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Quote by Anna Funder

“The penalties for being an accessory to the attempt to flee the [GDR] were greater than the crime of trying to flee itself.”

Quote by Anna Funder

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Anna Funder
Anna Funder

Anna Funder is an Australian author known for her historical novels and non-fiction works. Born in 1966, she graduated from the University of Sydney and later lived and worked in the United States and the United Kingdom. Funder's works often focus on political and social issues, with her first novel, 'Stasiland,' set against the backdrop of East Germany's pre-history, receiving widespread acclaim. more

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“I find it difficult to say whether the leadership's 'second echelon' could have preserved the German Democratic Republic. Helmut Kohl later told me he had never believed that Egon Krenz was capable of getting the situation under control. I do not know — we are all wiser after the event, as the saying goes. For my part, I must admit I briefly had a faint hope that the new leaders would be able to change the course of events by establishing a new type of relations between the two German states — based on radical domestic reforms in East Germany.”

Cold WarEast GermanyGerman Reunification
Book:Memoirs
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“The last diplomatic crisis had been all too recent. A month earlier, a West German man, who had travelled through the GDR, had died of a heart attack when questioned by border guards in a barrack in Drewitz, Saxony-Anhalt. As such, this was nothing out of the ordinary. The psychological pressure that East German border guards deliberately built up during questioning proved too much for an estimated 350 people in total who died of heart failure at inner-German checkpoints.”

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Book:Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990
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“Восточная Германия была огромным местом лишения свободы, управляемым русскими, Штази воплощала в себе наихудшие крайности немецкой авторитарности и бюрократического педантизма, все, у кого есть мозги, и все, у кого есть характер, бежали на Запад до возведения стены, но узники, оставшиеся искупать коллективную вину страны, были парадоксальным образом освобождены от немецкого начала в себе. Те, с кем я познакомился в Йене, были скромны, непунктуальны, импульсивны и щедро делились тем немногим, что имели.”

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“Kids in tje East had also grown up with a genuine sense of fear that the world might actually come to an end during their lifetime. That it probably would in fact. For some this fueled nihilistic feelings - one reason Toster from Die Anderen, for instance, never got deeply political was because he stopped giving a shit.”

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Book:Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall
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“And as the Stasi began to pay more and more attention to the new network, they made the same mistake they had when trying to break up the punk scene a few years before: they sought to identify leaders and focus on undermining them. The Stasi assumed every organisation had a top-down structure like the Stasi, like the Party, like the dictatorship.”

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Book:Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall
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