Courage can be defined as a person's strength in the face of pain or grief. In Funders ‘Stasiland’ the characters are displayed as courageous, but many still live in fear of the Stasi. Courage is shown throughout the story, but observations made by Anna expose dread and paranoia, even after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Though strength is an important part of Funder’s interpretation of East Germany, many other factors play equally important roles, revealing a world of devastation, alienation and mass manipulation which triggers this courage. The courage characters found to withstand dictatorship is set forth in ‘Stasiland’, but also the consequences for those who collaborated is exposed. Anna meets her ‘last Stasimon’ Herr Bohnsack who had the courage to out himself to the public and return to the same pub for three years, enduring disgust from those around him. Although Bohnsack was a member of the stasi, Anna is less critical of his actions, Funders sympathy for Bohnsack is very understandable because of the cost of his own courage. Bohnsack story is predominantly about depression and misery caused by his bravery, this may not be evident in Funders writing, but Bohnsack spends lots of his time at the same pub, leaving the reader to feel that this broken down man drowns his sorrows in alcohol ‘He started screaming “Stop it! Stop it!” until people took him away from the phone’. The majority of stories in ‘Stasiland’ display many acts of courage, but fear of the stasi still lurks within the text, Herr Winz exstasi that is trapped in this paranoid past still does not have trust in the present society. Funder uses dark humor to make this mental illness seem less intense, comparing his behavior to that of an old fashioned spy. Anna finds this quite comical, but to this old man trapped in the past, the surveillance was very real foreshadowing why Winz acted in such a way. Courage is very consistent in ‘Stasiland�