47 pages • 1 hour read
Stasiland
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Chapters 18-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 18 Summary: “The Plate”
Hagen Koch’s father dies in 1985, and he is forbidden to attend the funeral because his sister, a westerner, is attending. He cannot take this, so he leaves his regiment, transferring from the Stasi into the regular army. He feels angry about the fact that he is so replaceable that in an act of defiance, on his way out, he steals a plate from the wall in his office.
Three weeks later, the head of his old Stasi section pays him a visit to ask about the plate. Koch tells him to leave, and the commandant later establishes a Working Group on Plate Re-Procurement. Koch is summoned to headquarters and interviewed. The district attorney visits him and gets him to sign a sworn affidavit confirming he has no knowledge of where the plate is.
In 1993, Koch is interviewed by a television crew. They try to remove the plate because it’s causing glare issues, but Koch firmly demands the plate stay where it is. He tells the whole story on camera, and several days after the program is broadcast, men overseeing the fire sale of East German state-owned enterprises arrive for the plate, which they claim was property of the GDR and now rightful property of the Federal Republic of Germany. Koch refuses. He is indicted on theft of GDR property.
Later, the men return to say the charges have been withdrawn, but he is being charged now with perjury, because of the affidavit he signed. Koch can’t believe it. He responds, “‘Do you want to see me punished because I worked for the Firm, or do you want to see me punished because I worked against the Firm? What is it, exactly, you want?’” (181).
Funder calls Miriam and says she’d like to catch up. Using a map from Herr Koch and a drawing from Miriam, she tries to find the fence Miriam first climbed to escape.
Chapter 19 Summary: “Klaus”
Funder pays her friend Klaus a visit. His living room is filled with pictures of himself, which track his development from a clean-cut young man to “a long-haired star with a sheepskin coat and a bass guitar” (185). He was "the bad boy of East German rock’n’roll” (185), the front man of a band called The Klaus Renft Combo. It was authentic music that spoke to a rebellious spirit and connected with people in the midst of the manufactured pop culture that the government put out.
Because they were not permitted to play in towns, Renft played in villages for enormous crowds. One day, when they go to have their performers’ license renewed, the chairperson of the licensing committee tells them the band no longer exists. Secretly, Klaus takes a recording of this and passes it to his girlfriend, to take to West Berlin, and tells the committee that if anything happens to them, it will be broadcast. Still, the band’s records disappear from shops and they cease to be written about or played on the radio.
Two of the more political members of the band are arrested while the others stay with a manager, who is a Stasi man; they rebrand copied Renft songs, so the Stasi could “satisfy the needs of the people, but with a band it could control” (191).
Klaus puts on a video of the band playing for Funder. She loves it. Afterward, Klaus says, “‘you can’t let it eat you up, you know, make you bitter. You’ve got to laugh where you can,’” and Funder adds: “he’s right, of course. And to drink” (193).
Chapter 20 Summary “Herr Bock of Golm”
Funder meets with another Stasi man, Herr Bock, who was a professor at the training academy of the ministry. He taught the science of recruiting informers.
She meets Bock at his home and he tells her about how he taught in the Defense section of the ministry (a euphemistic title which Funder points out could only refer to defending the government against the people). He tells her, for example, about the danger of the church, where oppositional thought could take root, and how the Stasi recruited young bright students from theological colleges to be informers. He claims that 65 percent of church leaders were informers.
Herr Bock is now a business adviser working for West German firms who come to buy East German assets, “once more getting the trust of his people and selling them cheap” (202). Funder leaves and then returns because the bus isn’t coming. She waits in Herr Bock’s house for a taxi. He seems to be enjoying having her at his mercy until the taxi arrives.
Chapters 18-20 Analysis
At the end of Chapter 18, we see Funder’s attempts to connect even more intimately with the past. Up until now, she has visited the museums and interviewed the people, but now she seems to need to get closer, to find the exact spot where Miriam tried to climb over the Berlin Wall, “as if to bring the past into some kind of focus” (182).
We see echoes of Miriam’s story in Klaus’s. When the head of the licensing committee says, “‘We didn’t say you were banned […] We said you don’t exist’” (189), it echoes Miriam’s experience at the Employment Office. It is an exemplification of how Funder defines “Stasiland,” when talking to Uwe: “a place where what was said was not real, and what was real was not allowed” (120).
Funder also finds optimism in Klaus’s story, and perhaps a bit of a solution. Klaus did not capitulate to the Stasi: “This, I think, is his victory. This is what stops him being bound to the past and carrying it around like a wound. If there was ‘internal emigration’ in the GDR, there was also, perhaps, internal victory” (193). While this doesn’t provide an antidote to those currently struggling with what they did, it provides a way out of the mire of shame in the form of a vigilance of one’s present and a healthy sense of the great mistakes of history going forward.
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