Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13020 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-17
• Original language: English
• 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

Fascinating, but not to be read as a history book
I picked this up after watching "The Lives of Others." The book is well written, mixing evocative (sometimes over-elaborate) reflections with a much more sparse style when retelling some of the scarcely believable stories of the misery of life in the GDR. Some of her observations are very sharp, such as her objection to items which are still of live interest being put on display in a museum. I thought the ending was disappointing. However, books like this are often nothing more than expanded magazine articles, a charge that cannot be made here. Recommended.

An insight into East Germany
I had this book bought for me many months ago, but left it on the shelf until recently.
Having little or no insight into the problems of living in East Germany, I found it very well written, and very engaging. Incidently it is written as non-fiction, but presented in such a narrative way that you would think it was ficticious, and for me reading history is made easier when presented in that format.
It was a grim but interesting journey into life under the control of the 'stasi'. This police state, controlled not only by the state, but also by ordinary people in the street forced into having to 'work' for the state, to control the citizens by some of the most cruel methods, makes for a painful read. It highlights a period before 'The Wall' came down, where Russian communist control continued the deprivations of WW11.

Total Information Awareness
Anna Funder gives a sharply cut and moving (in)human face to the now defunct German Democratic Republic by interviewing former Stasi members (the top, foreign spies, informants, organizers) and their direct or indirect victims.
In `a world where there was nothing to buy, nowhere to go, and where anyone who wanted to do anything other than serve the Party, risked persecution or worse', the Stasi's aim was to know everything about everybody with all means, even radiation. As the author poetically states: everybody had `a mirror Nemesis' in a Stasi department. The result was that everyone suspected everyone else and turned into an `internal emigration' for the sheltering of their secret inner lives.
In fact, the Stasi was a formidable organization (one informant for every 6,5 citizens) created in order to defend the government against its own people.
Anna Funder exposes the real Stasi mentality: `The most important thing you have is power" (Chief E. Mielke). Its colossal archives were partly shredded after the fall of the Berlin Wall (15000 sacks) and are being puzzled together. A truly Herculean task.
The author paints a society built on ideological fiction (human nature was a work-in-progress which could be improved by Communism) and on blatant lies (a multi-party democracy, no former Nazis, not responsible for the Holocaust).
But what is left after the collapse? A `Wall in the Head'. The victims are still heavily marked (psychological damage by the terrifying effect of total surveillance) and some Stasi men still hope that the Wall will be built again.

Anna Funder wrote a formidable evocation of life in a communist one party state protected by a wall.
A must read.