47 pages • 1-hour read
Stasiland
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Chapters 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Charlie”
Mariam resumes her story. In prison, she is tortured by being dunked in a tub of water. Her treatment leaves a mark even now: she has removed the doors from the hinges in her apartment, and once, she fled from her husband out of a semi-involuntary flight reaction after he stood up when she said something provocative.
Mariam recalls the beginning of her and Charlie’s relationship and how he came to be pursued by the Stasi after a playful game involving swimming out to a Swedish boat while on holiday. The authorities think he is trying to leave the country. Afterward, he quits teaching and starts writing provocative books and articles.
Being that Miriam is an ex-criminal and her husband is under surveillance, the authorities occasionally search their house. Because Charlie has applied to leave the country, and because they suspect that he is trying to leave illegitimately, the Stasi arrest him. Miriam is not allowed to visit him and almost two months later, a policeman comes to tell her she should collect his things because he is dead.
Angered and distraught, Miriam contacts Major Trost, the district attorney, who tells her that Charlie hung himself. She doesn’t believe him. She meets with Dr. Wolfgang Vogel, a government lawyer who negotiates the trade of people from East to West Germany for a price. Miriam wants to get on his list, so she goes and sees Herr X, who was Charlie’s lawyer and a representative of Vogel. The lawyer does not think he can do anything for her.
In Miriam’s opinion, the funeral is a charade. Charlie is buried in a coffin, rather than cremated, only after she makes a fuss. But she can see, even from far off, that he has head wounds and no strangulation marks around his neck. Nearly one year later, Miriam is abruptly put on a train and expelled from East Germany. She is not allowed to pack her things or say goodbye to her friends.
Funder wonders if Miriam stopped living her life after Charlie died, “if her existence is no longer real to her in itself, more like a living epitaph to a life that was” (44). Miriam has now come to Leipzig because she wants to find out what really happened to Charlie.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Linoleum Palace”
After a long day listening to Miriam’s story, Funder returns to her apartment in Berlin and is startled to find the woman she is subletting from, Julia, on a ladder, unscrewing her bookcases to take them to her own home.
Funder doesn’t mind this continuous “denuding” (48) of her apartment. Although many items are being taken, she is still able to live there, although there is nothing that produces beauty or joy, and in that way, she sees her living quarters as similar to East Germany.
Thinking about the horror of Miriam’s story, Funder wonders what it must’ve been like to be an informant or a Stasi officer. She takes out an advertisement in the paper, seeking former Stasi officers who are open for an interview.
Chapters 4-5 Analysis
These two chapters bring Miriam’s story to a conclusion. Her search for the truth behind her husband’s death illuminates the methods of obfuscation that the Stasi used to evade responsibility for the death of dissenters. The lawyers and judges in Miriam’s story are little more than a veneer of democracy and fairness; behind them, the Stasi had full control.
Two themes begin to emerge that will be important for the rest of the book, and both have to do with the preservation of the past. On a cultural and historical level, the danger of forgetting the mistakes of the past is a concern of Miriam: “‘You know, they just want to stop thinking about the past. They want to pretend it all didn’t happen’” (45). On a personal level, the book concerns itself with the ways in which past actions (both positive and negative) play into the construction of identity:
Some people are comfortable talking about their lives, as if they can make sense of the progression of random events that made them what they are. This involves a kind of forward-looking faith in life; a conviction that cause and effect are linked, and that they are themselves more than the sum of their past (44).
The value of this “forward-looking faith” will be important in the chapters to come.
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