Anna Funder > Quotes

“He must at the same time face – or efface – not one, but two devastating truths: the previous incumbent died of overwork and neglect, and he, too, may not have long.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“Now Julia had withdrawn from him, withdrawn into her home, and withdrawn from hope. This was more than internal emigration. It was exile.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“anti-fascist protective measure’. I have always been fond of this term which has something of the prophylactic about it, protecting easterners from the western disease of shallow materialism. It obeys all the logic of locking up free people to keep them safe from criminals.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“Nevertheless he will not stay. He doesn’t want to be an invalid in someone else’s house. A house is a life you make, and if he is in his own house he’ll still be in his own life.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“Nearby, Hitler’s bunker has been uncovered in building works. No-one could decide about that either—a memorial could become a shrine for neo-Nazis, but to erase it altogether might signal forgetting or denial. In the end, the bunker was reburied just as it was. The mayor said, perhaps in another fifty years people would be able to decide what to do. To remember or forget—which is healthier? To demolish it or to fence it off? To dig it up, or leave it lie in the ground?”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“Yes," she says, smiling, "I know it's relative. We easterners have an advantage, perhaps, in that we can remember and compare two kinds of systems." Her mouth twists into a smile as she collects her cigarettes and lighter together and puts them in her pocket. "But I don't know if that's an advantage. I mean you see the mistakes of one system - the surveillance - and the mistakes of the other - the inequality - but there's nothing you could have done in one, and nothing you can do now about the other." She laughs wryly. "And the clearer you see that, the worse you feel.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“After the Wall fell the German media called East Germany ‘the most perfected surveillance state of all time’. At the end, the Stasi had 97,000 employees—more than enough to oversee a country of seventeen million people. But it also had over 173,000 informers among the population. In Hitler’s Third Reich it is estimated that there was one Gestapo agent for every 2000 citizens, and in Stalin’s USSR there was one KGB agent for every 5830 people. In the GDR, there was one Stasi officer or informant for every sixty-three people.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“But he has the gift of taking things easy. Cushioned by alcohol, his landings are soft. He seems incapable of regret, and anger evaporates off him like sweat.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“I’m not that interested,’ he says. ‘I didn’t let them get to me.’ 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.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“It comes down to something in the German mentality,’ he says, ‘a certain drive for order and thoroughness and stuff like that.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“I once saw a note on a Stasi file from early 1989 that I would never forget. In it a young lieutenant alerted his superiors to the fact that there were so many informers in church opposition groups at demonstrations that they were making these groups appear stronger than they really were. In one of the most beautiful ironies I have ever seen, he dutifully noted that, by having swelled the ranks of the opposition, the Stasi was giving the people heart to keep demonstrating against them.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“I think that there is no parallel in history where, almost overnight, the offices of a secret service have gone from being so feared they are barely mentionable, to being a museum where you can sit in an easy chair next to the boss’s private pissoir and watch a video on how his office was stormed.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“It is this prospect, of something freshly imagined, some new possibility of belief, that America holds out to all comers. — Toller”
― Anna Funder, All That I Am

“I hear fear though in his voice, the flipside of fury. Fear perhaps that his end, soon to come, will also be a desecrated grave. Then I remember his conviction to the cause. I think he may not be so much afraid of death itself but that it will eliminate, finally, his powers of rebuttal.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“Do you ever run into any Stasi men you recognise in the street?’ I ask. I think that is what would terrify me, in the nonsensical way in which it is horrible to run into someone who has wronged you.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“Fidelity is a peculiar promise. To some people it’s fundamental; to others it’s a matter of lip service, of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’. In my own life, I feel pretty strongly that other people’s affairs are exactly that – theirs, and none of my business.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“Il problema della vita è che puoi procedere solo alla cieca, in un'unica direzione. La memoria ha delle idee tutte sue; carpisce elementi da gni quando e cerca di metterli insieme. Ti sorprende da tutte le angolazioni, con tutto quello che sei venuto a sapere in seguito, e ti comunica le novità.”
― Anna Funder, All That I Am

“No worries,’ he says, and he believes her, and does not believe her.”
― Anna Funder, The Girl with the Dogs: Penguin Special

“Se dice que los psicópatas, gente sin problemas de conciencia, suelen ser buenos generales y políticos:”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Historias tras el muro de Berlín

“In Dresden once, on a bridge over the river Elbe, I saw a plaque commemorating the liberation of the East Germans from their Nazi oppressors by their brothers the Russians”
― anna funder

“They are at a hinge moment: between youth and age, between the life you thought you wanted and the one you feel might, now, suit you better. They are like hermit crabs who outgrow one shell and need to leave it before they are trapped inside, emerging for a moment, shell-less and pink, vulnerable to predators of every stripe.”
― Anna Funder, The Girl with the Dogs: Penguin Special

“Per zio Erwin c'era un sorta di curriculum dell'esistenza in cui le cose da fare erano state stabilite dagli altri. Le soddisfazioni e i piaceri della vita non consistevano tanto nel farle, quanto nello spuntarle dalla lista.”
― Anna Funder, All That I Am

“Une grande vie alors,’ he says. ‘A big life, then.’ He gives a kind of Gallic shrug, lifting his arms out and letting them flop at his sides. She leans in and kisses him for a long time. It feels anatomical. She has to get home.”
― Anna Funder, The Girl with the Dogs: Penguin Special

“Eileen was a wisp of a human but inhumanly strong; her nickname, for reasons no one remembers, was Pig.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“To my mind, a person is not their work, just where it came from. To want the two to be the same, on pain of ‘cancellation’, is a new kind of tyranny. And from there, no art comes.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“It is something from the middle of that story that best suits where she is, in the middle of her life. It’s hard to remember exactly, but as she looks at Dan – his spray of acne scars, his sweat-stained shirt – her heart contracts and she understands that this is her one and only life.”
― Anna Funder, The Girl with the Dogs: Penguin Special

“The healthiest of writers can feel terror racing to finish a book. The idea that it must go off into the world is like watching your inner life continue without you. It will emerge leaving you husked like a cicada skin, to be blown away.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“In my section,’ he says, ‘they were all journalists. We used them to start scandals, or break open political cover-ups. We funded them, and we fed them scoops.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“Maybe a more fluid understanding of gender will eventually also free us not only from the fictions of what it is to be female and what it is to be male, but also from the assumptions about work and care that those definitions secretly, and not so secretly, carry. The other reason it’s hard to talk about is because my husband and I think of ourselves as equals. To draw attention to the gendered load feels like driving a wedge between us – though in truth the wedge is already there,”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“And I know that her small cat is incontinent, which makes her place smell, somehow, of anxiety.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall