Quotes from Anna Funder

Look,' he said, 'they are just Germans who had Communism for forty years and went backwards, and all they want now is the money to have big TV sets and holidays in Majorca like everyone else. It was an experiment and it failed.

All day long they hold what look like philosophical discussions, gesticulating slowly with their free hands and clasping tins of beer with the other. They seem to share knowledge of a world where each of them once had a place.

Relations between people were conditioned by the fact that one or other of you could be one of them. Everyone suspected everyone else, and the mistrust this bred was the foundation of social existence. Miriam could have been denounced

To understand her," I say, "you have to understand what she was trying to do. Dora was ... a verb.

They didn't need as many external rules as we did because they had internalised the standards of decency.

Hagen Koch: 'There was no other transport. People on bikes could evade checkpoints, they could have secret meetings

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

But in Potsdam people come up and say'—he puts on a small sorry voice—'"You were right. Capitalism is even worse than you told us it would be. In the GDR you could go out alone at night as a woman! You could leave your apartment door open!"' You didn't need to, I think, they could see inside anyway.

There is an art, a deeply political art, of taking circumstances as they arise and attributing them to your side or the opposition, in a constant tallying of reality towards ends of which it is innocent.

Per capita the East Germans drank more than twice as much as their West German counterparts.

But there was also a car—for the GDR an expensive car, a Russian Lada—that

We don't catch hold of an idea, rather the idea catches hold of us and enslaves us and whips us into the arena so that we, forced to be gladiators, fight for it.

The pills sit in there in their colours and shapes ready to push me, in plastic-coated increments, into my future.

And just remember Comrades this one thing: the most important thing you have is power! Hang on to power at all costs! Without it, you are nothing!" He didn't mention the democracy demonstrations and the fact that the Soviets were backing away from us,' Herr Bohnsack says, 'but it was clear he must, at some level, have felt the end coming.

History was so quickly remade, and so successfully, that it can truly be said that the easterners did not feel then, and do not feel now, that they were the same Germans as those responsible for Hitler's regime. This sleight-of-history must rank as one of the most extraordinary innocence manoeuvres of the century. In Dresden once, on a blue

To start a new country, with new values and newly minted socialist citizens, it is necessary to begin at the beginning: with children. Schoolteachers in the eastern regions were immediately dismissed because their job had been to educate children in the values of the Nazi regime. Socialist teachers had to be created.

In a society riven into 'us' and 'them', an ambitious young person might well want to be one of the group in the know, one of the unmolested. If there was never going to be an end to your country, and you could never leave, why wouldn't you opt for a peaceful life and a satisfying career?

At ground level Alexanderplatz is a monstrous expanse of grey concrete designed to make people feel small. It works.

Why did people need a permit to ride a bike?' I ask. 'Because they could bring messages! Pass on news!' Koch cries. 'There was no other transport. People on bikes could evade checkpoints, they could have secret meetings.' Clearly the atmosphere of paranoid control had set in early under the Russians.

There are some people just the thought of whom makes us behave better.

It was a condition of sanity both to accept 'GDR-logic' and to ignore it. 'If you took things as seriously as people in the west think we must have, we would have all killed ourselves!

Did he know about the doping?' Children at sports schools were given hormones under the guise of vitamins. In a scandal that has come to light since the Wall fell, the pills accelerated growth and strength, but turned the little girls halfway into boys.

Von Schnitzler's job was to show extracts from western television broadcast into the GDR—anything from news items to game shows to 'Dallas'—and rip it to shreds. 'That man radiated so much nastiness he simply wasn't credible. You'd come away feeling sullied, as if you'd spent half an hour atrociously badmouthing someone.

And I think about those Stasi men. They would never in their lives have imagined that they would cease to exist and that their offices would be a museum. A museum!