Stasiland

Werner Coch and Frau Paul’s husband receive instructions that involve code words and a piece of plaster that will be removed if the tunnel escape plan is deemed unsafe.

In the present, Funder goes to the same apartment that the tunnel was originally dug from, which is currently being renovated. She finds it in the basement and tries to imagine all the people who left their country from this spot.

Back in Frau Paul’s story, Coch gets caught by the Stasi. Coch is taken into custody and then to a prison at Hohenschönhausen. Frau Paul’s husband gets away, goes home, and the couple resigns themselves to staying in East Germany and not seeing their son.

From then on, they are followed. One day, Frau Paul is taken right off the street and subjected to a twenty-two-hour interrogation at Stasi HQ. They offer her a deal: she can see her son if, in exchange, she arranges to meet up with Michael Hinze, the student who helped a great number of East Germans escape. Frau Paul suspects that they are going to use her as bait to kidnap him. She refuses. She later learns that her husband and the three students, as well as thirty others planning to escape, have been arrested.

Frau Paul and her husband are held at Hohenschönhausen for five months and then transported to Rostock, on the Baltic Sea, for trial. They charge her with “aiding and abetting citizens of the German Democratic Republic to illegally leave the GDR” (223). They are sentenced to four years of hard labor. Werner Coch gets one year and nine months in prison because he was deemed an accessory.

Frau Paul takes Funder to Hohenschönhausen prison, “another blank on the map” (223). She gives Funder a tour and Funder gets into the truck Frau Paul was transported in, which contains six tiny cells and a tiny corridor. Funder finds it horrible. Frau Paul takes Funder to the place she was interrogated and another building where other prisoners were tortured.

In November 1963, Frau Paul received a letter from a doctor at Westend Hospital relating that their son was doing well.

Michael Hinze tells Funder that Frau Paul and her husband are heroes, and Funder considers that perhaps the way Frau Paul sees herself is affected by the way the Stasi saw her.

In August 1964, Frau Paul and her husband are freed by the west, but are not released. They receive positive news of their son (who is now four years old) from one of the nurses. He is released eight months later, to East Germany, when he is well enough. Frau Paul finds him a stranger and almost regrets not taking the deal the Stasi offered her.

Funder meets Frau Paul’s son, Torsten, and asks him if he thinks his mother made the wrong decision. Torsten says no. Torsten works with bands in the electronic music scene. “‘There are no people who are whole,’” (233) he says; he doesn’t wish to think about the past. He takes Funder to the station, and drives on, “crooked and crippled and living for the day” (234).

Funder meets her last Stasi man at a pub. He is the only Stasi man she’s met who outed himself. He was a lieutenant colonel who worked in the overseas spy service for the Stasi. He was responsible, as he puts it, for “‘disinformation and psychological warfare against the west’” (236).

The HVA, the spy service, is led by Markus Wolf, a slim intellectual who the officers looked up to. According to Bohnsack’s telling, no one really liked Mielke. At a banquet celebrating forty years of the GDR, he spoke for four hours, neglecting to mention the democracy demonstrations going on. He keeps interrupting everyone to say more words, and Herr Bohnsack calls the situation “insane.”

By Christmas of 1989, the HVA are being made to simulate combat, in the event of an outbreak of World War III, which Bohnsack says was almost farcical. He is afraid they would be ordered to shoot the demonstrators.

Back in September, Bohnsack had read the writing on the wall, and, against orders, begins to destroy documents. When he learns that a magazine is going to publish the identities of the top paid Stasi employees, he calls another news magazine and tells his whole story. This gets him blacklisted from the club of former Stasi men, and as Bohnsack puts it, “‘I’ve fallen between two stools, you might say’” (243).

Early in the morning. Funder receives word her mother’s cancer is back. Funder must fly home. She leaves a message for Miriam stating this. It will be four years before she returns to Berlin.