Klaus Jentzsch is a musician and German celebrity, who for many years was one of the biggest rock stars in East Germany. He performed some of his own music, as well as covers of American and British rock songs by the Beatles, Elvis, and the Rolling Stones. In the 1970s, however, the government suspended his license to play music, and Klaus decided to move to West Berlin. Years later, he returned to East Berlin to find that he’d become a cult icon.
Klaus Jentzsch Quotes in Stasiland
The Stasiland quotes below are all either spoken by Klaus Jentzsch or refer to Klaus Jentzsch . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Note: all page numbers and citation info for the quotes below refer to the Harper Perennial edition of Stasiland published in 2011.
Chapter 19
Quotes
Klaus worked for years in the west as a sound-man in the theatre. After the Wall came down, he found out that ‘we'd become a cult band in the GDR—our records were more expensive than a Pink Floyd album’.
Related Characters:
Anna Funder (speaker), Klaus Jentzsch (speaker)
Related Symbols:
The Berlin Wall
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
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Klaus Jentzsch Character Timeline in Stasiland
The timeline below shows where the character Klaus Jentzsch appears in Stasiland. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1: Berlin, Winter 1996
...train, Funder contemplates the previous night, during which she visited a pub with her friend Klaus. Funder then thinks back to learning German years ago in an Australian school. In the...
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Chapter 8: Telephone Calls
...falls into restless sleep. At 2:30 am, she gets a phone call from her friend Klaus. Klaus lives nearby, and he and Funder often go to the same pubs.
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Chapter 14: The Worse You Feel
After listening to Julia’s story, Funder calls up Klaus and gets drunk with him. She wakes up the next day with a hangover. In...
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Chapter 19: Klaus
In the afternoon, Funder calls Klaus and asks to come over. By 6 pm, the two friends are on their third...
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For decades, East German musicians needed a license to perform music. In the 1970s, Klaus’s band’s license expired, and when they tried to renew it, they were told that they’d...
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Several members of Klaus’s band died of a mysterious form of cancer, as did several other dissidents and critics...
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