The writer, Anna Funder, is an Australian who lived and worked in Berlin for many years before deciding to find out a bit more about life in the former GDR and, especially, about the Stasi.
How did you become an enemy of the state? They decided that you were one… Some sources estimate that at its height it had an informer to population ration of 1:6.5, and these informers were used to keep control of anyone who was an enemy of the state. In reality, it was the largest tool of mass suppression the world has ever known. The Staatssicherheitsdienst (or Stasi for short) was ostensibly responsible for ‘state security’ in the now defunct German Democratic Republic. ‘Stasiland’, of course, is not a communist-era travel guide, but a non-fiction book telling of life in the part of Germany which, for forty-four years, was trapped behind the Iron Curtain.
Eventually, my eye was caught by the book you see to the left, and I decided to keep to my German theme with a switch to the other side of the wall. After finishing ‘Gruppenbild mit Dame’, it was time to choose a new book (I described this lengthy process in an earlier post).
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