(Eventually her lover died, mysteriously, in custody.) A couple the author met had nearly lost their sick child, who was at a better hospital in West Berlin her landlady was barely able to acknowledge what turned out to be a history of twisted treatment by the Stasi. Funder befriended several survivors, such as Miriam, who was arrested at 16 in 1968 for anti-authoritarian pranks fearing prison, she attempted to cross the Berlin Wall, served time, and was persecuted for years.
The German Democratic Republic’s surveillance apparatus, run by the Stasi (secret police), was more pervasive than elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc many people became informers, while others had their lives ruined for minor infractions. When she was writer-in-residence at the Australia Center in Potsdam, the author became fascinated by the uneasy truce former East Germans kept with their recent Communist past, which was literally all around. Her own personal connections with German history and with Berlin form a central part of the story, and by the final chapters, she feels a strange sense of melancholy that the history of the East German state is either being destroyed or exhibited in museums-when, in reality, this history is still very a much a part of her life and the other characters’ lives.Sydney-based Funder’s impressive debut crisply renders her pursuit of East Berlin’s ghosts. But as the book proceeds, Funder begins to put herself into the narrative more and more. Especially in the first half of the book, Funder is most often a witness to other characters’ memories and experiences, rather than a dynamic character in her own right. She interviews dozens of Germans, many of whom were once officers in the Stasi-the East German surveillance force and secret police. Funder explores Berlin and surrounding cities like Leipzig and Nuremberg, which were once a part of the Communist East German state. Beginning in 1994 and ending in 2000, she makes three trips to Berlin to work for a German TV station and, more importantly, study the way the city’s people are adjusting to the recent collapse of the East German state.
Anna Funder is the Australian author and narrator of Stasiland.
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