pass through a netherworld of bad historical memories and the
damaged lives that still inhabit it.
With a fearlessness that seems guileless for
someone so perceptive, as if Funder has never been truly hurt or endangered
before, the author dives into the history of the laughably named "German
Democratic Republic" and its former security force, "the Stasi",
whose surveillance culture dominated East Germany during Communist rule and
continues to haunt many of its populace today. She does this simply by posting
an advertisement in the local paper "seeking former Stasi officers and
unofficial collaborators for interview." It is the opening act on the
proverbial can of worms.
"People here talk of the Mauer im Kopf or
the Wall in the Head," Funder writes. "I thought this was just a
shorthand way of referring to how Germans define themselves still as easterners
and westerners. But 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 one day might come again, and in their victims' minds too, as a
terrifying possibility."
Stasi headquarters was known as "the House
of One Thousand Eyes." Funder explains, "At the end, the Stasi had
97,000 employees--more than enough to oversee a country of seventeen million
people. But it also had 173,000 informers among the population. In Hitler's
Third Reich it is estimated that there was one Gestapo agent for every 2000
citizens, and in Stalin's USSR there was one KGB agent for every 5830 people.
In the GDR there was one Stasi officer or informant for every sixty-three
people. If part-time informers are included, some estimates have put the ratio
as high as one informer for every 6.5 citizens."
In this kind of world, secrecy and surveillance
were not without their bureaucratic absurdity. At one point Funder cites a
Stasi file note from 1989, the year the Wall finally fell, in which "a
young lieutenant alerted his superiors to the fact there were so many informers
in church opposition groups at demonstrations they were making these groups
appear stronger than they really were. In one of the most beautiful ironies I
have ever seen, he dutifully noted that it appeared that, by having swelled the
ranks of the opposition, the Stasi was giving the people heart to keep
demonstrating against them."
The preying density, the absolute complicity of
it all, leads Funder through a world of broken and repressed lives that no
shorthand summary can do justice to: a mother separated from a critically ill
son by the building of the Wall in 1961; a budding young linguist denied a
career, then a love life, and finally the ability to love, by the encroaching
thuggery of the State; a maverick rock star refused his public existence by the
annulling force of the security apparatus. You meet them all in Funder's
strangely permeable company; feel something of their lost quality as one might
feel the hurt of familiars. At one point Funder admits, "No one can ever
tote up life's events and calculate the damages; a table of maims for the
soul." But in Stasiland she most certainly tries.
Beyond the victims she speaks to collaborators,
propagandists, apologists and people who felt they were just doing their job,
as well as Stasi men still living a secret life, still absorbed in the
possibility of another turning point back into history: a nostalgia for the ice
age of totalitarianism that is surprisingly prevalent beneath the surface of
east German life today. I'd argue the successes of Le Pen in France, let alone
the mood beneath the regimes of China and Russia, suggest this mood is not so
delusional--or exclusively Teutonic in flavour.
Funder certainly gives it chilly credence here.
She visits office spaces and torture rooms, has murky assignations with Stasi
men at bars and churches and curtain-drawn homes, places that emanate a banal
evil all their own. Human coldness is manifest in the architecture around her,
in bereft public spaces, even an empty chair. Everything feels soiled.
Finally she meets "the puzzle women in
Nuremburg" who seek to piece back together the shredded documents of the
most bureaucratized police state the world has ever known, the stories of lives
that were destroyed--often covertly--by the Stasi: thickly plotted
"mysteries" of lost jobs, suicide, murder and divorce, all
puppet-pulled from invisible strings above people's heads. Indeed many of the victims
Funder meets exist themselves in fragments and gaps, as unrestored to meaning
as the shredded dossiers and files on their lives. Never to be put back
together again.
One of the most interesting themes to Stasiland
is the way "many people withdrew into what they called "internal
emigration." They sheltered their secret inner lives in an attempt to keep
something of themselves from the authorities."
For Funder's young and beautiful landlady Julia
this defensive response has become a prison of its own. "It's the total
surveillance that damaged me the worst," Julia confesses to her in one of
the many startling set-pieces of the book, a kitchen scene choking with regret
and claustrophobia. "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... That's probably why I react so extremely so
approaches from men and so on. I experience them as another invasion of my
intimate sphere."
On that masculine point it's interesting to
reflect that the GDR had the world's oldest leaders at the time the Wall was
brought down and the Communist regime finally collapsed. Julia speaks of her
earlier dreams that they would all eventually die off, though later she
discovered they were injecting themselves with sheep cells, taking oxygen,
doing anything to prolong their creepy grip on power. A female cleaner
attending to the old Stasi headquarters--now a museum--speaks of how when she
first arrived all the rooms emanated "the smell of old men."
One feels in these irksome descriptions--along
with the spidery quality beneath Funder's own encounters with aging Stasi
men--the incontinency and anxiety of this culture at its very end, its
repulsive dankness and needy aggression. If there is meta-psychology to the
book, it's a view of the state as a people held tight in daddy's oppressive
fist. It's this perspective that leads me to wonder if only a woman could fully
negotiate and sensitize the political mystery of totalitarianism in the manner
Funder has achieved. But perhaps that's being way too Freudian and
deterministic for such brilliant inquiry into the soul of a nation at its
lowest depths.
By the end of Stasiland Funder is weighted by the
sorrows she has heard and the death of her own mother back in Australia. Grief
comes down upon her "like a cage." She leaves Germany with no great
wisdoms to offer, but when she returns almost three years later it is spring,
not the winter she lived through. Berlin is now "green, a perfumed
city," a place she knows yet does not know at all from the winter-world
she previously passed through. Though there is the vague feeling of Funder
self-consciously looking for meaning in these final chapters, a flicker of her
narrative control losing confidence, she still delivers a heart-rending
denoument: a recognition of other, humbler human secrets, infinitely lighter
than the world she submerged herself into.
The queen of Australian literary journalism,
Helen Garner, has rightly acclaimed this book with a cover note that states it
"makes us love non-fiction." With her debut Stasiland Anna Funder has
certainly announced herself as one of the leading non-fiction writers of the
present day, Sydney's very own answer to Joan Dideon. Like Dideon at her early
best in books like Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Funder's writing persona is
taut and pale, interior and existential, yes, but absolutely enmeshed in
history. We are fortunate to witness her arrival.
- Mark Mordue
Review first published online at Freezerbox (USA) on 16.06.2003. http://www.freezerbox.com/archive/article.php?id=272
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