47 pages • 1 hour read
Stasiland
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Chapters 15-17Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 15 Summary: “Herr Christian”
Funder meets her “latest Stasi Man,” Herr Christian, at Potsdam station. He drives her to a mansion he calls the “Coding Villa,” where he encoded transcripts from car phones and police walkie-talkies in the west: “He has a sense of fun about what he did with the Stasi” (150).Funder observes and learns he wanted to be a boxer but a Stasi man met with him during his military service and recruited him, which Herr Christian went along with because he’d “‘always had an acute sense of duty to obey the law,’” and “‘thought it was the right thing to do’” (150).
Christian shares that he is a private detective now, but he won’t do marriage work because he had an affair while working for the Stasi, which he confided in a friend about, and the friend informed on him. They put him in solitary and demoted him because the rule with the Stasi, as Herr Christian puts it, is “‘anyone can have an affair, but everything must be reported’” (152).
Herr Christian shows Funder where he would watch for cars that might have stowaway East Germans in them, and shares some the parts of the job he enjoyed, like picking out disguises. He tells her his favorite was being a blind man: “‘Being a blind man is the best way to observe people’” (154).
Chapter 16 Summary: “Socialist Man”
Funder meets with another Stasi man, Hagen Koch, Honecker’s personal cartographer, who in 1961 painted the line where the Wall would be built. He tells her his story, beginning with his father’s life. His father, Heinz Koch, learned he was of illegitimate birth early on and was ostracized by his friends, which led him to sign up for the army.
We get some history about the inception of East Germany: it was under Russian control until the GDR was established as a satellite Russian state in 1949, during which the Russians stripped the factories of equipment and sent it back to the USSR. They also required the East Germans to embrace Communism after their liberation from the Nazi fascists, “and almost overnight the Germans in the eastern states were made, or made themselves, innocent of Nazism” (161).
Koch’s father served as a teacher after his military service, after going through a program to train new socialist teachers. He also founded the Lindau branch of the Liberal Democrats. He won an election against a Communist Party candidate named Paul Enke, who was the head of the Electoral Commission, and called everyone to the town hall, where he convinced them (after asking how many of the wives’ husbands were in POW camps) that Heinz should be punished for serving in a fascist army as well. Heinz is arrested and taken to prison. Enke visits Heinz in prison and offers him a deal: to be released if he joins the Socialist Unity Party. Heinz takes the deal and begins to educate children in the values of Communism.
Hagen Koch also tells Funder about a piece of propaganda where East Germans were led to believe that the Americans would fly over and drop beetles to destroy the crops. He remembers fondly getting sweets in exchange for taking the beetles off the potato crops, thereby “foiling” the American plan.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Drawing the Line”
On April 5th, 1960, Hagen Koch takes an oath of loyalty at the Ministry of State Security. Mielke picks him out and is made director of the Drafting Office for Cartographics and Topography. Koch later falls in love with a girl from Berlin. The government thinks she is “GDR-negative” and disapprove, but the couple elopes.
Koch talks about the Wall as a necessary measure to protect the GDR. Before the Wall, many would go to the west to work (where the wages were higher) and then buy products from the east (where prices were lower). By 1961, 2,000 people were leaving each day for the west. Ulbricht, the head of state, decided a wall was needed. On August 12, 1961, the East German army rolled out barbed wire separating east and west Germany, and Koch begins to draw the line, which will be fifty kilometers (or roughly thirty-one miles) long.
Later, Koch resigns from the Stasi when he finds out that his father was coerced into joining the Party. In response, they arrest him for producing pornography and visit his wife, forcing her to sign divorce papers under the threat that they’ll take their child away. They show the papers to Koch and use them to get him to retract his resignation. He does, and only learns the truth when his son tells him what happened. He and his wife remarry a year later.
Chapters 15-17 Analysis
Herr Christian is startlingly cavalier about everything from his recruitment to the techniques he used to spy on citizens of the GDR. He almost makes it sound like a reasonable and natural course of action to join the Stasi, citing the “bit of adventure” (150) it might lead to, and claiming that he always had a strong sense of duty to obey the law.
Herr Christian’s story demonstrates why Hagen Koch is so wrong, when, in the following chapter, he says “without understanding my childhood, you can’t see why anyone would want to join the Stasi” (156). Funder refutes this:
[I]n a society riven into ‘us’ and ‘them,’ an ambitious young person might well want to be one of the group in the know, one of the unmolested. If there was never going to be an end to your country, and you could never leave, why wouldn’t you opt for a peaceful life and a satisfying career? (156).
It is important because it requires the ability to imagine the past complexly and not let the stamp of evil posthumously cloud our ability to see that many who joined the Stasi felt that they were doing their part to uphold the law and make a name for themselves: that it was in a sense the right and natural thing for many to do. This goes back to the importance of remembering the past accurately. Without the knowledge that morally-reprehensible behavior can appear natural at first glance, history will continue to repeat itself.
Funder is also interested in how people deal with their past after the fact, and the ways in which they bend the truth to make themselves feel better about what they did by comparing one’s regrettable actions as “grit that rubs in you,” which one might rework “until it is shiny and smooth as a pearl” (157).
In a sense, the answer is yes, and not just for people but for whole countries: the Nazi regime haunts Germany, but the guilt and burden of the atrocities do not weigh on the minds of the easterners, because their past indeed was made “shiny and smooth as a pearl.” They adopted the belief that Nazism originated from the west and that now, all the Nazis had returned there. And so the cycle repeats itself: as the easterners were innocent of Nazism, the ex-Stasi men were innocent of the horrors of the Communist regime. Only remembering and doing something like writing this book is capable of disabusing if not them then future generations of that notion.
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