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Anna Funder
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Stasiland Paperback – 5 December 2003

by Anna Funder (Author)
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 2,631 ratings
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Truth can be stranger - and more fascinating - than fiction. Anna Funder tells extraordinary stories from the underbelly of the most perfected surveillance state of all time, the former East Germany. Funder meets Miriam, the sixteen-year-old who might have started World War III. She visits the regime's cartographer, obsessed to this day with the Berlin Wall, then gets drunk with the legendary 'Mik Jegger' of the east, once declared by the authorities 'no longer to exist'. And she finds spies and Stasi men, still loyal to the Firm as they wait for the next revolution. Stasiland is a lyrical, at times funny account of the courage some people found to withstand the dictatorship, and the consequences for those who collaborated. Funder explores the daily chaos and harsh beauty of Berlin, a place where some people are trying to remember, and others just as hard to forget. Stasiland is a brilliant debut by a prodigiously gifted writer.
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Previous page
  1. Print length
    304 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Text Publishing
  4. Publication date
    5 December 2003
  5. Dimensions
    13 x 2.2 x 20 cm
  6. ISBN-10
    1877008915
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1877008917
  8. See all details
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Product description

About the Author

Anna Funder is the author of the acclaimed All That I Am, winner of the 2012 Miles Franklin Literary Award, among other awards. Her first book, the internationally bestselling Stasiland, won the 2004 Samuel Johnson Prize and was published in twenty countries and translated into sixteen languages. Anna Funder is a former DAAD and Rockefeller Foundation Fellow. She grew up in Melbourne and Paris and now lives in New York with her husband and family.

Visit the author online at annafunder.com

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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Text Publishing; 1st edition (5 December 2003)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1877008915
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1877008917
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13 x 2.2 x 20 cm
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 2,631 ratings

About the author

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Anna Funder

Anna Funder

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4.3 out of 5 stars
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2,631 global ratings

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Top reviews from Australia

memoir fan
5.0 out of 5 stars brilliant
Reviewed in Australia on 18 February 2024
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She has a gift for immersing the reader, nuanced insights into the impact of world events on the people who lived through it.
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Deborah Fowler
4.0 out of 5 stars Reflections on the personal stories of the Stasi regime
Reviewed in Australia on 31 August 2023
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A sad book about the needless harm inflicted on a population that had been defeated in war and then had to endure an overbearing secretive and cruel rule by communists
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Veronica Husted
5.0 out of 5 stars The truth about those terrible times
Reviewed in Australia on 15 October 2023
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This was a brilliantly written book which kept me riveted until the end. the terrible things people do to each other is sickening and it continues. when will we stop?
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John Giles
3.0 out of 5 stars Wanted to hear more of East Germans' stories and less about the author's irrelevant experiences
Reviewed in Australia on 30 January 2024
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When the author did not unnecessarily interpose herself, the stories of the citizens of East Germany were very interesting. Wanted to hear more about them and much much less about the author. Disappointing in the way the author kept saying "look at me", as if that was of interest to anyone.
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John Whiteing
4.0 out of 5 stars What an appalling regime it was and how sad for those people who survived the Third Reich being ...
Reviewed in Australia on 2 November 2016
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Having recently visited Berlin for the first time and spent time at the Topography of Terror and the GDR Museum this book really struck a cord with me. What an appalling regime it was and how sad for those people who survived the Third Reich being thrust into this new hell. There can truly be no caring and merciful god who can allow this to happen.
4 people found this helpful
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Tim Johnson
5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant insight into the brain of the GDR.
Reviewed in Australia on 13 June 2020
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I finished this insightful look into the brain of the GDR and more specifically, the Stasi apparatus that was needed to keep that government functioning.

The author, Anna Funder, as an Australian could slip into the lives of several East German personalities and record their lives as those lives changed due to the influence of GDR domestic surveillance. Funder uses specific people as examples of how this domestic surveillance worked in the GDR. For instance, she talks with Julia in Chp.9, von Schnitzler in 13, Frau Paul in 21 and others in between these chapters. I found chapter 27, Puzzlers to be particularly fascinating in a remarkably fascinating book.

Funder has written a timely book, at least for an old guy like me who still thinks the destruction of The Wall in 1989 was recent history.
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Ian mby
5.0 out of 5 stars Marvellous
Reviewed in Australia on 10 January 2020
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Anna Funder is an excellent writer, and is here in fine form. She deals with not just the former East German spy agency, but also the effect of its work on its agents, victims, the many informers, and the few who resisted all blandishments to assist. The viewpoint is personal, the truths universal. Strongly recommended.
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Trena
4.0 out of 5 stars Very Intersting
Reviewed in Australia on 13 November 2018
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I bought this book before an upcoming trip to Berlin to get a bit more of a personal look into the history. I enjoyed the book, easy reading and personal accounts.
One person found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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passeva
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book
Reviewed in Italy on 21 October 2021
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A great book with stunning personal accounts of the period. Well written with a flair of female sensitivity that makes it even better.
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Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 stars Nice book ...
Reviewed in India on 1 November 2017
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Very detailed knowledge of rouge intelligence agency of east Germany most amazing thing they had informers everywhere ....Stasi was brilliant secret service in my point of view
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Emi Bevacqua
5.0 out of 5 stars Heavy history that reads like a novel!
Reviewed in Germany on 25 March 2017
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Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall is a masterpiece by Anna Funder, it came out in 2003, and has been published in 20 countries and 16 languages. Stasiland is a brilliantly researched account of several Ossis (aka former East Germans, GDR, poor cousins) either involved in, or affected by the Stasi (State Security Service of the former GDR or German Democratic Republic). These individuals' stories are heartbreaking and intense, and along with their surrounding history Funder illustrates for us the horror of this chapter in history's oppression and brutality. The vast Stasi network of 97,000 employees and 173,000 informers yielded a ratio of 1 informer to 63 GDR residents; for context Funder compares the Stasi's 1:63 to Hitler's Gestapo ratio of 1:2,000. The scope of Stasi surveillance and psychological torment was stupefying, and beyond that they were involved in doping young athletes with androgenic hormones, and using radiation to track their subjects with reckless disregard for their safety.

There is tension and suspense, and so many moving descriptions - of the fall of the wall, with people from the east and the west climbing it, crying and dancing all over it; or the scene afterwards inside the Stasi office where over a hundred shredders were worked to kaputness so Stasi members were actually ripping documents up by hand and just shoving all the shreds into bags; the painstaking work of the "puzzle ladies" putting together all those little pieces of paper, that continues today and is projected to take another 375 years, at the current rate; or (outgoing German President) Joachim Gauch's role in opening those Stasi files on its people to its people, which allows me to understand better why it's such a big deal that he is retiring.

Throughout this read I was reminded with dread, of President Trump, "the man... accustomed to such power that the truth does not matter because (he) cannot be contradicted" or "the man radiated so much nastiness he simply wasn't credible"etc.; but despite his genealogical Drumpfness, at least I know Trump didn't inherit "that German mentality, a certain drive for order and thoroughness" so characteristic of the Stasi infiltration.
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fishface42
5.0 out of 5 stars DETRITUS OF A 40 YEAR EXPERIMENT. (Also, See DDR ON U Tube.)
Reviewed in Canada on 15 February 2016
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One reviewer states that she would have liked to hear more from Frau Paul, separated for years by the Wall from her ailing son. But this observation highlights a point. Frau Paul and her tragic son are DDR detritus, washed up for good, like many other victims of the Stasi. There isn't much more Frau Paul could say. The successful MO of the DDR was to stunt every comrade, both victim and victimizer. In T.S. Eliot's phrase, they were all "living and partly living." Each kept his head down and played along with the farce in all its bizarre manifestations. At first I wondered if the author's first person introduction was going anywhere; by the end I understood how she had combined multifarious personal interviews and observations into a coherent tapistry/mosaic of life in the DDR.
I followed her leads to Utube to see the derivative rocker Klaus Renft and the ludicrous manufactured dance, the lipsistep, a would-be socialist alternative to western decadance. There are also various propaganda videos from the DDR plus, astonishingly, scenes of Ostalgie, parties and souvenir stands, post-1990, of DDR memorabilia. These have few hits, but must be seen to get a fuller picture of the DDR and its aftermath.
Frau Paul, her husband and son, give an extended interview on a U Tube series called "A History of the DDR", episode 1 (of 7) at approx. the 42 minute mark. This is a detailed series from c.2003 of narrative and personal experiences of many comrades of the DDR.
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Nicolas B.
5.0 out of 5 stars Très bien écrit
Reviewed in France on 24 July 2016
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Contrairement à beaucoup d'ouvrages du genre qui souffrent de la lourdeur d'un style très descriptif et factuel, cet ouvrage est écrit de la perspective de l'auteur lors de ses rencontres avec des victimes ou d'anciens dignitaires de la Stasi et de sa propre aventure à travers les méandres de ce qu'il en restait alors.

Les histoires qui y sont relatées offrent une perspective exceptionnelle et rafraîchissante, l'analyse y est intelligente. Je l'ai dévoré en 2 jours à peine ...
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