These and a hundred other tales (from both the recent past and the present, as Berlin still struggles with the legacy of history) make for a highly unusual book, the final effect of which is as life-affirming and positive as the destruction of the Wall must have been for those who watched. The amazing stories that Anna Funder tells in Stasiland bring to life with extraordinary vividness both the dark and the more human sides of life in the former East Germany: a young girl who could have started World War III, the man who laid down the line that became the Wall. 'Stasiland takes us on a grim journey into a country in which the ratio of watchers to watched was even higher than that of the Soviets under communism.' - The Times (London) 'In a well-researched, personalized account ts out to explore and explain eastern Germany as it is now. For the inhabitants of East Germany, there were some stark statistics: one in 50 East Germans had informed on a fellow citizen, and human beings behaved in fashions unthinkable just the space of a wall away. With the hated symbol of the enforced division between East and West reduced to rubble, the two Germanys-East and West-are able to reunite grey, depressed East Germany becomes a memory.Īfter the initial euphoria, the change was hard for the world to accept, but it was both exhilarating and unsettling for the denizens of the Soviet bloc state, who had lived under the brutal, paranoid regime of the secret police, the dreaded Stasi of the title. In Stasiland, winner of the 2004 Samuel Johnson Prize, Anna Funder tells extraordinary tales from the underbelly of the former East Germany, 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 countrymen and women. The Berlin Wall falls and the history of a country that had become a microcosm of the Cold War is changed irrevocably. Anna Funder's penetrating and dispassionate Stasiland really begins with one significant date: the year 1989.

Stasiland book review