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Overview
"Stasiland demonstrates that great, original reporting is still possible. . . . A heartbreaking, beautifully written book. A classic." -- Claire Tomalin, Guardian "Books of the Year"
Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction: a powerfully moving account of people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship of East Germany, and of people who worked for its secret police, the Stasi.
Anna Funder delivers a prize-winning and powerfully rendered account of the resistance against East Germany's communist dictatorship in these harrowing, personal tales of life behind the Iron Curtain--and, especially, of life under the iron fist of the Stasi, East Germany's brutal state security force. In thetradition of Frederick Taylor's The Berlin Wall and Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families, Funder's Stasiland is a masterpiece of investigative reporting, written with novelistic vividness and the compelling intensity of a universal, real-life story.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9780062077325
- ISBN-10: 0062077325
- Publisher: Harper Perennial
- Publish Date: September 2011
- Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.5 pounds
- Page Count: 304
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The other side of the Berlin Wall
Originally published in Australia and the U.K. in 2003, Stasiland describes a series of horrors and indignities visited upon the citizens of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) by the Stasi—the Ministry for State Security—in the years leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Anna Funder began her research in 1996 by interviewing both victims and victimizers and rummaging through the vast Stasi headquarters, now a museum.
The Stasi and their spies were everywhere—and they made sure people knew it, reasoning that knowing there was no chance of privacy would discourage subversive activity. “In the GDR, there was one Stasi officer or informant for every sixty-three people,” Funder reports. “If part-time informers are included, some estimates have the ratio as high as one informer for every 6.5 citizens.”
In this heavily policed state, private residences were routinely searched on mere suspicion or whim, telephones were tapped, mail was opened and the contents recorded. The Stasi kept voluminous records on virtually every citizen. When the Wall fell, there was an orgy of paper shredding. Even so, there were far too many files to destroy. Now there are teams trying to reassemble the shredded documents, a task predicted to take well over 300 years.
Funder’s stories are at once heartbreaking and outrageous: A 16-year-old girl is imprisoned for a year and a half, some of that time in solitary confinement, for posting “seditious” leaflets; 10 years later her sweetheart dies under mysterious circumstances in a Stasi prison cell; a young woman is summoned by a Stasi official to discuss the intimate portions of her love letters; parents are separated from their gravely ill child for the first five years of his life. Despite all this, the Stasi officials whom Funder interviewed are generally unrepentant.
Fortunately, there are flashes of Orwellian humor amid the soul-crushing darkness. In one such instance, a woman goes to a state agency to apply for a job and makes the mistake of telling the clerk there that she is “unemployed.” This enrages the clerk. “You are not unemployed!” she barks. “You are seeking work. There is no unemployment in the German Democratic Republic!”
The other side of the Berlin Wall
Originally published in Australia and the U.K. in 2003, Stasiland describes a series of horrors and indignities visited upon the citizens of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) by the Stasi—the Ministry for State Security—in the years leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Anna Funder began her research in 1996 by interviewing both victims and victimizers and rummaging through the vast Stasi headquarters, now a museum.
The Stasi and their spies were everywhere—and they made sure people knew it, reasoning that knowing there was no chance of privacy would discourage subversive activity. “In the GDR, there was one Stasi officer or informant for every sixty-three people,” Funder reports. “If part-time informers are included, some estimates have the ratio as high as one informer for every 6.5 citizens.”
In this heavily policed state, private residences were routinely searched on mere suspicion or whim, telephones were tapped, mail was opened and the contents recorded. The Stasi kept voluminous records on virtually every citizen. When the Wall fell, there was an orgy of paper shredding. Even so, there were far too many files to destroy. Now there are teams trying to reassemble the shredded documents, a task predicted to take well over 300 years.
Funder’s stories are at once heartbreaking and outrageous: A 16-year-old girl is imprisoned for a year and a half, some of that time in solitary confinement, for posting “seditious” leaflets; 10 years later her sweetheart dies under mysterious circumstances in a Stasi prison cell; a young woman is summoned by a Stasi official to discuss the intimate portions of her love letters; parents are separated from their gravely ill child for the first five years of his life. Despite all this, the Stasi officials whom Funder interviewed are generally unrepentant.
Fortunately, there are flashes of Orwellian humor amid the soul-crushing darkness. In one such instance, a woman goes to a state agency to apply for a job and makes the mistake of telling the clerk there that she is “unemployed.” This enrages the clerk. “You are not unemployed!” she barks. “You are seeking work. There is no unemployment in the German Democratic Republic!”