47 pages • 1 hour read
Anna FunderStasiland
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 25-28Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 25 Summary:“Berlin, Spring 2000”
Back in Berlin, Funder walks through the park on a beautiful spring day. She moves back into her old apartment. She takes out and rereads a letter she sent to Miriam that explains how writing about Miriam’s story caused it to take on a life of its own. Funder did not receive a reply from Miriam, but she did get one from Julia, whom Funder also wrote to. Julia is working in a feminist bookshop in San Francisco and is very happy leaving her past behind.
Funder sits in the park. One man, wearing a medal on a ribbon around his neck, strikes up a conversation with a man named Harry, who says he’s been hunting elephants in Mexico and Funder speculates that “perhaps this is really a society of poets and priests where all stories are metaphorical. Or perhaps reality has been so strange here that anything else is welcome to take its place” (249).
The man with the metal invites Funder to come mushrooming with the men, and Funder wonders if he’s joking. It turns out he is not. He calls himself a professor of mushroom-picking and talks about the old days of the east, when everything from alcohol to medicine was cheap. He begins to talk about how those who got shot knew what they were doing, and Funder says, “I know this argument as well: if you didn’t buck the system, then it wouldn’t harm you. But, from what I have seen, it probably would” (252).
Chapter 26 Summary: “The Wall”
Funder calls Frau Paul, who now works for an organization that campaigns for the compensation of those persecuted by the regime. She says she was recently followed home by a Volvo and she expected the vehicle to have an ex-Stasi inside.
Mielke dies at ninety-two. This reminds Funder to call Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler. Von Schnitzler is outraged that Mielke’s grave has been desecrated.
Funder visits a newly-reconstructed section of the Wall, rebuilt for tourists, which she views as “a sanitized Disney version; it is history, airbrushed for effect (256). Inside the museum, she runs into Hagen Koch, who is taking a busload of tourists along where the Wall was and invites Funder along on his rehearsal run.
He takes her to a new apartment building where there is still an East German guard tower in the courtyard. He takes credit for it, stating that at the end of 1989, he was responsible for Denkmalschutz, or the preservation of historical monuments. Most were taken down, but with the tower, he put a homeless man up there and gave the man money and a job to renovate it, and so it stayed.
They drive into town and Koch shows Funder the narrow strip of granite representing where the Wall once was. She realizes that otherwise, one would have no idea it was ever there. He then takes her to a fenced-in lot between apartment buildings that was technically in the eastern zone, but that the Wall didn’t block off from the west: “it was, literally, no-man’s land” (260). After the Wall came down, a family used it as a garden, but two brothers fought and split the garden into two separate zones via a fence.
They go to the Oberbaum Bridge, where the longest strip of remaining wall runs along the river bank. A man named Gerd, a stall keeper selling old memorabilia from the east, gives Funder a piece of the Wall in a small plastic bag.
Chapter 27 Summary: “Puzzlers”
Funder travels Nuremberg to visit the Stasi File Authority office, where the puzzle women work. She wonders if they have found out about Charlie, so that Miriam can have closure in her story. The director, Herr Raillard, tells her that the piecing together of shredded documents started in 1995, after many sacks were found at Normannenstrasse which “contained shredded and hand-ripped files, index cards, photos and unwound tapes and film” (263).
Funder feels a mild panic when she sees the office where all the paper is, because it seems like the project is not as efficient or diligent as she had hoped. She asks about security and Raillard tells her that there have been background checks to make sure none of the workers have Stasi connections. It’s not what she expected: “It is something between a hobby farm for jigsaw enthusiasts and a sheltered workshop for obsessives” (265).
They get on the topic of East Germany, and one worker tells about taking in an East German couple, who couldn’t believe how many kinds of ketchup they had in the west, and that the woman realized that no one needed so many brands of ketchup. A man retorts, “I think we need to remember that they came here for the freedom, not for fifteen kinds of ketchup” (268).
The director gives Funder a memo outlining the math behind reconstructing pages, which concludes that it would take more than 375 years to reconstruct everything.
Chapter 28 Summary: “Miriam and Charlie”
On her way back to Berlin, Funder gets off at Leipzig. She visits a museum, where she sees a TV monitor playing von Schnitzler’s program, and she also sees a case of Renft memorabilia. A smaller, shabbier museum is also there, and Funder is happier that it still exists, because it is more authentic. This smaller museum is the former Leipzig branch of the Stasi File Authority.
She calls Miriam, who answers excitedly and comes to take Funder back to her apartment. Funder tells her about everything she’s learned since they first met. Miriam works at a radio station and was asked to make a program on GDR nostalgia parties (where everyone calls each other “Comrade”), but she refused.
Miriam shows Funder a picture of her and Charlie, and Funder can hardly believe how beautiful Miriam once was: “I would never have seen this girl in her" (276). Apparently, the DA found a witness who reported an account on the day of Charlie’s death, but another report countered it, and it’s seeming more and more like a mystery they’ll never know. Miriam suspects that the guards roughed him up when he refused to co-operate, hit him on the head, and then left him there to die. For now, she has “only the frail comfort of theories” (280).
Funder stays the night with Miriam and on the train the next day, she reads Charlie’s poem:
In this land / I have made myself sick with silence / In this land I have wandered, lost / In this land / I hunkered down to see / What will become of me. / In this land / I held myself tight / So as not to scream. / —But I did scream, so loud / That this land howled back at me / As hideously / As it builds its houses. / In this land / I have been sown / Only my head sticks / Defiant, out of the earth / But one day it too will be mown / Making me, finally / Of this land. (281-82).
Chapters 25-28 Analysis
These final chapters document Funder’s return to Berlin and her reconnection with those she heard stories from before, as well as those who’ve been referred to and perhaps misrepresented in Funder’s imagination, like the men in the park and the “puzzle women” in Nuremberg.
We see shades of nostalgia for the east in the drunks in the park (“‘bring back the Communists, is what I say. The pubs were fuller under Honecker. Cheers.’” (251)) as we do in the irony of Hagen Koch, the man who drew the line along which the Wall was built, leading tours of people along where the wall was once built, serving as “a lone crusader against forgetting” (259).
Funder finally meets the puzzle women in Chapter 27, distant figures alluded to throughout the book, and finds that they are not all women, and their enterprise seems far more optimistic and fruitless than she’d hoped. Some of them get into a long discussion about the horror of the state using people against each other, and Funder considers:
I think of Koch’s father having to change political parties or be exiled to a Russian camp, or Frau Paul, who could have been bait in a trap to catch a westerner, and even of Julia, imprisoned in her country and offered freedom within it only if she would inform on the people in her life. I think of the generational cycles of tragedy the Germans have been inflicting on themselves (267).
A lot of this final section seems to be about a fundamental failure to truly imagine what it’s like for someone else: Funder is proven wrong one final time when she sees pictures of Miriam as a young girl. She makes a symbolic connection between Miriam keeping her husband’s photos locked away and the way the new wall is an ersatz version of the original. She adds, with a note of finality, that while the regime may be gone, the world cannot be set to rights until Miriam has some kind of justice: “Things have been put behind glass, but it is not yet over" (280).
