“Beyond all of that, I could see the wall I had seen from inside the train, the wall that runs along the train line. I assumed that there, behind it, was the west, and I was right. I could have… — Anna Funder Copy Share Image
“Prison left me with some strange little tics.' She has taken all the door off their hinges in all the apartments she has lived in since. It's not that she has anxiety attacks about small spaces, she says, it's just… — Anna Funder Copy Share Image
At the end of our lives it is our loves we remember most, because they are what shaped us. We have grown to be… — Anna Funder Copy Share
“The blue-eyed rabbi in our village at Samotschin used to talk to me as though I were a grown person, even when I was… — Anna Funder Copy Share
“History was so quickly remade, and so successfully, that it can truly be said that the easterners did not feel then, and do not… — Anna Funder Copy Share
“The penalties for being an accessory to the attempt to flee the [GDR] were greater than the crime of trying to flee itself.” — Anna Funder Copy Share
“Such applications were sometimes granted because the GDR, unlike any other eastern European country, could rid itself of malcontents by ditching them into West… — Anna Funder Copy Share
“anti-fascist protective measure’. I have always been fond of this term which has something of the prophylactic about it, protecting easterners from the western… — Anna Funder Copy Share
“Lately, a study has suggested that depressed people have a more accurate view of reality, though this accuracy is not worth a bean because… — Anna Funder Copy Share
“Julia and her family, like many others in the GDR, trod this line between seeing things for what they were in the GDR, and… — Anna Funder Copy Share
The cynic sees only cynicism, the depressive can taint creation with one glance — Anna Funder Copy Share
“And I think about those Stasi men. They would never in their lives have imagined that they would cease to exist and that their… — Anna Funder Copy Share
Per capita the East Germans drank more than twice as much as their West German counterparts. — Anna Funder Copy Share
Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. — Anna Funder Copy Share
“Mielke and Honecker grew up fighting the real evil of Nazism. And they kept on fighting the west, which they saw as Nazism’s successor,… — Anna Funder Copy Share
“Beyond all of that, I could see the wall I had seen from inside the train, the wall that runs along the train line.… — Anna Funder Copy Share
“In August, the Hungarians cut the barbed wire at their border with Austria, creating the first hole in the Eastern Bloc.” — Anna Funder Copy Share
