Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall - Softcover

Anna Funder

4.2

18,568 ratings by Goodreads

9781847083357: Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847083358 ISBN 13: 9781847083357

Publisher: Granta, 2011

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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'. Written with wit and literary flair, Stasiland provides a rivetting insight into life behind the wall.

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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:

'An appealing blend of investigative and reflective reporting, with the narrative drive of powerful human-interest stories. . . . There is no denying Funder's journalistic talents' --.

'The best account of the strange, secretive place on the other side of the wall' --Evening Standard

'Superb... Funder skilfully deploys fictional techniques to make the material jump off the page: crafted scenes with their own story-arcs, naturalistic dialogue, fully-realised characters with their own plotlines. The atmosphere of grey grimness is vividly conveyed: but there are flashes of humour too' ***** --Independent on Sunday

'These are haunting accounts of an Orwellian time through which no one lived through without paying a high personal price' --Herald

'These rigorously researched, tenderly told stories of life inside East Germany won the Samuel Johnson prize a decade ago. It reads as a powerful backward glance of the everyday fears, terrors but also rebellions. Funder illuminates her subjects with humanity and at times, inserts herself into the story of a nation and identity divided, reminding us just how remarkable investigative journalism can be' --Independent

'These encounters with the survivors are the most harrowing and, until this book, almost forgotten' --The Times

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