Customer Reviews

Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

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Anna Funder is an Australian writter who found herself in Berlin several years after the Berlin wall and Communism in former GDR (German Democratic Republic; or DDR in the German language) collapsed.

Through personal stories of former East Germans, Anna tries to put together a mental pictures of what life in former GDR was like. And this mental picture is a stark, dark, oppressive, and paranoid collage of people's lives' stories.

One will learn that East Germany was 'the most perfected surveillance state of all time,' where there was one Stasi officer or informant for every 63 people. The book covers the national formation of the GDR regime and also discuss the cultural background of why Germans were willingly subjecting themselves to authority. The best torture method devised by the Stasi was sleep deprivation. With all this and more, the author makes the point that the regime would not have survived without the Soviet military muscle and presence.

The book also presents some light and funny trivia: the quasi-scientific method of 'smell sampling' used by the 'Firm' (Stasi), the East German silly dance style called 'Lipsi' and the corny or mind-numbing propaganda TV shows.

Interviewing people who lost loved ones in the evil regime's prisons, persons who taught counterintelligence classes for the Stasi, who worked as informants or undercover policeman, students who tried to escape across the Berlin Wall, and persons who are still believers in the 'proletarian' revolution and are nostalgic about the values of the former Socialist republic.

By reading this ecclectic biography collage you will learn about German cultural values, GDR political and idiological history, the Stasi (one of the most feared secret police organizations). Stasiland also shows how much the Stasi archives ruined many lives in former East Germany.

A recommended counter-balance to the gloomy and depressing theme of this non-fiction is the romance/drama/comedy movie "Good Bye Lenin (2003)."

When author George Orwell wrote Animal Farm and 1984 he wrote of the contemporary and future 'proletarian' dictatorships. The German Democratic Republic, more than any other state before or since, came the nearest to a state of perfected and complete absolute control over its citizens' lives. The author of Stasiland, Anna Funder, has done a suberb job of revivifying this state in her readers' minds through the personal stories of the GDR's inhabitants. I got this book for Christmas and had it read in three days, so good I never wanted to put it down.

The book's chapters trace the lives of various GDR citizens, both those being oppressed and the Stasi personnel charged with terrifying the GDR's people into abject submission. In Soviet Russia there was one KGB agent for every 5830 people, in Nazi Germany one Gestapo agent for every 2000 people, but in the GDR there was one Stasi - or full-time informer - FOR EVERY 63 PERSONS (see p. 57)!

Funder hears shocking tales of personal tragedy, bizarre - but true - stories of GDR logic, and personal justifications from ex-Stasi men themselves. One 15-year-old girl singlehandedly, without any prior planning(!), almost manages to escape over the Berlin Wall, getting within a couple meters of freedom. Another family is permanently separated from their seriously ill son for his first five years of life. And one woman's personal and career life is ruined when she refuses to submit to ideological control.

The author also interviews some famous GDR personalities, such as musician Klaus Renft, the evil-spirited Karl Von Schnitzler, and Hagen Koch (who literally wrote the plan for the wall). She also interviews the puzzle people trying to piece back together the shredded Stasi files. And she also meets with Stasi agents, who for one reason or another, decided to join the 'dark side'.

As I was reading the book, I couldn't help but become absolutely convinced that, despite the very publicized efforts of the German gov't to piece back together the Stasi files, in fact, German (and all other Eastern European) CURRENT LEADERS WANT TO COMPLETELY OBLITERATE EVIDENCE OF THEIR OWN CRIMES DURING THE COMMUNIST REGIMES. The fact of the matter is that many of the former communist elite are still in power now and are using all their gov't influence to ensure they are never, EVER going to be outed! So, in reality, many of them have gotten away with murder and look set to lead comfortable lives into retirement. Many times throughout the book I sensed a continuing cover-up and obfuscation by former Stasi men.

The German government's extremely feeble, half-hearted attempt to reassemble the Stasi files with a staff of 30 or so persons is an absolute farce! Funder calculates it will take them over 300 years to reassemble the files at this rate. With a budget in the billions of euros, it becomes patently obvious the German government's objective is to NOT reassemble the incriminating files. A person might even believe that the Stasi File Authority is headed by a person, Herr Raillard, who is secretly charged by gov't leaders with eliminating any damning evidence that is actually found. This isn't a surprise, as it is the same across the entire former Communist bloc.

This is a great book with a wonderfully direct, realistic writing style. I hope Ms. Funder writes a sequel to the book. I would have liked to have seen some photos too, though. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in life in Eastern Europe.

An excellent journalistic account of the days of the Stasi in East Germany, written in a colorful style by an obviously gifted person in the art of observing and reading human beings. It reads as a novel in so far that the people we meet through Funder's eyes tell powerful life-changing stories. It is also a very critical and shocking appraisal of an inhuman political system in which a few (psychopathic?) personalities torture the masses they fear.

By chapter two I had already laughed and cried at the absurdity of it all. Is there any more to say?

As I fight my way through the dense data thicket that is John Koehler's "Stasi", I appreciate "Stasiland" all the more.

I've read almost everything about the Stasi that has been translated into English in the course of my research and this book stands out above all others in putting the Stasi phenomena in proper perspective. This book and Timothy Ash's "The File" have done more to form my view of what actually took place during this period of intense repression than all of the others combined.

In all of my reading I've been looking for the face of pure evil and have found that the evil that was the Stasi is the amassing of thousands of personal failings that combined to form one giant evil. And in its own way that makes it all the more terrifying. I'd rather see the devil himself as responsible than to learn that in the end it was just a bunch of everyday people -- your friends and neighbors -- who combined to form the giant security apparatus.

Anna weaves a personal narrative with a proper sense of history to give you a sense of what happened that will most certainly give you a deeper understanding of those events. History is the people involved, and not just the dismal data that regime has left in its wake. Anna gets this and tells the story in a way that gives more understanding than a world of data and statistics ever could.

What really makes Stasiland stand out is Anna's skill as a writer. She is supremely talented and a breath of fresh air amidst all the stale ramblings of academic historians. It reads like a well written novel and is very tight from beginning to end. If you only read one book to inform you about this dark patch of history I suggest that this be that book.

Stasiland is the former East Germany, a country where the Stasi, the secret police, spied on every inhabitant, kept files on everybody, and seemed all-powerful. Anna Funder has written about the Stasi in a way that sometimes seems like fiction, other times like memoir, and ultimately like an exceptionally readable history.

The Berlin of Funder's book is post-Wall Berlin, but it is as gray and paranoid as the Berlin of John le Carre's spy novels. Funder seems depressed throughout, and it is no wonder. She spends all her time interviewing former "Ossis," East Germans who were victims of the Stasi or who were former Stasi themselves. Even her irrepresible rock musician friend reveals that his band was declared "non-existent" by the Stasi. The secret police were so thorough that he cannot find any evidence that his group, which recorded several albums and was quite popular in the East, ever existed.

Through Funder, we hear from Miriam, who nearly made it over the Wall at age sixteen, but was caught, jailed, and blacklisted. Shortly after she married, her husband was arrested, then the Stasi showed up at Miriam's door to tell her that her husband had killed himself. She refused to believe the obvious lie and the subsequent funeral was a bizarre farce. Decades later, Miriam is still trying to make sense of it all, still searching for clues to explain what really happened.

Frau Paul tells of her newborn son whose East German doctors risked their careers by smuggling the infant to the West because it was his only chance to survive a life-threatening condition. Frau Paul was denied permission to visit her baby unless she agreed to help the Stasi trap an acquaintance of hers. She desperately wanted to see her son, whose condition kept him in hospital for years, but knew that if she agreed to help the Stasi just once, she would be theirs for life. The child was well-cared for, but was growing up with only the hospital staff as his family. When he left the hospital at age six and returned to his family in the East, he was polite but distant with the parents who were strangers to him. Forty years later, Frau Paul still considers herself the traitor to her country and failure as a parent that the Stasi told her she was.

Not all of the stories are tragic. Funder learns of a woman the Stasi tried to recruit to spy on her co-workers. The woman agreed, then went to work and cheerfully told everyone that the Stasi had recruited her to be a spy. Since her cover had been blown, she was no longer useful to the Stasi. They never bothered her again.

Funder visits the office of the "puzzle people," workers who put shredded documents from Stasi files back together. The papers reveal who the Stasi was watching, what they discovered, and who the informers were. Ossis may now request to see their files, but many of the files have yet to be put back together. The director tells Funder that at the rate of an average of ten reconstructed documents a day per employee, it will take forty puzzle people 375 years to reconstruct all the shredded documents. And, he explains, "as you see, we have only thirty-one employees."

Little by little, Funder allows us to realize that the Stasi does not exist as a curious and irrelevant moment in history. The torture devices in the Stasi museum and the thousands of bags of shredded documents that recall the abuses of power are evidence of a government that still haunts the lives of millions of former Ossis. It had seemed so powerful, but when the end came for the Stasi, it was without violence in a peaceful revolution of people who were just fed up.

Having lived in Germany during much of the time that the country was divided by the wall between the societies of West and East Germany, I was very impressed and further educated by this excellent work of investigative journalism. What amazed me most was that it was written by a very informed "Auslaenderin." She knew the country, the cities of Berlin and Leipzig, and more importantly, she could tap into the moods, the mentalities, and the life-defining experiences of those whose stories she shared with us. I can only marvel at this sensitive view into a dark time in Germany's Post WWII history. It's really a shame that one cannot rate a work of this caliber with six stars. Read it.

Stasiland is not an in-depth history of the DDR or the Stasi, and if that's what you are looking for, you might be disappointed, as one reviewer was. That's understandable. But to gain insight into just how the DDR police state impacted the lives of several ordinary people in Berlin, this book provides a well-written glimpse on a very personal level.When I bought it, my first thought was, "well it isn't the history I thought it might be' but before long I was completely engrossed in it. Funder is a very fine writer and her book reads more as a novel than anything else. It is, really, a page-turner. While the text meanders a bit from time to time, it was very enjoyable and somewhat eye-opening. It is also surprisingly fair, and while certainly not exonerating the Stasi and their actions in any way, it does remind us that they were human beings, at times complex ones. All in all, an outstanding read.

For anybody who is into the espoinage/secret police reading milieu, this is a must read book. There is information in this book, written at the human level, that you will never find anywhere else. The author's interviews of victims and ex-Stasi is without equal. Moreover, the author has that rare and incredible ability to paint a picture with words.

I could scarcely oput this book down.

Sometimes it takes an outsider to turn in a feat of these dimensions: an Australian has written the seminal book on the GDR and the Stasi. Anna Funder's brilliant and bold 'Stasiland' is equal parts mesmerizing, head-shaking and heartrending. She depicts an organization that protected the party not from perceived or real external enemies, but from their own people. And, in doing so, it tore lives apart.

Funder's masterstroke is to not overwhelm you with stats and the big picture, but instead to dig deep into a couple of cases - most notably as revealed in her interviews of three women: Miriam; Julia; and Frau Paul. The pain inflicted on these women is almost incomprehensible - a murdered spouse, a covered-up rape, a sickly child ripped from her mother's embrace. 30 to 40 years on, the hurt has never left these women. Multiply that hurt times a couple of million (indeed, the breadth of the Stasi files are almost unimaginable), and you get the idea of how grotesque and sclerotic GDR life had become before its 1989 demise.

If you enjoyed Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's cinematic masterpiece The Lives of Others (I consider it the best film of the past decade), then you'll be enthralled by Frau Funder's book. Well done, Anna!

Stasiland is well worth reading, providing revealing insight into the individual lives of those who lived under the "democracy" of the German Democratic Republic (which was barely German and neither democratic nor a republic). It also serves as a warning to those who either believe in or are prone to acquiesce to totalitarian forms of government - particularly socialism. The great strength of the book lies in its sympathetic treatment of those involved on both sides of the system in the former East Germany. In some ways Anna Funder's prose leave you wondering who the ultimate victims really are. She does a superb job of revealing that, even though there are those who do better or worse within any system of government, bad systems create nothing but victims; some loose their freedom, or even their lives, while others loose their very souls.

Two major criticisms of the book are that it fails to provide an overarching context for what happened and the writing style fluctuates between elegant and grandiloquent. Snippets of more general history do come through in fits and starts during the telling of various characters' stories, but one needs to read a more conventional history of the GDR to understand who many of the politicians and other people mentioned in the book are and how they fit into the general picture. The book could be improved by a general chapter or an appendix outlining the history to orient readers who are not already familiar with the GDR and Cold War.

As far as the writing style is concerned, it is the sort of thing your 9th grade English teacher would think was fantastic, but sometimes comes across as a bit forced. There are many elegant turns of phrase and some marvelously painted word pictures. Still, they don't always work and sometimes read like the author was trying just a little bit too hard to impress with her prose. This can be distracting at times and thrilling at others. After the first few pages, any reader will realize this is a talented writer, after a hundred or so they will realize this is not a fully mature writer. In addition, the plot seems to fall off a little bit toward the end and it begins to sound like a book that the author is just trying to get done after running out of really good material. Maybe confronting the reality of a police state became a little too much for someone who grew up in a free and open society.

Stasiland has given me a new appreciation of what occurred in the GDR and the freedoms I have enjoyed in life. It has also reminds me, in the words of Thomas Paine, "Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."