In the former East there was one agent of the Stasi, the secret police, for every six citizens. What did it do to people to be so watched? And what sort of people were they, all those watchers? In her internationally acclaimed debut, Anna Funder presents with startling humour and sympathy the human face of the twentieth century's most repressive regime. Anna Funder lived in Berlin before the Wall came down. She visited Germany again after the fall of communism, and spoke with people about their experiences living under, or within, the Stasi regime. Their stories have become Stasiland.

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

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Stasiland

Funder, Anna

Used - Hardcover

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