Stasiland

Berlin in the 1990s. A city split for forty years by the Wall is trying to knit itself back together - a city where former Stasi men
and their victims now pass one another in the street, and where, just under the surface, the Nazi past lies buried. When Anna Funder hears
of ordinary people who resisted the fearsome Stasi - extraordinary stories that are barely being told now - she sets out to explore the
underbelly of the most perfected surveillance state of all time, the former East Germany.

Funder finds Miriam Weber, imprisoned as a teenager because she might have started World War III, and Frau Paul who never, ever wanted to be
a hero. She visits the regime's cartographer, obsessed to this day with the Berlin Wall, and she gets drunk with the legendary 'Mik
Jegger' of the east, the rock star Klaus Renft, once declared by the authorities to 'no longer exist'. Then she meets former Stasi men, now
coping with the end of their world - men who spied on their families and friends, who irradiated people to track them with Geiger counters,
or stole pieces of their underwear for 'smell samples'.

Funder is a fiercely talented new writer, with a novelist's eye for character and story. She has written an extraordinary book: a lyrical,
at times blackly funny look at courage and conscience and the extremes of what humans will do to one another.

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"Photos show Mielke to be a small man with no neck. His eyes are set close together, his cheeks puffy. He has the face and the lisp of a
pugilist. He loved to hunt; footage shows him inspecting a line of deer carcasses as he would a military parade. He loved his medals, and
wore them pinned over his chest in shiny, noisy rows. He also loved to sing, mainly rousing marches and, of course, 'The Internationale'. It
is said that psychopaths, people utterly untroubled by conscience, make supremely effective generals and politicians, and perhaps he was
one. He was certainly the most feared man in the GDR; feared by colleagues, feared by Party members, feared by workers and the general
population. 'We are not immune from villains among us,' he told a gathering of high-ranking Stasi officers in 1982. 'If I knew of any
already, they wouldn't live past tomorrow. Short shrift. It's because I'm a humanist, that I am of this view.' And, 'All this blithering
about to execute or not to execute, for the death penalty or against - al rot, comrades. Execute! And, when necessary, without a court
judgment.'"

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Approaching Infinity said:

Thanks WK! I've been looking for a book like this for the past 2 years.

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Photos show Mielke to be a small man with no neck. His eyes are set close together, his cheeks puffy. He has the face and the lisp of a
pugilist. He loved to hunt; footage shows him inspecting a line of deer carcasses as he would a military parade. He loved his medals, and
wore them pinned over his chest in shiny, noisy rows.

Click to expand...