Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall - Paperback

by Anna Funder (Author)

"Stasiland demonstrates that great, original reporting is still possible. . . . A heartbreaking, beautifully written book. A classic." -- Claire Tomalin, Guardian "Books of the Year"

Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction: a powerfully moving account of people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship of East Germany, and of people who worked for its secret police, the Stasi.

Anna Funder delivers a prize-winning and powerfully rendered account of the resistance against the German Democratic Republic's communist dictatorship in these harrowing, personal tales of life behind the Iron Curtain--and, especially, of life under the iron fist of the Stasi, East Germany's brutal state security force in one of history's most notorious surveillance states. In the tradition of Frederick Taylor's The Berlin Wall and Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families, Funder's Stasiland is a masterpiece of investigative reporting and a vital work of twentieth-century history, written with novelistic vividness and the compelling intensity of a universal, real-life story.

Through meticulous reporting, Funder reveals the haunting reality of life in the GDR--a world of quiet heroes, conflicted enforcers, and the ghosts left behind by a fallen state.

• A Chilling Surveillance State: Delve into the inner workings of the Stasi, a secret police force that used everything from collecting "smell samples" in jars to a vast network of informers to control the populace.
• Unforgettable True Stories: Meet Miriam, who became an Enemy of the State at sixteen for distributing leaflets, and Frau Paul, who made an impossible choice to protect a stranger at the cost of seeing her own critically ill child.
• Life Behind the Berlin Wall: Experience the strange, often absurd reality of the German Democratic Republic, a country that no longer exists but whose secrets still haunt the present day.
• The Perpetrators' Perspective: Hear directly from the men who served the regime, from professors who taught the art of recruiting informers to the officer who physically painted the line where the Wall would be built.

Back Jacket

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell; shortly afterward the two Germanys reunited, and East Germany ceased to exist. Anna Funder's bestselling Stasiland brings us extraordinary tales of real lives in the former East Germany. She meets Miriam, who tried to escape to West Berlin as a sixteen-year-old; hears the heartbreaking story of Frau Paul, who was separated from her baby by the Berlin Wall; and gets drunk with the legendary "Mik Jegger of the East," once declared by the authorities--to his face--"no longer to exist." And she meets the Stasi men themselves, still proud of their surveillance methods. Funder's powerful account of that brutal world has become a contemporary classic.