Stasiland: Insight Text Guide - Softcover

Funder, Anna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1459662237 ISBN 13: 9781459662230

Publisher: ReadHowYouWant, 2013

Synopsis

Stasiland Insight Text Guide has highly visual Character Map with notes on each character and their relationships; in - depth and comprehensive background and context notes; excellent notes on genre, style and structure; a chapter - by - chapter/scene - by - scene analysis; discussion of characters and relationships; highly informative section on themes, issues and concepts; discussion of different interpretations - which has come into most English courses around Australia recently; sample exam questions and answers for students to use for essay writing practise on the text; a comprehensive References list.

About this title

Review

Anna Funder's penetrating and dispassionate Stasiland really begins with one significant date: the year 1989. The Berlin Wall falls and the history of a country that had become a microcosm of the Cold War is changed irrevocably. With the hated symbol of the enforced division between East and West reduced to rubble, the two Germanys--East and West--are able to reunite; grey, depressed East Germany becomes a memory.

After the initial euphoria, the change was hard for the world to accept, but it was both exhilarating and unsettling for the denizens of the Soviet bloc state, who had lived under the brutal, paranoid regime of the secret police, the dreaded Stasi of the title. For the inhabitants of East Germany, there were some stark statistics: one in 50 East Germans had informed on a fellow citizen, and human beings behaved in fashions unthinkable just the space of a wall away.

The amazing stories that Anna Funder tells in Stasiland bring to life with extraordinary vividness both the dark and the more human sides of life in the former East Germany: a young girl who could have started World War III, the man who laid down the line that became the Wall. These and a hundred other tales (from both the recent past and the present, as Berlin still struggles with the legacy of history) make for a highly unusual book, the final effect of which is as life-affirming and positive as the destruction of the Wall must have been for those who watched. --Barry Forshaw

Review

'A masterpiece.' (Sunday Times)

'A fascinating book ... I can think of no better introduction to the brutal reality of East German repression.' (The Sunday Telegraph)

'At once lyrical, bitter, funny and sad, her writing releases many individuals of their stories – a second liberation.' (The Observer)

'Brilliantly illustrates the weird, horrifying viciously cruel place that was Cold War East Germany ... as well as the horror, Funder writes superbly of the absurdities of the Stasi.' (The Evening Standard)

Edition details

• Publisher: ReadHowYouWant
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1459662237
• ISBN 13: 9781459662230
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128