Stasiland

Frau von Schnitzler greets Funder at their home. Funder eyes the decor of this man’s living room: “a bust of Marx, a daguerreotype of Lenin, and, as my eye casts along, even a miniature full-body statue of Stalin” (130).

The first thing von Schnitzler tells Funder is “‘what you will have read about me is 95 per cent false’” (130). Funder relates von Schnitzler’s life story: born in 1918 to a wealthy Berlin family, they had close ties to Hitler and the Nazi regime, and profited off of it. He was fascinated from an early age with Communism.

Funder wants to talk to him about The Black Channel, but he’d rather talk about the war, during which the British took him as a POW and he made broadcasts in German for the BBC for a program called German Prisoners of War Speak to the Homeland.

He gives an angry account of what’s on the “piece of filth television” (132) today, denouncing a program called Big Brother, which, Funder notes, takes its name from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a book banned in the GDR. Von Schnitzler admits that in the later stages of the regime, he committed to the fight against imperialism.

He begins to talk about Mielke, who he considers a friend and calls “‘the most humane human being’” (137), which startles Funder because she hasn’t heard Mielke referred to in this way. As a parting gift, she gives him a pin of the Australian and German flags together. He is at first surprised that it is the Federal Republic’s flag, not the GDR’s. Finally, he gestures to where he will put it: among his collection of Communist decor.

Funder invites Julia over for lunch. She wants more of Julia’s story. Julia begins by saying that fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, was more intense for her than others and even now, she finds it hard to subject herself to authority. She finally tells Funder she was raped.

It happened at a wedding she was attending out of town. She was staying in a high-rise at the bride’s apartment and got into an elevator with a man who pressed the emergency button and forced himself on her. He threatened to kill her if she screamed.

She went to the police the next day, but they were not sympathetic, because rape was taboo in East Germany. The female police officer even declined to examine her, so she was examined by a male colleague. Julia felt like they didn’t believe her, and Funder says of Julia’s demeanor in recounting the experience: “There are no tears; it is as if she has no self-pity at all” (142).

The rapist was convicted, but through the trial, “Julia felt violated all over again” (143). She became suicidal and an alcoholic. Due to the amnesties of 1990, she feels that hardened criminals were let out with some of the political prisoners. It was possible her rapist was also released. For her, “the end of the security state meant the end, too, of her personal security” (144).

Funder goes out drinking with Klaus that night. She wakes up hungover and goes to the local pool. She wants to swim laps, but it is a bit chaotic in the pool. Some people are swimming in diagonals and others are just bathing. A pool warden tells her that there’s no swimming, only bathing, and goes on to list the complicated schedule for when one is allowed to bath and swim. Funder considers the pool to be “the subconscious of the country: the mess that gives rise to all that order” (147).