Anna Funder
Stasiland had me hooked on Page 4, when Anna Funder nailed (in the GDR context) my fascination – why I keep reading about (and visiting) Eastern Europe. She calls it horror-romance. “The romance comes from the dream of a better world the German Communists wanted to build out of the ashes of their Nazi past: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. The horror comes from what they did in its name.“
After WW 2, when the victorious Allies were divvying up the spoils, Russia began directly controlling the Eastern part of Germany, and in 1949, GDR was established as a satellite state of the USSR. The rhetoric of Communist brotherhood was established, which had liberated East Germans from fascism. The idea was to project GDR as those who were the innocent of Nazism, and that all the Nazis had gone to West Germany! The GDR, in its 40 years of existence tried to create a Socialist German Man, different from Nazi German Man, and from western (Capitalist Imperialist) German Man.
Stasiland is journalism, history and reflection on it, and in some ways memoirs, and presents a poignant glimpse of the surveillance state formerly known as East Germany. It is set in post-reunification Berlin, after the wall came down, and through the stories of those who lived in fear of, worked for, and resisted the infamous Ministry for State Security – the Stasi, Anna Funder captures the era of totalitarianism.
She speaks not just to people who have suffered at the hands of the regime, but also those on the other side, who inflicted the suffering. Victims, dissidents, ex-Stasi officers, face of the regime, all are part of the book, and their perspectives highlight the greys of reality. There is Miriam, imprisoned as a teenager for attempting to escape to the West, and then subject to the state’s cruelty, derailing her life. Her husband died under mysterious circumstances, and she seeks closure. Her ray of hope is a setup called Puzzle Women (it has more women) who try to piece together files destroyed by shredders during the final days of the regime. Stasi files which would provide details of what the officials thought of, and did to the enemies – the general public! Even now, there are Stasi folks harassing people who try to uncover the past.
Julia, Anna’s ‘landlord’, not only suffered tribulations because of her affair with an Italian suspected by the Stasi, but went through trauma later. Once, when she asked someone in the unemployment queue how long he had been unemployed, an official told her “This is the Employment office, not the Unemployment Office. There is no unemployment in the German Democratic Republic”. Those Russian jokes are true! Later, it was “no rapes happen in GDR”.
There is also Klaus, ‘Mik Jegger’ of the East, whose band was told to their faces that ‘they’ did not exist. Who managed to find his own ways of making peace with the environment, even while continuing his rebellion. And then there is Frau Paul, whose son was born with complications, and was being treated in West Germany. The Stasi tried to use this to make her an informant, the visits to her son being contingent on this. She refused, but still wonders if she chose right, and whether her son would have had a better life if she had not listened to her conscience.
At the other end of the spectrum is Herr Bohnsack, a former Stasi officer who confessed, now lives in semi-hiding, and in almost a jovial way, offers glimpses into the psychology of the oppressor- how ideology and bureaucracy can normalise what one would consider evil. In his own words, he has now fallen between the stools, with no friends on either side. As per his story, and that of Miriam’s, the Stasi have managed to bounce back and continue a normal life, contrasting with how dictators and officials have been treated in other Eastern Bloc countries.
Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, who after his life as a Nazi soldier, switched to being a communist propagandist and host of the television show Der schwarze Kanal – The Black Channel. Who still fumes at the desecration of Mielke’s (read Notes) grave, holding on to his conviction to the cause.
And Herr Bock, who used to be a professor at the training academy of the ministry. Through that conversation, we get to know of the apparatus and departments of ‘Defence’ which was internal surveillance.
Somewhere in between is Hagen Koch, who in August 1961, walked the streets of Berlin with paint and brush, and painted the line where the Wall would be built. Fifty kilometres of it. To protect GDR from ‘the swindlers and parasites and black marketeers of the West.’ With what he calls a ‘GDR-positive’ upbringing, he compares GDR to an article of faith. Just as God could see inside of you to reckon whether your faith was strong enough to save you, the Stasi could see inside your life too, and had more sons on Earth to help!
Koch fell out of favour with the regime because of a couple of reasons. One, his grandfather was from the other side (his father traced his grandfather later in life, after a childhood of lies, a story in itself!) and his father was therefore thrown out of a job and even arrested, and two, because Hagen himself fell in love and married a “GDR-negative” woman. The Stasi even manipulated a divorce, but thankfully the story came out courtesy his son. As a measure of revenge, Koch stole a trophy plate on his last day at office, and the story of how he was hounded, even after the regime fell, is ludicrous!
The stories in Stasiland are historical and moral. The author is objective as an Australian working in Berlin, and though the book is not preachy, she clearly shows the absurdity and the horror of the GDR’s surveillance machine. To the extent where many people withdrew into what they called ‘internal emigration’, sheltering their inner secret lives in an attempt to keep something of themselves from the authorities. An interesting theme is ‘memory’ – of individuals and society at large. What they choose to remember and forget. Some of them have moved on, and some have yet to find complete closure. Some look back with nostalgia, and some still search for something to look forward to.
The larger story, I think, is about belief systems and narratives, built through the manipulation of truth, language, and loyalty. And what humans will do to each other for them. In many ways Stasiland is depressing, and poignant, but the kind of book that must be read, and hence makes it to my Bibliofiles 2025 long list. Much like Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time, its Russian counterpart.
Notes from Stasiland
1. The offices of Erich Mielke, the Minister for State Security, was on the second floor in the “Runden Ecke” – barricaded by the public on 7th November 1990, and since then, serves as a museum. It even contains the 1985 plans of the Stasi to invade West Berlin!
2. In the end, the Statsi had 97000 employees, and 173000 informers in a country of 17 million people. Hitler’s Third reich had one Gestapo agent for 2000 people, and Stalin’s KGB had one for every 5300 citizens. The Stasi had one every 63!
3. In October 1989, in the parade celebrating 40 years of the GDR, Gorbachev was uncomfortable standing on the podium, and urged the German leaders to reform, even as the crowd chanted ‘Gorby, help us’
4. People who lived adjacent to the Wall even threw mattresses down and then jumped over!
5. In many towns, buildings were painted only half way, and the rest would be grey concrete. It was because when Erich Honecker passed through, that was the level he could see up to from the back seat of his limo!
6. The Stasi used radiation to mark people and objects it wanted to track. Radioactive tags and irradiated pins for clothes, radioactive magnets for cars, pellets, sprays, and even personal geiger counters for the surveillance team.
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