Stasiland
by Anna Funder
Summary
In the mid 1990s Anna Funder, a young Australian working for German television in Berlin, became fascinated by the question her colleagues found faintly embarrassing: what had life inside East Germany actually been like, and where had all its enforcers gone? Her employer was not interested. So she went herself, renting a flat in a crumbling Berlin block, riding trains into the grey towns of the former GDR, and, in the book's most audacious move, placing a newspaper advertisement inviting former Stasi officers to talk to her. They answered.
The book alternates the two Germanies of its subtitle. There are the resisters and the ruined: Miriam, who at sixteen tried to climb the Wall, and whose husband later died in a Stasi cell, officially a suicide, a word the book spends its whole length quietly dismantling; the woman whose Beatles loving boyfriend was shot; families dismembered by the file and the informer. And there are the men from the advertisements: unrepentant professionals explaining surveillance tradecraft over coffee and cake, the smell regimen, the psychology of recruitment, one instructor still proud of his interrogation seminars, all of them adrift in a unified Germany that would rather not discuss it.
Funder writes it as first person reportage, wry, mournful and exact, and the book's lasting image is the puzzle women of Nuremberg, reassembling shredded Stasi files by hand, bag by bag, a job scheduled to take centuries.
Around two hundred and ninety pages.
Best for readers who want the best single book on the East German police state, told at kitchen table height.
Historical Context & Significance
Stasiland won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2004, an Australian debut beating the year's established names, and the Guardian's early review found it gripping: the culture of informants and moral capitulation comes wonderfully to life in Funder's racy account. The book has since been published in dozens of countries, become a staple of school and university courses on surveillance and totalitarianism, and been adapted for the stage by the National Theatre in London.
Its timing gave it force: written within a decade of the Wall's fall, while the files were fresh, the perpetrators employable and the nostalgia industry, Ostalgie, already booming, it caught testimony that a later start would have lost.
Anna Funder returned with the novel All That I Am, about anti Nazi exiles, which swept Australia's prizes, and Wifedom, her study of Eileen Orwell, and remains best known for this first book, routinely shelved beside Orwell for the clarity of its anger.