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She and a friend distributed leaflets and were caught in the act.

One of the subjects, Miriam (I presume most names in the book are not real), performed what we might be tempted to call “harmless agitation” against the regime as early as 1968, the year of the “Prague Spring” in neighboring Czechoslovakia. (Credit: flickr user bruchez, see end of article.)Īs already mentioned, the book tells some extraordinarily painful stories. But enough of the meta information about Stasiland: let’s dive into it contents.Ī corridor at Hohenschönhausen, a Stasi prison in Berlin. I stress print because there definitely are some German television documentaries dedicated to this topic.Įven more extraordinary is the fact that it was left to a “western” journalist, Ms. 1, plus one that I have in my possession and hope to read soon, Sie nahmen mir nicht nur die Freiheit –, but I’m not currently aware of any other instance where a print journalist has taken it upon him/herself to seek out and interview multiple persons affected by German communism. Several individual autobiographies exist - I think of those that I have read, such as Fremd im eigenen Haus and Ich war Staatsfeind Nr. I believe her book is fairly unique in the depth it provides to multiple individual stories, some of which are brutally painful. You can imagine how much more difficult it was in 1996 while Funder visited the country. Even now, in 2009, dealing with the recent German communist past is a very touchy issue (not to mention the National Socialist past). So in one sense - the academic one - you might call it lighter reading, but it’s certainly heavy in the emotional sense.Īnna Funder’s Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall (Amazon US, UK, CA, DE, DE ) tells the stories of real people whose lives were very much defined by the existence of the Berlin Wall and the East German communist dictatorship (the GDR from here on out): not just the regime’s victims, but also its supporters and still-proud employees.įrom the dates she gives, it appears Funder gathered most of her interview material while living in Germany in 1996, seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This week’s selection for Book of the Week is not written by a professional historian, but rather by an Australian journalist.