Product Description

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell; shortly afterwards the two Germanies reunited, and East Germany ceased to exist. In a country where the headquarters of the secret police can become a museum literally overnight, and one in 50 East Germans were informing on their countrymen and women, there are a thousand stories just waiting to get out. Anna Funder tells extraordinary tales from the underbelly of the former East Germany - she meets Miriam, who as a 16-year-old might have started World War III, visits the man who painted the line which became the Berlin Wall and gets drunk with the legendary "Mik Jegger" of the East, once declared by the authorities to his face to "no longer to exist".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15144 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Evening Standard Books of the Year
‘A brilliant and necessary book about oppression and history...Here is someone who knows how to tell the truth’

Travel Books of the Year, Sunday Times
‘A journey into the bizarre, scary, secret history of the former East Germany that is both relevant and riveting’

Sunday Times
‘Funder is a superb interviewer…she truly excels in the rendering of her sessions with former Stasi employees

Customer Reviews

Investigative journalism and lyrical writing
The former GDR is perhaps still to close to be history, and there doesn't seem to be many books out there on the subject. Anna Funder's "Stasiland" fills that gap, and does so beautifully. She evokes a lost country, where the grotesquely overfed intelligence service had spilled out into all areas of society. In the end, Stasi controlled - and in many cases ruined - the lives of just about everyone in the GDR.

The first chapter paints a brilliant (and rather funny!) picture of the dark absurdity of a dictatorship. It is amazing how bogged down in detail, how ridiculously self-important it became. The fake moustaches, the cameras hidden in flowery granny handbags seem to come straight of "The Avengers". But soon, the tone turns sombre, as we begin to grasp how this "rule of Marxisten-Senilisten" drained joy and choice out of people's life. I had to keep reminding myself that this is fact, not fiction, as the drama and poignancy builds like a novel.

The whole account is deeply personal. Funder alternates the analysis of her investigations with descriptions of her own film noir-ish life in Berliner pubs and stripped apartments. It appears that she combines her exploratory drive with great poetry and a real knack for story-telling: her language is always lyrical and atmospheric, creating a real sense of time and place. Bridging the gap between story-telling and journalism, Anna Funder has written a unique and beautiful book.

Opens horizons
I strongly recommend this book - not only to those, like me, who visited the happily defunct GDR, but everybody who would like to learn about how people react and act in a dictatorship. Why would people inform on their lovers, parents or neighbours? How could others think they would succeed in escaping?

The book is informative, exciting, moving and above all poetic. It leaves you thinking, and most of all, I'm left pondering how I would have behaved in a system such as the one in GDR. Hopefully, I'll never know.

Author intrusion
Having researched the collapse of Communism in a former Warswaw Pact state for an undergraduate dissertation a decade ago, I was instantly drawn to this account. It is not, and nor does it claim to be, a scholarly text. Instead it is an absorbing piece of investigative journalism, chronicling the lives of East Germans (including a number of ex-Stasi) during an extraordinary period of history. It is a time when people acknowledge (at least in public) certain fictions as fact. For example, the GDR was a multi-party democracy and that East Germans were not in any way responsible for the holocaust.

As a consequence, in order to remain sane, many people withdrew into an 'internal immigration' in order to keep something of themselves from the authorities. The coping mechanisms, and justificiations, employed by the central characters in this book are memorably drawn out by Funder. It is a time of black humour, where the landlady Julia closes her phone conversations to her Italian boyfriend with "Night All" 'to the others listening in', and rock star Klaus shouts to his adoring audience "There are people in this room reporting on us".

'Stasiland' is also an account of how the the central characters have adapted following the collapse of the wall. Unsurprisingly, it is often the watchers rather than the watched who have thrived - as telemarketeers, real estate agents and insurers. They are 'schooled in the art of convincing people to do things against their own self interest'. The case of Herr Bock, who recruited informers in the former GDR and is used post-1989 by West German companies to acquire state assets at bargain basement prices, is partcularly revelatory - and distasteful. It is in this section that the author's intrusion, as an informed commentator, adds to the text:

'Terrific. Here he [Bock] is once getting the trust of his people and selling them cheap'.

This 'Stasiland' at its best: Funder interacting with the interviewee, whilst involving the reader in her thoughts and reactions to the conversation.

However, there are times when her presence is less insightful, obstructing the flow of the narrative. Did we need the account with the tramps (one of them given the moniker 'Professor Mushroom') in the park? Or the accounts of the beautiful women who look at her in the train or at the coffee stall? Worst of all is the scene where the author goes swimming and is disturbed to find that there are no lanes in the pool, no order. People criss-cross and show little consideration for each other. Is this a metaphor for the new capitalist Germany, as Funder appears to be implying? She is surprised that this pool, like almost every other swimming pool in the world, has specific hours for swimming in lanes, for women and children, for 'bathing' etc etc.

'So this is orderly chaos'.

No, it is not. It is the way public swimming pools *work*, attending to the diverse needs of their local communities - be they in Beijing or Blyth.

However, such passages, though highly irritating, arethe exception. Generally, I have no hesitation in recommending this book to anyone interested in the social history of the twentieth centurys 'most surveilled' state. In these times of a global War on the Terror and proposals in the UK for a national identity card, it may even become required reading.