Stasiland

The German Democratic Republic existed for a mere 40 years, but in that time managed to become one of the most sinister and self-serving regimes of the modern world. The two Erichs - Honeker and Mielke - grew old as the Stasi, their Secret Police organisation, ruled the country for them by using a mixture of coercion, fear and tortured logic, convinced that their people should be protected from the decadence of the capitalist West.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Anna Funder, an Australian lawyer and radio/TV producer, decided to track down some former citizens of the GDR in an attempt to understand just what it was like to live there. As a result, Stasiland is, by its very nature, an anecdotal book, but all the more powerful for being so. Funder's encounters with both the victims and the perpetuators of the regime throw a gruesome, and sometimes farcical, light on the insanity of the GDR.

She meets Miriam, who almost succeeded in her attempt to escape over the Wall, but was captured at the last moment and sent to prison, with the judge's words "Juvenile Accused Number 725, you realise that your activities could have started Word War III" ringing in her ears. Released 18 months later, she moved in with Charlie, who was later arrested and died under mysterious circumstances in prison. Mirian has never found out why he died.

She meets former Stasi officers, some of whom yearn for their old jobs and cannot settle in the new capitalist Germany; she meets television presenter Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, the most hated man in the GDR; and she talks to the man who painted the line along which the Wall was constructed. Her landlady Julia turns out to have been approached by the Stasi and her family threatened when she took up with an Italian boyfriend, and there is a tragic tale of a poorly little boy in hospital, separated from his mother on the night the barbed wire was rolled out to divide Berlin.

Thankfully, the awfulness of these stories is tempered by tales of almost unbelievable absurdity; truly, dictatorships can be ridiculous caricatures of themselves. Julia recounts an argument she once had with a woman in an Employment Office, who frantically yelled at her that she was not 'unemployed', rather she was 'seeking work', because there WAS NO UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE GDR.

And yet, despite all this, Funder also comes across a cloying sort of nostalgia for the old regime: clubs which cannot be accessed unless you show your GDR identity card; Stasi men who meet to discuss the past; tramps who long for the days when beer and housing was cheap. These rose-tinted views of the past she finds almost as disturbing as the tragic stories she has heard, especially in light of the fact that the GDR crumbled only 15 years ago. We owe Anna Funder our gratitude for writing this personal and moving book.