Hi,
I'm currently studying stasiland, but I still don't really understand the text, even though I have read the book. I have a sac on it in 3 weeks and we've barely done anything in class (answering questions). And I have no idea how I'm able to write a good essay on it, if I don't understand the themes, and there's too many characters to remember. What can I do to gain a good understanding of the text?
Main thing to worry about is
what you're not understanding, (which I realise is a hard question to answer, but necessary nonetheless.) If it's just a matter of grasping the plot and development of the many characters in a fairly long text, then you'll need to do some summative exercises, ie. chapter summaries, character maps/profiles (<-- defs do this for Stasiland. Insight have a good starter one
here that you can add details to.)
Once that's under wraps you start to synergise it all, in order to understand the commonalities between the stories and begin to weave in the views and values of the text. If you're having difficulty here, start with study guides. There's plenty of info freely available on Stasiland at this point, so just googling 'Stasiland vce English resources' should be sufficient.
Start by just charting the major themes in the text, and connect each one to textual information (eg. the idea of sacrifice is linked to Herr Bohnsack, etc.) This will help your brain see the thematic concerns
within the text, rather than as a separate list outside everything. When you feel confident enough in this step, you can move on to asking yourself the question 'so what?' Why has the author done this? What is she trying to say?
Piece together the views and values, and the whole text falls into place. From there, tackling essay prompts becomes a lot easier, because you'll be working from your contention down to the textual evidence that supports it, rather than listing every relevant piece of information that comes to mind, and then attempting to make sense of it in the conclusion.
To start with though, you have to go from the inside, out. Ask yourself as many questions as possible about what happens in the text and why, then move out to dealing with the significance of these events and what they imply, and finally out to what the text and the author are saying about a certain theme or character or message.
Start small - lest you be daunted by the enormity of a whole text and all its historical weight - that's my best advice