"Stasiland" by Anna Funder

An audio book. The author, an Australian in her thirties, is in Berlin 7 years after the wall came down. She works for a TV company. The book is partly about her life and the problems getting material for the book, partly a history lesson with visits to museums, and it also has interviews mostly with people who were in the GDR on the government side - famous propagandists, secret agents, etc. She's interested in how lives were changed by re-unification. Her landlady, Julia, has a story to tell. Klaus is her drinking friend. He belonged to a well-known rock group.

History

• People could apply to go to West Germany, which had to pay East Germany for the people they received (more for educated people).
• The GDR liked to think that the Nazis were West Germans.
• Some people went from being Nazi to Socialist to unified German.
• There was a ban on using the word "fuhrer" in job titles. Nobody was "unemployed". Many savvy people had doubts about the West though, with its prostitution and homeless people on the streets. "Ostalgie" is nostalgia for the old East (Ost) Germany.
• Towards the end, the GDR ran out of paper-shredders and had to go over the border to buy them. After, there were puzzle women who tried to reassembled the scraps.
• They stored suspects' smells in jam-jars.

Interviewees

• Someone she meets, Miriam, nearly got over the wall when 16. She was a political prisoner for 18 months. Her husband died in prison - a poor cover-up. Years later, at a few hours notice, she was expelled. She returned later.
• She interviews the son of a school-teacher who had to set an example. He drew the line where the wall went, but wasn't an ideal party member.
• She meet a recruiter, now a business consultant.
• When the author put out an ad asking for stories, she's phoned asking how much she'll pay. Callers say that they've become capitalist.
• She visits torture scenes with those who were tortured.
• She meets a woman who was only allowed to see her very ill child if she gave the names of traitors.

Other reviews

• Giles MacDonogh
• Henning Hoff (her German history is shaky: Germany wasn't divided into zones at the Potsdam conference; you can't go from Alexanderplatz to Ostbahnhof by tube; "Berliner Schnauze" doesn't mean "in-your-face attitude" but the cheeky, ironic way Berliners talk themselves through life; Erich Honecker was not ruling East Germany when the wall was built (that was Walter Ulbricht). The torture chambers at Hohenschönhausen prison weren't used after 1958, which makes her claim that "Not one of the torturers has been brought to justice" not more bearable, but more understandable. And so on. ... While the life-stories are touching and infuriating, she fails to offer insights that would have given her book a wider theme. Nevertheless, taken with a pinch of salt, Stasiland is worth reading.)
• Storgy (Funder’s book is a stunning work of empathetic journalism and a must read for anybody with an interest in the period.)
• Kirkus reviews