Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

The former GDR is perhaps still to close to be history, and there doesn't seem to be many books out there on the subject. Anna Funder's "Stasiland" fills that gap, and does so beautifully. She evokes a lost country, where the grotesquely overfed intelligence service had spilled out into all areas of society. In the end, Stasi controlled - and in many cases ruined - the lives of just about everyone in the GDR.

The first chapter paints a brilliant (and rather funny!) picture of the dark absurdity of a dictatorship. It is amazing how bogged down in detail, how ridiculously self-important it became. The fake moustaches, the cameras hidden in flowery granny handbags seem to come straight of "The Avengers". But soon, the tone turns sombre, as we begin to grasp how this "rule of Marxisten-Senilisten" drained joy and choice out of people's life. I had to keep reminding myself that this is fact, not fiction, as the drama and poignancy builds like a novel.

The whole account is deeply personal. Funder alternates the analysis of her investigations with descriptions of her own film noir-ish life in Berliner pubs and stripped apartments. It appears that she combines her exploratory drive with great poetry and a real knack for story-telling: her language is always lyrical and atmospheric, creating a real sense of time and place. Bridging the gap between story-telling and journalism, Anna Funder has written a unique and beautiful book.

Some of the reviews written above complain or find fault with Ms. Funders interjections or opinions during the course of her conversations with the people she meets yet I believe this adds very much to the charm and integrity of her account. She is reacting to the stories of people who lived under a regime that would have seemed incomprehensible to a girl born on the other side of the world (Australia, 1966) when the Wall had already been in existence for five years. It could have been something happening on another planet. It is significant, I think, that Ms. Funders never actually saw the Wall. It was gone by the time she got to Berlin. But the legacy of the Wall lived on in the damage it had done to the people imprisoned behind it and this is what her book is about. It is not a scholarly work with footnotes, nor is it a series of interviews conducted in English with an (unacknowledged) interpreter doing the donkey work which is what we have come to expect from our television superstars. This is not Gitta Sereny interviewing concentration camp commanders, nor even Hannah Arendt commenting on the 'banality of evil' as she witnesses the trial of Adolf Eichmann. No, this is a very different thing altogether. This is a young Australian woman of Danish descent (she thought that was close enough to "pass" as German, but it turned out it wasn't) who decided to study German as a kid to the bewilderment of her family. She liked the weird agglomerations of the language that made nuanced new words. She goes to Berlin and starts to meet people who lived under the DDR regime, already 7 years defunct by the time she gets there. That's where the stories come from. So she's judgemental. Why not? She can hardly believe what she is hearing. This is late 20th Century Alice in Stasiland -- just as weird as the Lewis Carroll original: there is no unemployment even if you are unemployed, this is a multi-party state even if there is only one party, the Wall protects you even if we shoot you for trying to leave. Something is seriously askew here. Objectivity in these circumstances would have led to the following "balanced" report from Berlin in former times: 'Obviously the Jews must be doing something deeply subversive, otherwise Herr Hitler wouldn't be so angry with them'. Indubitably. In fact, I find several parallels with this occasionally poetic (very rarely over-written) account of Ms. Funder with that of the "Berlin Stories" of Christopher Isherwood written from the same city during the early 1930s when the Nazis were just coming to power. In the same way as Isherwood she captures the feeling and mood of the city, the swampy setting, the wide grey streets, the bustling trams, the cavernous apartments with brown linoleum, the trees, the parks, the drunks, the feverish gaiety, the underlying gloom. Ms. Funder gives us a personal (and why not?) snapshot of a certain time and place just as Isherwood -- 'I am a camera' -- did for another period in the history of this city.

I strongly recommend this book - not only to those, like me, who visited the happily defunct GDR, but everybody who would like to learn about how people react and act in a dictatorship. Why would people inform on their lovers, parents or neighbours? How could others think they would succeed in escaping?

The book is informative, exciting, moving and above all poetic. It leaves you thinking, and most of all, I'm left pondering how I would have behaved in a system such as the one in GDR. Hopefully, I'll never know.