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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