Gdr Quotes

“I like trains. I like their rhythm, and I like the freedom of being suspended between two places, all anxieties of purpose taken care of: for this moment I know where I am going.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“Betrayal clearly has its own reward: the small deep human satisfaction of having one up on someone else. It is the psychology of the mistress, and this regime used it as fuel.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“There are no people who are whole" he says. "Everyone has issues of their own to deal with. Mine might be a little harder, but the main thing is how on deals with them.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers. You have to look at how normal people manage with such things in their pasts.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“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 the 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

“Beyond all of that, I could see the wall I had seen from inside the train, the wall that runs along the train line. I assumed that there, behind it, was the west, and I was right. I could have been wrong, but I was right.' If she had any future it was over there, and she needed to get to it.
I sit in the chair exploring the meaning of dumbstruck, rolling the word around in my mind. I laugh with Miriam as she laughs at herself, and at the boldness of being sixteen. At sixteen you are invulnerable. I laugh with her about rummaging around for a ladder in other people's sheds, and I laugh harder when she finds one. We laugh at the improbability of it, of someone barely more than a child poking around in Beatrix Potter's garden by the Wall, watching out for Mr McGregor and his blunderbuss, and looking for a step-ladder to scale one of the most fortified barriers on earth. We both like the girl she was, and I like the woman she has become.
She says suddenly, 'I still have the scars on my hands from climbing the barbed wire, but you can't see them so well now.' She holds out her hands. The soft parts of her palms are crazed with definite white scares, each about a centimeter long.
The first fence was wire mesh with a roll of barbed wire along the top.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“Miriam is upset. Her voice is stretched and I can't look at her. Perhaps they beat something out of her she didn't get back.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“Heute habe ich, der Zoologe, gelernt: Die afrikanische Wüstenheuschrecke hat eine ostdeutsche Verwandte, die Bücherheuschrecke (Locusta bibliophila), eine Spezies auf zwei Beinen, gekleidet in „Wisent“- oder „Boxer“-Jeans, selbstgestrickte Rollkragenpullover und olivgrüne oder erdbraune „Kutten“ (Parkas). […] Die Locusta bibliophila ernährt sich von Büchern, allerdings nur von solchen aus dem Nichtsozialistischen Wirtschaftsgebiet. Der Angriff der Bücherheuschrecke wird Wochen vor dem Leipziger Schlaraffenland-Ereignis generalstabsmäßig geplant […] Die Rüstung der Bücherheuschrecke (besagter „Messe-Mantel“, Typ Parka) wird etwa zwei Wochen vor der Schlacht einer gründlichen Überprüfung unerzogen; rechte Innenseite: in zwei Reihen nebeneinander je fünf Taschen, von Überbrust- bis in etwa Kniehöhe eingenäht (teilweise überlappend), Format 21 x 13 cm, die Leichtgängigkeit wird mittels des in der Pelzschneiderei „Harmonie“ befindlichen Exemplars Heinrich Böll, „Wanderer kommst du nach Spa…“ kontrolliert […]. Der Angriff der Bücherheuschrecke vollzieht sich in Wellen, sein unmittelbar bevorstehender Beginn wird dem scharfen Beobachter dadurch kenntlich, dass sich die ohnehin immer gierig blickenden Augen zu Hungerschlitzen verengen.”
― Uwe Tellkamp, Der Turm

“She'd confused honour with virtue. Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it. You can fight a war in an honorable way—the Geneva Convention exists for that very reason—and you can enforce the peace without any honor at all. In its essence, honour is the art of being humble. And gangsters, just like cops, politicians, soldiers, and holy men, are only ever good at what they do if they stay humble.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“The penalties for being an accessory to the attempt to flee the [GDR] were greater than the crime of trying to flee itself.”
― Anna Funder

“What in essence happened under the Treuhand was a complete transfer without compensation of property and assets accumulated over forty years through hard work and effort by GDR citizens, as well as the land they owned (which in the GDR had no monetary value as such) to, in the main, West German owners. This transfer of a country's assets — unprecedented anywhere in the world during peacetime — amounted to billions of Euros: a robbing of ordinary people for the enrichment of a few. Of those companies and individuals who bought GDR property, 80 per cent were West Germans, only 10 per cent were from other countries, and a mere 5 per cent went to GDR citizens.”
― Bruni de la Motte, Stasi State or Socialist Paradise?: The German Democratic Republic and What Became of It

“What followed was the largest and most rapid privatisation ever seen in any country in the world (except perhaps in the Soviet Union under Yeltsin). Never in the history of civilisation has a state's total assets and infrastructure been disposed of so rapidly and in such a criminal fashion. Its machinations make Al Capone look like a paragon of capitalist virtue.”
― Bruni de la Motte, Stasi State or Socialist Paradise?: The German Democratic Republic and What Became of It

“In hindsight, it's seen as inevitable that the two Germany's would reunite. But none of the people who had laid the groundwork for the fall-those who had started the tremors and endured the security forces' brutality-envisioned a unified Germany. Those people had sacrificed their places in society for the chance to form a new one, something different and distinct, an independent East Germany built form scratch. The hadn't looked to the West for inspiration before, and none of them looked to the West for salvation now that the border was open.”
― Tim Mohr, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

“The ethos of East Berlin punk infused the city with a radical egalitarianism and a DIY approach to maintaining independence-to conjuring up the world you want to live in regardless of the situation or surroundings.”
― Tim Mohr, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

“In dem kleinen sozialistischen Land hatte man gemeinhin Probleme mit den Gefühlen und dem Berühren, mit Zärtlichkeit und Anteilnahme, das lag nicht an dessen geographischer Position im Norden Europas, sondern vielmehr an seiner Geschichte, in der für überbordendes Mitgefühl noch nie Preise verliehen wurden.”
― Sibylle Berg

“I wonder how it worked inside the Stasi: who thought up these blackmail schemes? Did they send them up the line for approval? Did pieces of paper come back initialled and stamped 'Approved': the ruining of a marriage, the destruction of a career, the imprisonment of a wife, the abandonment of a child? Did they circulate internal updates: 'Five new and different ways to break a heart'?”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: 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

“To my mind, there is something warmer and more human about the carnality of other dictatorships, say in Latin America. One can more easily understand a desire for cases stuffed with money and drugs, for women and weapons and blood. These obedient grey men doing it with their underpaid informers on a weekly basis seem at once more stupid and more sinister. Betrayal clearly has its own reward: the small deep human satisfaction of having one up on someone else. It is the psychology of the mistress, and this regime used it as fuel.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“She just wanted to be herself, and doing, saying, reading and writing the things that would have made her feel like herself were all verboten.”
― Tim Mohr, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

“Kids in tje East had also grown up with a genuine sense of fear that the world might actually come to an end during their lifetime. That it probably would in fact. For some this fueled nihilistic feelings - one reason Toster from Die Anderen, for instance, never got deeply political was because he stopped giving a shit.”
― Tim Mohr, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

“And as the Stasi began to pay more and more attention to the new network, they made the same mistake they had when trying to break up the punk scene a few years before: they sought to identify leaders and focus on undermining them. The Stasi assumed every organisation had a top-down structure like the Stasi, like the Party, like the dictatorship.”
― Tim Mohr, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

“C. was reminded of another little significant-seeming episode: Once he’d had to spend a night in jail in A.—the main town of the district he came from—and realized right away that he’d never get a single minute’s sleep in the hole they’d locked him up in. His cell was probably used as a drunk tank; traces of the catastrophes attendant to the drying-out process were visible all around… In the GDR, thought C., succumbing to alcohol still made for indelible images, so it was not entirely unreasonable for writers and artists to spend their time drinking. The cell whose door slammed behind him consisted of several cubic yards of bad smells, and contained a cot, a broken-down chair, and a cracked toilet that wouldn’t stop running and stood in a puddle of sludge. On the wall behind the cot, a broad swath of vomit trailed down, already dried; the dim light of a 25 watt bulb showed the walls covered from top to bottom with unidentifiable filth—possibly human excrement—spatters of blood, and countless inscriptions: scratched messages and addresses. It was enough reading material to last him all night. One of the first slogans he read stated straight out: Long live capitalism.”
― Wolfgang Hilbig, The Interim

“Some of the “songs” on offer were served up with screams and inarticulate noises to an audience consisting mostly of teenagers who, whipped up by the music, carried out degenerate motions.”
― Katja Hoyer, Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990

“From 1971, the rates paid were means-tested, allowing working class families with children privileged access. A four-person household in West Germany spent around 21 percent of their net income on rental costs while a similar household in the East only needed 4.4 percent.”
― Katja Hoyer, Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990

“This project was hugely successful, perhaps one of the most effective aid projects ever conducted. Vietnam is now the world’s second largest producer of coffee, producing around 30 million 60-kilogram bags every year, and its industry employs 2.6 million people. Its Robusta beans have a high caffeine content and are ideal for granular and instant coffee, which is drunk in large quantities around the world. Only 6 percent of the produce is used internationally, while the rest is exported at an estimated annual worth of $3 billion.”
― Katja Hoyer, Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990

“The last diplomatic crisis had been all too recent. A month earlier, a West German man, who had travelled through the GDR, had died of a heart attack when questioned by border guards in a barrack in Drewitz, Saxony-Anhalt. As such, this was nothing out of the ordinary. The psychological pressure that East German border guards deliberately built up during questioning proved too much for an estimated 350 people in total who died of heart failure at inner-German checkpoints.”
― Katja Hoyer, Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990

“Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart,” that was officially used to refer to the Berlin Wall.”
― Katja Hoyer, Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990

“In other fields too, female ambition had become the norm. By 1988, over 90% of East German women fought their own battles in the workplace. The GDR had reached the highest rate of female employment in the world as women entered every last bastion of previously exclusively male domains.”
― Katja Hoyer, Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990