Cambridge Publishing Management (CPM) writes this review:
History is made of personal stories, and Anna Funder’s sensitive but incisive investigation into life in East Germany since the end of the Second World War is a powerful example of how people’s stories can be used to reveal the multi-layered, complicated truth.
Writing in the first person, Funder describes how in the 1990s she was drawn into researching what life had been like in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). She skillfully weaves historical facts with people’s stories, threading them together with her own experiences of interviewing these damaged people.
There are a few key characters in the book, such as Miriam, a young woman whose husband died in a Stasi remand cell, and whose funeral was orchestrated to the point of substituting an empty coffin for a full one. Miriam’s own life and mental health were destroyed by what started as a minor teenage act of rebellion when, aged just 16, she and a friend printed some posters at home complaining about heavy-policing of a demonstration and then pasted them up around Leipzig. Her subsequent arrest, imprisonment in solitary confinement, sleep deprivation and interrogation, led her impulsively to try to escape over the Berlin wall when she was released. Astonishingly she very nearly made it to the West, but this made her attempt seem like it must have been well planned and backed up, making her seem all the more dangerous, and consequently the interrogation and imprisonment that followed was all the more intense.
Another story is that of Frau Paul and her husband, whose sick baby had been receiving specialist treatment from a hospital in West Berlin when the Berlin wall was suddenly put up. They couldn’t continue to get the vital medicine their son needed, and when he became so ill that he might have died, the eastern doctors managed to spirit him away across the border to the West Berlin hospital. So began years of separation and pain, which eventually led to the couple being incarcerated in brutal conditions and tortured.
Then there is Hagen Koch, the fresh young Stasi recruit who once painted the line where the wall would go and now, proud of his past, keeps a Wall Archive. For him the GDR was like a religion he was brought up to believe in. His father had joined the German army in 1929, serving under the Nazis, but then found his hometown handed over to the communists. Like many soldiers Herr Koch was imprisoned by the Russian secret police in a prisoner of war camp (some 43,000 people are estimated to have died in this sort of circumstance from starvation, illness and violence). When, after only one month in custody, Herr Koch was offered release if he became a member of the Socialist Unity Party it was simple, he changed parties. And so the Koch family became signed-up advocates for the Party and, in a country predicated on paranoid control, in due course his son became a poster boy for the new regime. How was Koch supposed to deal with the end of the GDR?
To remember or to forget, which is healthier? After the Berlin wall came down there were many practical problems to deal with, but there was also the question of what to do about the past. No one could decide whether to get rid of buildings and their contents, or to keep them as a memorial warning from the past. Funder visits the museum containing Stasi artifacts: fake wigs and moustaches, handbags with built-in microphones, like hardly credible props from a spy film; instructions for Stasi spies and lists of signals they were to give each other, such as bending to retie shoelaces, touch nose with handkerchief, which now seem almost risible. Why, she asks, are some things easier to remember the more time has passed since they occurred?
The wall came down in October 1989, and debate raged hot about what to do with the Stasi files: should they be opened or burnt? Should they be locked away for fifty years and then opened? What are the dangers of knowing, or of ignoring the past? In the end some were destroyed, some locked away, and some opened. The files that the Stasi had kept on ordinary people inside the GDR were particularly sensitive, people were afraid that information might be kept and used against them, or that they would never find out how their lives had been manipulated by the Firm.
Funder finds a country crowded with victims: of the Nazis, of Stalin, and of the Stasi. She meets former Stasi members who now have to deny their past, but who in private (and making sure no waiters were eavesdropping) speak of communism as an article of faith; they believe capitalism is exploitation, unfair, it plunders the planet. They wait in their apartments with brown linoleum floors for the Second Coming of Socialism.
Funder’s sensitive retelling of so many individual tragedies captures the anguish of her subjects, their long silent pauses, held breath, chewed lips and nervous tics, which subtly dramatise their continued torment despite the passage of time. Her book is a fantastic read for anyone interested in Berlin and Germany, or simply in people and what makes history.
Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall is published by Granta Books (2011).
Read more about our author services here
Read more about Anna Funder here
________________________________________________________