“The Wall remains the most potent character and symbol in this
text.” Do you agree?
Due in Monday…
Introduction
Introduction:
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Author
Title
Place into context
Narrative structure (p.1213)
Contention and 3
supporting
reasons/arguments
Consider including quotes
that capture the essence of
the text
Main Body Paragraph One:
TS- The Wall is a symbol of
political oppression and division
but also a metaphoric bell jar of
this “place lost in time”.
The Wall remains the historical,
political and psychological barrier
that divides the former East and
West Germany. As Anna herself
makes “new connections” that ‘do
not come out of the ordered
store” of her past memories, she
discovers the continuing potency
of the Wall as a symbol of a lost
nation, trying to reconstruct
themselves from a “country that
no longer exists”.
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As the Wall “cut a strange wound through the city”
on a physical and psychological level, Funder
unravels the painful memories of “a land gone
wrong”. Stasiland offers a careful but powerful
analysis of what went wrong in East Germany after
1945, and how it affected the people Funder
interviews. Although the author offers no simple
solutions, her underlying message reminds us both
the dangers of forgetting and the horrors of
remembering and as Funder reflects, “To remember
or forget; which is healthier? To demolish or fence it
off? To dig it up or leave it in the ground?”
Creative non-fiction text; literary journalism; where
factual material is shaped into engaging narrative;
journalistic narrative non-fictional style; The world
Funder enters as an investigative journalist is post
1989; Funder’s narrative is held together by personal
stories she recounts, either of the former Stasi men
she interview, or those gradually revealed by the
women she befriends.
“Along with the Great Wall of China, it was one of
the longest structures ever built to keep people
separate from one another.”
“’Have you travelled yourself since the Wall came
down?’” (p.3)
“East Germany felt like a secret walled-in garden, a
place lost in time.” (p.4)
“’There must be people who stood up to the regime
somehow, or who were wrongfully imprisoned....as if
a tiny piece of national pride could be salvaged and
tied onto a couple of student pacifists ..What about
here?....’” (p. 12)
“After the Wall fell the German media called East
Germany ‘the most perfected surveillance state of all
time’”. (p. 57)
“Within hours of his blunder 10,000 people were at
the Bornholmer Bridge checkpoint on foot and in
their Trabant cars, thronging the Wall.” (p.64)
“The people didn’t know and didn’t care. They
steamed through into West Berlin……dancing on the
Wall.” (p. 66)
Main Body Paragraph Two:
TS-Within this “secret walled
garden” that symbolised the Iron
Curtain, the Communist world of
deprivation, oppression and
control, is largely forgotten as
“East Germans and their stories”
remain a painful but “lost”,
ignored” history, like the “hidden
short cuts” and “unmarked lanes”
of Leipzig. While Anna describes
herself as an Alice in Wonderland,
it is only when she moves beyond
the physical “detail” of pictures,
boxes and glass cases, that she
begins to uncover the disparate
but connected voices and stories
of a lost people “from this land
gone wrong”.
Miriam
Julia
Frau Paul
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Main Body Paragraph
Three:
TS- The Wall remains the
chronological and political
symbol of division. Just as the
“neighbourhood of Mitte”
represents the change from pre
Wall to Post Wall Berlin in its act
of “ideological redecoration”
(p.52.). However, these attempts
of superficial architectural
“I went home to Australia, but now I am back in
Berlin. I could not get the Miriam’s story, the strange
second-hand tale of a woman I had never met, out of
my mind.” (p. 9)
“The next morning she got on a train for Berlin. It
was New Year’s Eve1968, and Miriam Weber was
going over the Wall.” (p18)
“At the Brandenburg Gate she was amazed that she
could walk right up to the Wall…” (p.19)
“At Bornholmer Bridge the border ran, in theory,
along the space between the tracks…” (p. 20)
“We laugh at the improbability of it, of someone
barely more than a child poking about in Beatrix
Potter’s garden by the Wall, watching out for Mr
McGregor and his blunderbuss….” (p.21-22)
“The train that night was crammed full of people
being expelled from the GDR. It was as though
anyone who might catch the glasnost virus had to be
put over the Wall.” (p.44)
“Shortly after the revolution in 1989 Miriam went to
the cemetery to find Herr Mohre, but he had
vanished as soon as the Wall came down.” (p. 46)
“Over the next week, I think about Miriam and I think
about Stasi men. I am curious about what it must
have been like to be on the inside of the Firm, and
then to have that world and your place in it
disappear.” (p.53)
renovation barely cover the
exposed and “tattered faces of the
city’s “grey buildings”. Anna’s
curiosity to know about “what it
must have been like on the inside
of the Firm” deconstructs the
“mysteries” of the “’most
perfected surveillance state of all
time’” through her “meetings”
with the Stasi “underlings”.
The Stasi as symbols of the WallKarl Eduard von Schnizler, Herr
Bohnsack, Hagen Koch, Herr
Winz, Herr Bock, Herr Christian
Conclusion-