Review 1: Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, by Anna Funder

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am hungover and steer myself like a car through the crowds at Alexanderplatz station.

How could you not love a book that begins like that?

Early on in Stasiland, Anna Funder discusses the ‘puzzle women of Nuremberg’. This is a group of underfunded people (both men and women, oddly) who spend their days piecing together the scraps of documents the Stasi hurriedly shredded at the end of their regime.

It feels like an apt analogy for Funder’s book itself – she carefully and brilliantly pieces together a view of what it was like to live in East Germany, and the effect it’s had on its citizens decades after the Berlin Wall was wrenched down, from snapshot interviews, research and her own experiences… despite the fact that most people she encounters would rather sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened.

I came to this book knowing that East Germany was run as a Communist surveillance state, but little else. That was no problem. The way Funder dots explanation in around her interviews catches the novice up easily, without sparing the kind of chunks of in-depth information that would also satisfy people less ignorant than me (i.e. most people).

The governing party of East Germany, the GDR, started with noble intentions. What Funder demonstrates beautifully here is how an ideology, using bureaucracy as its primary tool, can forget the humanity of the people it claims to represent. The Stasi (essentially the secret police of the GDR) were given free rein to infringe individual rights in order to protect ‘the wider society’ – which increasingly became synonymous with ‘the government’.

Funder sensitively chronicles the stories of those who were trampled – a woman whose husband’s funeral was infiltrated and possibly faked after he died in suspicious circumstances; another whose baby had to be sent to West Germany after East German doctors failed to treat him, access to whom was then used to try to blackmail her into informing for the Stasi; a man who was forced to choose between divorcing his wife and living his life out in prison – alongside interviews with representatives of the Stasi who had been responsible for conducting the surveillance, and in doing so, powerfully underlines how easily the real lives of people can slip through the cracks when ideology, bureaucracy and hierarchy are allowed to run unchecked.

One of the book’s best examples of how the GDR lost sight of real people takes place in an old GDR media centre. There, Funder finds a video showcasing the Lipsi – a new dance that the GDR concocted and hoped would take off. As she watched, she realised it was actually stitched together from various other dances that were already popular in different parts of the globe: part Greek, part Irish, part waltz, part Russian. But one thing remained constant – the dancers’ hips didn’t move. And in attempted to excise anything even vaguely semi-sexual from this dance, they ended up with a confused, mechanical bundle of movements. They focused on the physical dance, but not on why people might choose to do it. This feels as appropriate a metaphor for the regime as any.

Funder’s writing style is clever, self-assured and deeply readable. Matter-of-fact about dark subjects – torture, for example – but without ever losing empathy for people in any position within the former East Germany. I’ll definitely seek out more of her work.

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