2017-06-11

别低头皇冠会掉

Ordinary citizens, who do not support the Stasi ideology, automatically become “enemies” of the state, and suffer from the constant pressure of being watched for the slightest transgression.

Barricades: Dieter Behrend, Julia’s father, is a typical victim who is worn down by the need to show outward membership of the Stasi; the slightest error or mishap can have devastating consequences. (Quote) Living with the constant contradictions and anxieties takes its psychological toll.

As Julia states, from the time “we woke up… they were aware of what “could be said outside the home (very little) and what could be discussed in it (most things)” (95) Julia describes her father, Dieter, as one who is defeated by this constant intrusion. He is depressed and needs constant medication. “Living for so long in a relation of unspoken hostility but outward compliance to the state had broken him” (96)

Constant psychological surveillance takes its toll and leads to heightened state of anxiety. Funder explains this burden of anxiety in terms of Julia’s shell-like “internal migration” whereby she erects artificial boundaries just like the “barricaded tower” to which she presently, physically, escapes. Julia often withdraws unpredictably. She is like a “hermit crab”, ready to “whisk back into its shell at the slightest sign of contact” (90). In a way Funder also suggests it is more complicated and indescribable (or unidentifiable): “It’s not that either. I don’t know what it is”

Also, as Funder explains, the erosion of trust leads to a loss of dignity and even a loss of selfhood. Julia finds that the Stasi is so intrusive that there is not even a kernel of self she can keep intact; she has no “private sphere left at all” As she recalls, “it was the loss of everything until I had disappeared too.”