Stasiland:
Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall
By Anna Funder
In
1989, the Berlin Wall fell; shortly afterwards the two Germanies
reunited, and East Germany ceased to exist. In a country where the
headquarters of the secret police can become a museum literally
overnight, and one in fifty East Germans were informing on their
country men and women, there are a thousand stories just waiting
to get out.
Anna
Funder tells extraordinary tales from the underbelly of the former
East Germany - she meets Miriam, who as a sixteen-year-old might
have started World War III, visits the man who painted the line
which became the Berlin Wall and gets drunk with the legendary 'Mik
Jegger' of the east, once declared by the authorities to his face
to 'no longer to exist'.
Stasiland
is a powerful account of the courage of those who withstood the
dictatorship and the consequences for those who collaborated. It
is not a history of the rise and fall of East Germany but an exploration
of the effect that the regime had on the lives of so many ordinary
men and women.
‘A
brilliant and necessary book about oppression and history….it
both devastates and lifts the heart’
Evening Standard
‘Brilliant
account of the brutal histories of people whose lives were shaped
by the Berlin Wall’
Sunday Times
‘Funder
is a superb interviewer …..she truly excels in the rendering
of her sessions with former Stasi employees’ Sunday Times
‘Funder
has collected impressive life stories of victims and perpetrators
in a divided country. She tells their tales well’ Independent
Anna
Funder was born in Australia and grew up in Melbourne and Paris.
Stasiland, her first book, won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction
in 2004.
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