Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall Review

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(More customer reviews)Stasiland is the former East Germany, a country where the Stasi, the secret police, spied on every inhabitant, kept files on everybody, and seemed all-powerful. Anna Funder has written about the Stasi in a way that sometimes seems like fiction, other times like memoir, and ultimately like an exceptionally readable history.
The Berlin of Funder's book is post-Wall Berlin, but it is as gray and paranoid as the Berlin of John le Carre's spy novels. Funder seems depressed throughout, and it is no wonder. She spends all her time interviewing former "Ossis," East Germans who were victims of the Stasi or who were former Stasi themselves. Even her irrepresible rock musician friend reveals that his band was declared "non-existent" by the Stasi. The secret police were so thorough that he cannot find any evidence that his group, which recorded several albums and was quite popular in the East, ever existed.
Through Funder, we hear from Miriam, who nearly made it over the Wall at age sixteen, but was caught, jailed, and blacklisted. Shortly after she married, her husband was arrested, then the Stasi showed up at Miriam's door to tell her that her husband had killed himself. She refused to believe the obvious lie and the subsequent funeral was a bizarre farce. Decades later, Miriam is still trying to make sense of it all, still searching for clues to explain what really happened.
Frau Paul tells of her newborn son whose East German doctors risked their careers by smuggling the infant to the West because it was his only chance to survive a life-threatening condition. Frau Paul was denied permission to visit her baby unless she agreed to help the Stasi trap an acquaintance of hers. She desperately wanted to see her son, whose condition kept him in hospital for years, but knew that if she agreed to help the Stasi just once, she would be theirs for life. The child was well-cared for, but was growing up with only the hospital staff as his family. When he left the hospital at age six and returned to his family in the East, he was polite but distant with the parents who were strangers to him. Forty years later, Frau Paul still considers herself the traitor to her country and failure as a parent that the Stasi told her she was.
Not all of the stories are tragic. Funder learns of a woman the Stasi tried to recruit to spy on her co-workers. The woman agreed, then went to work and cheerfully told everyone that the Stasi had recruited her to be a spy. Since her cover had been blown, she was no longer useful to the Stasi. They never bothered her again.
Funder visits the office of the "puzzle people," workers who put shredded documents from Stasi files back together. The papers reveal who the Stasi was watching, what they discovered, and who the informers were. Ossis may now request to see their files, but many of the files have yet to be put back together. The director tells Funder that at the rate of an average of ten reconstructed documents a day per employee, it will take forty puzzle people 375 years to reconstruct all the shredded documents. And, he explains, "as you see, we have only thirty-one employees."
Little by little, Funder allows us to realize that the Stasi does not exist as a curious and irrelevant moment in history. The torture devices in the Stasi museum and the thousands of bags of shredded documents that recall the abuses of power are evidence of a government that still haunts the lives of millions of former Ossis. It had seemed so powerful, but when the end came for the Stasi, it was without violence in a peaceful revolution of people who were just fed up.


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