Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall [Paperback]

Anna Funder (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1862075808 | ISBN-13: 978-1862075801 | Publication Date: May 2003

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".

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Its job was to know everything about everyone, using any means it chose. It knew who your visitors were, it knew whom you telephoned, and it knew if your wife slept around." This was the fearsome Stasi, the Ministry for State Security of the late and unlamented German Democratic Republic. Funder, an Australian writer, international lawyer and TV and radio producer, visiting Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, finds herself captivated by stories of people who resisted the Stasi-moving stories that she collects in her first book, which was shortlisted for two literary awards in Australia. For instance, Miriam Weber, a slight woman with a "surprisingly big nicotine-stained voice," was placed in solitary confinement at the age of 16 for printing and distributing protest leaflets; she was caught again during a dramatic nighttime attempt to go over the Wall. Filtered through Funder's own keen perspective, these dramatic tales highlight the courage that ordinary people can display in torturous circumstances.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

During its 40-year history, the German Democratic Republic--East Germany--was, with Soviet assistance, the perfect police state. The organ of surveillance within the GDR (as well as foreign intelligence activities) was the Stasi, which, better than any other modern secret police, had organized a large army of citizen informers. Australian writer Funder thoroughly documents that culture of domestic spying and its effects on a cross-section of East German society. To call the stories that she relates as Orwellian is rather an understatement; the fact that they are true alone goes beyond Orwell: the mysterious death of a husband while in detention, the sudden "nonexistence" of a rock star, a mother's separation from her critically ill infant. What the reader learns from these stories is that evil swings like a pendulum, from the banal to the surreal, but no matter where it is in the spectrum, it always leaves pain behind. Frank Caso
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Granta Books (May 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1862075808
• ISBN-13: 978-1862075801
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #255,218 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #90 in Books > History > Historical Study > Essays
  • #98 in Books > Travel > Europe > Germany

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Puzzle People, August 13, 2004

By 

takingadayoff "takingadayoff" (Las Vegas, Nevada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall (Paperback)

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.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Their story..., June 28, 2004

By 

trix (cyberspace) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall (Paperback)

The recent winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, Stasiland reads like a diary of an outsider, as Funder takes her readers through her own personal landscapes of Berlin. Perhaps one of the most honest pieces of history written, her intimate style refocuses on the idea of story-telling in the most personal sense. History, as Funder portrays it, is a matter of memory, of re-telling the story of both sides, of interpreting, of listening and of re-creating. Very few history books dare to reveal their own vulnerability, and their own uncertain claim to "objectivity". Funder puts herself into the history that she attempts to record, and exposes the author of non-fiction as a mediator between the history as recorded and the history as told. Here Stasiland is a vehicle for subjective, personal histories to be heard, to accumulate, to inter-relate and therefore giving us a picture of what it is to wield power in the Orwellian GDR and what it is to live as a subject of the terrifying totalitarian apparatus.

A beautifully written, almost bittersweet, non-fiction. Funder tells the story of Miriam - a woman that continues to struggle with the authorities for the truth of her husband's death; of Frau Paul, who continues to wonder what might have been if she had not decided "against" her child; of her landlord Julia, whose teenage love affair with an Italian brought the scrutiny of the Stasi; and of the Stasi-men - and they are always men - of the young man who drew the line for the Berlin Wall; of a spy who thought it was fun to dress up for his job; of the propaganda-machine of GDR, who continues to hold on to his socialist ideal.

The intimacy of Funder's re-telling of her interviewees' accounts is coloured also by a sadness, an elegy, but sometimes also an obssessive drive. Often, Funder's own voice intrudes, commenting on what she has heard, sharing with us her reactions to the stories she is ascribing. These moments serves to remind the readers that although the prose reads like a novel, these stories are real - no matter how closely they may resemble fiction. Funder re-tells the stories, allowing herself to become the medium through which these histories can come to light.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A marvel, a must-read on totalitarianism, June 23, 2004

By 

Hugh Claffey (Co. Kildare Ireland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall (Paperback)

Anna Funder is an Australian who, somewhat aimlessly, finds herself in
Berlin in the 1990s. Working in the media she takes a professional interest in gathering stories about East German and its all-pervasive security apparatus - The Stasi. She visits museums filled with Stasi memorabilia, seeks interviews with former agents and victims. The book is well written and evocative, it paints a realistic picture of everyday cruelty of the former regime - a wife put to her wits end trying to bury her husband who died in custody, families pressured to spy on each other and on friends - Funder quotes statistics which reveal that there was one Stasi officer for every 63 East Germans; Hitler's Gestapo had one agent for every 2,000. The cases of the victims are heartbreaking, the effects on their personalities of the harassment, surveillance and torture they endured lasts beyond the reach of the old regime, through the supposed liberation.
She is quite effective on the attitude of today's German society to Ossies (former East Germans), most former West Germans (Wessies) now feel that "they were Germans who had Communism for forty years and went backwards, and all they want now is money to have big TV sets and holidays... It was an experiment and it failed". Ossies on the other hand feel an amount of resentment that they now live in a society which is so unequal and relatively unsafe. This resentment has spawned a cynical nostalgia for the old East Germany - Ostalgia. This outcome is astonishing to the outsider, but Funder's book carefully outlines how this has come to pass, since the optimism of the day's when the Berlin wall collapsed.
She excellently outlines revealing vignettes - the toilet minder, ex-East Berliner , who would like to travel, especially to visit China " to have a look at that Wall of theirs"; the former broadcaster, whose weekly propaganda program made him one of the most reviled figures of the Communist regime, who now rails against the reality TV show where people are locked into a house and observed via camera, their every move recorded - he calls it "Big Brozer" with unconscious irony- as a product of `The Australian Television Tyrant' {Murdoch}.
She is less revealing when dealing with the ex-Stasi agents, whom she meets. They talk to her as an apparently neutral foreigner, but their description of the past is filled with minimization and evasion. Their bewilderment at the collapse of their entire belief system and social structure is their most deeply felt emotion.
The book strengths lie in the despair of the stories themselves, and the craft that Funder brings to their telling, the mixture of bewilderment, despair, comedy and banality with which she makes the past and present so real. That said the weaknesses lie in her intrusion of her own story into the tale and her attempts at analysis. Funder is the thread along which the story advances - the tales of her acquaintances, her journalistic assignments mingle in the narrative. For the most part this works, however it can be over-instrusive, in particular when includes some dream sequences.
As an outside in Germany, she fails on when using German self analysis - e.g. Tucholsky's observation that all Germans grovel in front of counters and aspire to sit behind them - is fine for a German to make, but smacks of intrusion into a family quarrel when used by an outsider. Occasionally the commentary will lapse into German exceptionalism - what is it about the Germans and their lack of self esteem that makes them co-operate with oppression and totalitarianism. Its seems to me that this is not too far from the views expressed in the book "Hitler's willing Executioners", and is equally fatuous. It is a myth that societies react selflessly in the face of coercive repression, the French faced it for four years in World War II, Eastern Europe for forty years. Funder's book would be better without these judgmental side tracks.

That being said, it's a wonderful read. There are heat breaking stories of peoples still living with the impact of their treatment by the Communist regime, stories of people still living in denial of the crimes that they have committed. Surprises about the compromises made by the current regime in terms of failing to pursue those crimes, both in a forlorn effort to forgive by forgetting, but also due to typical bureaucratic underfunding. Hugely revealing, and topical in the sense of reminding us that systems and regimes can make enormous mistakes, of historical importance, that questioning dissent is vital for societies and that individual morality must guides all functionaries within systems.