Stasiland: Chapter 16 Summary & Analysis

In 1961, Hagen Koch painted a line in the streets of Berlin, marking the future location of the Berlin Wall. Funder visits Koch in his apartment, which Koch jokingly calls the “Wall Archive,” since it’s full of old documents about the Wall. He shows Funder Stasi maps, showing secret Stasi locations throughout Berlin, and then sits down to tell her about his life.

Koch talks about growing up in East Germany. For as long as he can remember, he was surrounded by German propaganda, and when he did well in school, his teachers could think of no higher compliment than to suggest he work for the Stasi. Love for the East German state, Funder realizes, was for all intents and purposes a religion—and like any religion, it had its own versions of heaven and hell and its own system of punishment and redemption. In German schools, teachers explained how history consisted of an evolution from chaos to Communist perfection.

Hagen Koch’s father, Heinz Koch, was born in Saxony in 1912, an illegitimate child and therefore a social outcast in German society of the time. He signed up for the military in 1929, and later fought for the Nazis in France. Peculiarly, Koch tells Funder that the Soviet state gave his father permission to ride a bike in 1945, suggesting that they’d vetted his father’s record and concluded “he wasn’t an evil person.” Funder senses that there’s a lot Koch isn’t telling her about his father.

After the end of World War Two, Germany was divided between the Allied powers and the Soviet Union. In the West, the Allies prosecuted former Nazis and established democracy; in the East, the Soviets established a one-party system and stripped Germany of its factories. The “party line” on Nazism was that East German had never had Nazis—that was strictly a West German problem. Hagen Koch’s own father became a Socialist schoolteacher. At the time, there were many in the West who believed that Russia was creating a Socialist paradise in Germany.

Heinz Koch ran for mayor in his small town, representing a moderate, non-Communist party, and won in a landslide. However, the Communist candidate was also the head of the voting commission, and declared himself the winner. Heinz was sentenced to work in a POW camp for seven years. A month later, his opponent, now the mayor, offered to get him out of prison, on the condition that he join the Communist Party. Heinz agreed, and he returned to teaching school.

In 1948, the Soviet Union tried to starve out West Berlin by cutting off the power. In response, the Allies sent troops and supplies to West Berlin. A rumor began to circulate in East Berlin that the American military was dropping beetles on East German crops, creating mass starvation. When Funder asks how anybody could believe such an absurd allegation, Hagen Koch points out that Americans bombed Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden.