Stasiland

Funder meets her “latest Stasi Man,” Herr Christian, at Potsdam station. He drives her to a mansion he calls the “Coding Villa,” where he encoded transcripts from car phones and police walkie-talkies in the west: “He has a sense of fun about what he did with the Stasi” (150).Funder observes and learns he wanted to be a boxer but a Stasi man met with him during his military service and recruited him, which Herr Christian went along with because he’d “‘always had an acute sense of duty to obey the law,’” and “‘thought it was the right thing to do’” (150).

Christian shares that he is a private detective now, but he won’t do marriage work because he had an affair while working for the Stasi, which he confided in a friend about, and the friend informed on him. They put him in solitary and demoted him because the rule with the Stasi, as Herr Christian puts it, is “‘anyone can have an affair, but everything must be reported’” (152).

Herr Christian shows Funder where he would watch for cars that might have stowaway East Germans in them, and shares some the parts of the job he enjoyed, like picking out disguises.