Stasiland

A young Australian, Anna Funder, places an advertisement in the newspaper to find resistors and enforcers of the brutal East German regime, the Stasi. This naïve, but bold act leads her on a path to discover tales that reverberate through time.

Similarly, I felt ill equipped to face vestiges of censored war crimes, historical documents, and fragments of memory, but, inspired by Funder’s curiosity and dedication, I pressed on.  

Stasiland is a gripping non-fiction account of personal histories from the former East Germany told retrospectively. We live alongside Australian writer Anna Funder amidst fast-changing 1990s Berlin as she meets Stasi men and those who resisted them. We learn of their struggles in East German times and beyond through her outsider’s eye. Some may balk at the book’s personal tone, but for me, Funder pulls it off. I found this first-person blend of memoir and journalistic investigation to be utterly irresistible. 

I am utterly obsessed with the GDR, a country that existed for less than thirty years and was riddled with informers and forbidden zones. So many of the stories which have come out of it teeter on the edge of absurd: the punk scene, for example, which the Stasi (the state secret police) were so determined to infiltrate that one popular band was made up entirely of their agents. And so many of them, including the treatment of prisoners in the secret prison at Hohenschönhausen, are terrifying. In Stasiland, Anna Funder captures all the insanity and also the warmth… show more.

This book was a very important source of information for me while I wrote East of the Wall. The Stasi was the policing component of the Soviet government of East Germany from after World War II until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. They recruited informers by various means, including some very ugly ones, to feed them private information about all the residents of East Germany and even some of the residents of West Berlin. They read people's mail and used wiretaps of phone lines to collect information also. All this information was recorded in miles of paper records.… show more.

I first encountered this non-fiction book on East Germany while doing research for my novel. It is a riveting account of the author’s journey to Germany after the Wall came down to interview both people who resisted the authorities and people who worked for them. It provides incredible insight into the life and mindset of East Germans under the totalitarian regime. Many of the stories will leave you with your mouth hanging open in shock. I took it out of the library and then realized it was a book I needed to own, so I bought it and have read… show more.