Stasiland is a great book for leisure reading. From what I remember, because I didn't do Stasiland in my exam (purposes which I'll write down later if you're concerned), here are a few things you might want to take note of.
1. Imagery is extremely important and you ought to analyse the reccurent motifs or colour schemes within the text.
2. You're going to need to think hard about what you think Funder's stance is in the text- It's not as obvious as you think.
3. Then you need to assess how she attempts to implement such 'slight' bias into the text whilst retaining a sense of fact and information in the text. E.g, The text is almost non-fiction, bar these inputs from Funder, which shows that if she was attempting to present this book as factual it is almost a facade amidst her own observations and input in the text.
4. Which leads to a very obvious and critical part that must be in your close reading- How do these little narrations and side-tracked observations affect the reader when reading the text and a) introduce Funder's perspective and opinion, b) influence us subtly and almost I think, sneakily?
5. The most difficult part of Stasiland is to think of a reason for WHY Funder wrote the novel. Don't just say to inform us, the Western reader. It goes far deeper than that I think. It delves into the psychology of suppressing trauma instead of remembering, instead of progressing by working through such experience, it delves into WHY we as humans have a certain type of Mindset, or even more specific than that, why the Germans have this mindset, why the "german" experience is another world of its own.
6. Then you'll need to make up a choice- Is this text exploring such issues enclosing it decisively within the world of Germany, with the stance that what happened is a uniquely German phenomenon, isolated to German experience, or is she attempting to extrapolate this and make a universal claim about humanity from what she is looking at? Personally, when I look at how Funder expresses her connection with German culture and weird admiration for it, I believe in the former. Do what you want but make sure you support it.
On the outset, Stasiland appears quite simple and I thought I was going to do it for the exam. Within the text however there are many underlying structures and points you need to consider. I didn't choose Stasiland because I have to profess I felt like the passages contained at times, so much factual input rather than Funder's own manipulation of writing that I had hardly anything that my skills could analyse. How the heck do you analyse non fiction?
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