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Stasiland: Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall

Book by Anna Funder · 22 quotes · Gdr, Ddr, Stasi

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Stasiland: Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall Quotes

“I remember learning German - so beautiful, so strange - at school in Australia on the other side of the earth. My family was nonplussed about me learning such an odd, ugly language and, though of course too sophisticated to say it, the language of the enemy. But I liked the sticklebrick nature of it, building long supple words by putting short ones together. Things could be brought into being that had no name in English - Weltanschauung, Schadenfreude, sippenhaft, Sonderweg, Scheissfreundlichkeit, Vergangenheitsbewältigung.”

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“To my mind, there is something warmer and more human about the carnality of other dictatorships, say in Latin America. One can more easily understand a desire for cases stuffed with money and drugs, for women and weapons and blood. 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.”

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“Ci sono persone che si sentono a loro agio a parlare della propria vita, come se riuscissero a ricavare un senso dalla successione di eventi casuali che le hanno rese quel che sono. Questo comporta una sorta di fede preveggente nella vita; la convinzione che causa ed effetto siano legati, e che essi stessi siano qualcosa di più della semplice somma del loro passato.”

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“I wonder how it worked inside the Stasi: who thought up these blackmail schemes? Did they send them up the line for approval? Did pieces of paper come back initialled and stamped 'Approved': the ruining of a marriage, the destruction of a career, the imprisonment of a wife, the abandonment of a child? Did they circulate internal updates: 'Five new and different ways to break a heart'?”

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“Herr Bohnsack comienza con un chiste, que contó en un almuerzo allá por 1980 ante un grupo de colegas en un restaurante reservado a los altos cuadros de la Stasi. Se reclina en su silla y sonríe, como el que se regocija en su secretito. —Estados Unidos, la Unión Soviética y la RDA quieren sacar a flote el Titanic —dice arqueando las cejas—. Estados Unidos quiere las joyas que se supone que deben estar en la caja fuerte. Los soviéticos quieren la tecnología más puntera, y la RDA… —se bebe lo que le queda de Korn, a modo de pausa dramática— la RDA quiere a la banda que tocaba mientras se hundía.”

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“I once saw a note on a Stasi file from early 1989 that I would never forget. In it a young lieutenant alerted his superiors to the fact that there were so many informers in church opposition groups at demonstrations that 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, by having swelled the ranks of the opposition, the Stasi was giving the people heart to keep demonstrating against them.”

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“You see the mistakes of one system—the surveillance—and the mistakes of the other—the inequality—but there’s nothing you could have done in the one and nothing you can do now about the other. She laughs wryly. “And the clearer you see that, the worse you feel.”

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