Writing Task #2- Julia

Stasiland:

Writing task #2- Julia

This second writing task is designed to help you build on the work you have done on Miriam and work towards your first essay.

TASK TO BE COMPLETED:

Read Chapter summaries below for chapters 5, 9, 10, 11 & 14

Highlight the eight most important quotes you think are said by Julia. Be prepared to defend your choice.

Highlight the five most important reflections/comments that Funder makes about Julia and the setting. Once again, be prepared to explain your choices.

Can you find any examples of symbols/metaphor associated with Julia?

Write two paragraphs about Julia.

• PARA 1: consider the short term and long term effects of the Stasi regime on her life.
• PARA 2: why does Julia feel nostalgic for the old regime?
• You must integrate 4-5 quotations per paragraph.
• Try to include some reference to the way Funder uses imagery to evoke Julia’s emotional landscape.

5. Linoleum Palace

(47). Funder is deeply affected by Miriam’s story, emotionally and physically. Upon returning to Berlin she finds her landlord, Julia, removing possessions from the broken down, linoleum floored rooms. Julia’s removal of her possessions from the apartment is a symbolic act. By gathering up objects from her past life in the apartment she revisits her past and gives herself an opportunity to come to terms with it.

(48) “Julia is concerned about how long it is taking her to move out”. Funder makes reference to the slow pace Julia sets for herself in order to process her painful past.

(49) “Julia regards fixed appointments as intolerable constraints on her freedom”.

“I soon realised everything here was either broken or about to be”

(50) “Julia needs to be alone but suffers from it too and that her room is choked with cheap and broken things she feels she may want at some point in life but may not be able to afford if she abandons”

(51) “What surprises me about living here is that, no matter how much is taken out, this linoleum palace continues to contain all the necessities for life, at the same time as it refuses to admit a single thing, either accidentally or arranged, of beauty or joy. In this, I think, it is much like East Germany itself.”

9. Julia Has No Story

Funder observes people around the station and in park: Homeless, punks, drunks.

(89). Julia is in Funder’s apartment again. She has box of old love letters. Funder offers coffee to Julia.

(90). ‘She is a hermit crab, all soft-fleshed with friends but ready to whisk back into its shell at the slightest sign of contact.’Says there were no drunks and no homeless before Wall came down. Funder tells us that East Germans drank twice as much as West Germans. Housing shortages. Tells Funder she doesn’t look German.

(92). Julia had an Italian boyfriend. Funder surprised as East Germans didn’t travel abroad. Julia recalls black Lada car crawly slowly in front of their house.

(93). ‘That car,’ she says deliberately, ‘was there for me.’Gradually reveals clues. Car there because of Italian boyfriend.‘Things can end so badly.’ Ended it with boyfriend on Hungary holiday. ‘At least I thought it was the police.’ Funder realises ‘long story’is code for ‘no story’. Julia gives Funder cryptic clues. Funder tells Julia about meeting Miriam and the Stasi men. Julia: ‘I don’t have any story of the Stasi, or anything like that’. She goes to leave. Funder reflects on the freedom of her youth.

(94). ‘Please stay.’They have coffee and Funder makes a meal. They were both born 1966. Julia was 23 when Wall fell. She is studying obscure Eastern Bloc languages at university. Funder curious about her inability to go forward.

(95). Julia Behrend – Family History. Parents both teachers. Family ambivalent about politics.‘We were an ordinary family. None of us had ever had a run-in with the state.’They knew what could be said in and out of home. Mother a practical woman who said children could be anything they wanted to be. Father sensitive. Wanted to better what he saw as flawed system (although fairer than capitalism). He joined Free German Youth and later the Party as teachers were encouraged to. ‘For his pains, his country made him a pariah and his life a misery.’

(96). Dieter Behrend spoke up at meetings. ‘He would come home hollow.’Hedidn’t like

acknowledging fiction as fact.‘They sheltered their secret inner lives in an attempt to keep something of themselves from the authorities.’Dieter suffered depression after

retirement in 1989.‘Living for so long in a relation of unspoken hostility but outward compliance to the state had broken him.’ Julia and family trod line ‘between seeing things for what they were in the GDR, and ignoring those realities in order to stay sane.’

Julia is fascinated by languages andwanted to be translator and interpreter.

(97). ‘I thought by facilitating, even in this small way, communication among peoples I could make a contribution.’Julia writes letters in Russian, French, English and sends to outside world. Funder sees Julia as only part-attached to the world - she didn’t want to leave and believed in GDR. She wanted to explain to others ‘that Communism was not

such a bad system.’ Shocked at drugs, homelessness and prostitution in west. ‘I mean how is it people think they can just buya person?’ Funder believes she is nostalgic ratherthan bitter about regime.

Julia wants to keep talking. ‘...something her mind keeps returning to which she veers away from telling.’

10. The Italian Boyfriend

At 16 Julia worked at Leipzig Fair – an international trade fair. Meets the Italian boyfriend. He is 30 working for computer firm.

(99). He visits her twice a year. They meet for annual holidays in Hungary, speak on the phone onece a week and write frequently. ‘He became her most intimate penpal.’They are together about 2 ½ years.

Surveillance was intense when he visited - Overt. They are alwaysstopped. Her boyfriend is terrified. ‘I lived with sort of scrutiny as a fact.’She expects scrutiny of a

western foreigner. No phone at home so rings from grandmother’s house. Calls booked through authorities.

(100). Julia says she needed to accept her circumstances to stay sane. ‘I mean you’d go mad,’ she says, ‘if you thought about it all the time.’She isacademically clever but authorities sent her to distant boarding school. She thinks authorities may have deliberately isolated her. School made students watch East German news each night.

(101). News always about government projects and targets. No western news. Also had to watch the ‘anti-news’. ‘The Black Channel’ – ‘Der SchwarzeKanal’ with Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, the ‘human antidote to the pernicious influence of western television.’His job to rip western TV to shreds.

1984, the headmaster makes appointment to see Julia’s parents at home.

(102). Had come to get parents to influence Julia to break off with Italian boyfriend. Parents not happy about relationship but won’t stop her. 1985 Julia matriculates with straight As. Sits entrance exam for Leipzig university translating and interpreting course. Failed the political exam part.

(103). Thinks fail could have been rigged but she didn’t know names of political parties in GDR. A family friend with inside knowledge suggests

she’ll never get in. advises her to get a job. But Julia unable to get a job of any kind. ‘

That was when it got hard for me.’ Always got interviews, did well but then rejection.

(104). She assumes she was always double checked withStasi. Enrols in night course as Town Plan Explainer (tour group leader). Describes her experience at Employment Office. Told she isn’t unemployed but ‘seeking work’. Woman

loudly says, ‘There is no unemployment in the German Democratic Republic.’

(105). ‘By no fault of her own, Julia Behrend had fallen into the gap between the GDR’s

fiction and its reality. She no long conformed to the fiction. Loyal and talented as she was, she was now being edged out of the reality.’

Julia from then on ‘I sort of withdrew from things.’ Thinks she was depressed. Studies

Spanish. Goes to local nightclub. Sister Katrin notices a white car outside for 3 days in a

row. She knows it’s there for her. ‘She knew, too, that getting on with her life would mean leaving it behind.’. Meets boyfriend for holiday in Hungary. Her luggage is searched thoroughly.The boyfriend ‘so controlling, so jealous.’ Tells him it’s over.

‘Now Julia had withdrawn from him, withdrawn into her home, and withdrawn from hope.

This was more than internal emigration. It was exile.’

11. Major N

(106). Card comes in letterbox to renew ID. ‘There are some things –‘ she stops. ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to remember this. I haven’t remember this.’

(107). At police station, sent directly to Room 118. In the room is Major N. Minister of State Security.

(108). ‘She felt fear, she says, ‘like a worm in my belly’. Asks her to explain why she isn’t

working. Fears she may be sent to West. He again says no unemployment in GDR. Has

copies of her letter to Italian boyfriend. Had received torn letters but ‘had never thought

about it for long.’

(109). He reads out a letter. Julia and boyfriend wrote to each other in English. Asks her what they meant. Funder feels humbled. ‘I am outraged for her, and vaguely guilty about my relative luck in life.’Major N asked Julia meanings of lots of words – humiliating.

(110). Major N works through all letters thoroughly. He tells her things about the boyfriend that Julia didn’t know. Knows the make of his car.

(111). He knows every detail about Julia’s life. School subjects. Parents. Sister’s desire to study piano at conservatory. Said her father was ‘problematic’ but mother much more loyal to state. Tells Julia she takes after her mother. Ironic that they didn’t seem to know she’d broken up with boyfriend. Major N tells her they are ‘interested in your friend.’‘We would propose...if you would assist us, that we meet every now and again. For a chat.’

(112). Tells him she can’t as they split. ‘He wanted to own me. I knew if I stayed with him I would not be able to determine my own life.’ Major N tells her not to discuss visit with anyone.Gives card with his phone number. ‘He had shown her that with one phone call to him she could be in, or she could be out. She could be with them, or she could be gone.’

Julia ‘felt sundered, suddenly and irrevocably, from life. ‘It was as though all at once I was on the other side...separate from everybody.’

(113). ‘I think I’d totally repressed that entire episode.’Alludes to ‘the whole 1989 story’.

Funder comments that what happened to her was extreme. Julia thinks ‘it’s the total

surveillance that damaged me the worst. I know how far people will transgress over your

boundaries – until you have no private sphere left at all. And I think that is a terrible

knowledge to have.’

‘At this distance I understand for the first time how bad it was what he did in that room.’

‘I think I am definitely psychologically damaged!’

‘I think it’s worse if you repress it.’ Funder thinks, ‘To dig it up, or to leave it lie in the gr

ound?’

(114). Julia reacts badly at home after room 118 episode. Told her parents and sister

everything. Discussion about how she might live rest of her life. Only 20 years old. Realises she has to leave family and go to West. Has realised how dangerous ‘the good father state’ really is. Won’t become an informer.

(115). Thinks of writing to Honecker. They believed Stasi and State were separate. Mother says to ring Major N and tell him Julia and parentswriting to Honecker to make complaint.

Has bad nightmares. Dreams of being pursued. Goes to grandmother’s house to make the call.

(116). He demands to meet her at covert apartment in town. Tells her serious repercussions for family. Sister won’t get into conservatory. Going to tell his superiors. A week later visited at home. Major N and his boss. Tell them no need to

over react and write to Honecker, no need to involve Berlin. Men ask for more time and l

eave.

(117). ‘But when they left we knew we’d won. We had never really known where the battle

was...but we knew we’d won.’ Rare occasion when the bluff called and the Firm beaten. Next week, Julia is offered a job in hotel. Says she picked up box of letters to read

as she is seeing psychotherapist.

‘I look at the box in her arms and know that you cannot destroy your past, nor what it does to you. It’s not ever, really, over. Funder senses that she doesn’t know all of Julia’s story. ‘No-one can tote up life’s events and calculate thedamages; a table of maims for the soul.’

14. The Worse You Feel

(139) Funder invites Julia over for lunch“I’m putting as many calories into something as I know.” Julia is late and ‘oddly polite’.

(140) Julia has recently taken up smoking. ‘we both know there is more of her story to tell’

Funder asks her what her life was like after the Wall came down. ‘I wonder what it would have been like to watch the barrier that had held you in disappear and the whole world open up like some strange and new dreamt-of thing.’

Julia struggles to find the words. ‘The whole thing really threw me’… ‘I think that I experienced it more intensely than others’.She talks about the ‘whole Wende’.

‘I can’t subject myself to any sort of authority….I can’t commit myself to cominganywhere on time…I just can’t have structure imposed on me’.

Funder: ‘I am an eye in the ceiling corner. I see two women, like reflections of one another.’

(141) The revelation that she was raped is ‘tacked on’ to a statement she makes about how she feels about authority. ‘And as well as that…I was raped. That happened to me just after the Wall fell. It was in the east and it was really the last straw.’

Funder is made ‘cold and scared and sober’ by this. Tells how Julia calls her a week later to say that ‘afterwards(after telling Funder of the rape) she had felt sick for three days’…

(142) Harrowing description of the rape and the lack of care by the police the next day ‘Rape was taboo in the GDR’…. ‘it was as if they didn’t believe me’.

Note Funder’s description of ‘pieces of shattered sky falling against the window’… metaphor for Julia’s emotional and physical world in pieces. But there are ‘no tears; it is as if she has no self-pity at all.’

‘She felt separated from everybody, again.’

(143) The rape trial ‘If it happened to me again I would never bring charges…I would kill the man’

He is convicted but ‘Julia felt violated all over again’.

Her mother Irene didn’t understand why she couldn’t ‘just get on with things’.

‘I wanted to die’. Talks about not eating..her sister comes to watch over her.

(144) She returns to study ‘in fits and bursts’, takes odd jobs. Julia talks about the amnesties – the release of prisoners in 1990 and the fact that she believes the serial rapist was released by mistake. ‘It meant that before the good things about the West got to us, this negative thing – the letting loose of the criminals – affected me”

‘the end of the security state meant the end, too, of her personal security. The system that had imprisoned her had also somehow protected her’

‘she associates the fall of the Wall with the end of what had remained of her private sphere after the Stasi had finished with it.

(145) Gets drunk with Klaus

(146) Goes for a swim at her local pool the next day… stops her laps at one point to ask ‘What am I doing in this chaos anyway? In this chaotic city’ The whole scene is evocative of Funder’s grumpiness, her anger at the ‘orderly chaos’ of the city. The pool becomes a symbol of ‘the subconscious of the country; the mess that gives rise to all that order.’

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