Anna Funder - Stasiland

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell; shortly afterwards the two Germanies reunited, and East Germany ceased to exist. In a country where the headquarters of the secret police can become a museum literally overnight, and one in 50 East Germans were informing on their countrymen and women, there are a thousand stories just waiting to get out.

Anna Funder tells extraordinary tales from the underbelly of the former East Germany - she meets Miriam, who as a 16-year-old might have started World War III, visits the man who painted the line which became the Berlin Wall and gets drunk with the legendary 'Mik Jegger' of the East, once declared by the authorities to his face to 'no longer to exist'. Written with wit and literary flair, Stasiland provides a rivetting insight into life behind the wall.

Anna Funder

Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall

ePub r1.0

Leviatn 09.11.14

Ttulo original: Stasiland

Anna Funder, 2003

Diseo: Alison Forner

Editor digital: Leviatn

ePub base r1.2

ANNA FUNDER was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1966, and grew up there and in Paris. She has worked as an international lawyer and a radio and television producer. She is the author of Stasiland, winner of the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction in the United Kingdom (the worlds biggest prize for nonfiction), the Index Freedom of Expression Award, and the W. H. Heinemann Award from the Royal Society of Literature. The book was also short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award. Anna Funders debut novel, All That I Am, will be published in hardcover in February 2012 by HarperCollins. She lives in Brooklyn.

p. 5 Historian Dr Klaus-Dietmar Henke says the peaceful revolution of 1989 was the only successful revolution in German history. The East Germans added one of the most splendid moments to the history of our country, to the very troubled way of our nation to find and to accept individual and political freedom as the main values. He also states that the number of files generated by the Stasi is about the equivalent of all records produced in German history since the middle ages.

Lifting the Lid on Oppressionthe Stasi Files address to the International Bar Association, 26th Biennial Conference, Berlin 1996. Dr Henke was then head of the research department at the Stasi File Authority (Der Bundesbeauftragte fr die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik aka BstU).

p. 57 For figures on KGB agents in the Soviet Union, Gestapo personnel during the Nazi regime and Stasi employees and agents, see John O. Koehler, Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police, Westview Press, Boulder CO, 1999, pp. 78.

pp. 5758 On Erich Mielkes life, see Jochen von Lang, Erich Mielke: Eine deutsche Karriere, Rohwolt, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1993; Koehler, pp. 3372. For Mielkes famous speech in parliament see Der Spiegel 46/1999 (15 November 1999), Wende und Ende des SED-Staates (8), at http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel

This speech is also available at http://ddr-im-www.de/Geschichte/1989.htm

Mielkes pronouncements on traitors and execution come from the television documentary Die Stasi-Rolle: Geschichten aus dem MfS by Stefan Aust, Katrin Klcke, Gunther Latsch and Georg Mascolo, Spiegel TV, 1993.

p. 61 The GDR had the highest GDP per capita in the Eastern Bloc: Alexandra Ritchie, Fausts Metropolis: A History of Berlin, Carroll & Graf Publishers Inc., New York, 1998, p. 755.

The Russian publication Sputnik, for example, was banned by the GDR authorities in November 1988: Informationen zur politischen Bildung, 1, Quartal, 1996, Der Weg zur Einheit: Deutschland seit Mitte der Achtziger Jahre, p. 15.

p. 62 The Stasi File Authoritys report on Stasi preparations for the incarceration of citizens on Day X is Vorbereitung auf den Tag XDie Geplanten Isolierungslager des MfS by Thomas Auerbach and Wolf-Dieter Sailer, BstU, 1995.

p. 64 Honeckers words were, Den Sozialismus in seinem Lauf, wie man bei uns zu sagen pflegt, hlt weder Ochs noch Esel auf, Erfurt, 14 August 1989, and again in his address to the parliament on 6 October 1989, the GDRs fortieth anniversary: see 198940 Jahre DDR at http://ddr-imwww.de/Geschichte/1989.htm

See the same site for Gorbachevs famous admonishment. For Honeckers order to nip the counter-revolutionaries in the bud see Der Spiegel 40/1999 (4 October 1999), Wende und Ende des SED-Staates (2) at http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,44895,00.html

For the Stasi taking notes on the protesters cries against them, see Der Spiegel 46/1999 (15 November 1999), Wende und Ende des SED-Staates (8), at http://www.spiegel.de/druckversion/0,1588,52264,00.html

p. 65 Gnter Schabowskis press conference speech of 9 November 1989 featured in the TV documentary Die Stasi-Rolle: Geschichten aus dem MfS, Spiegel TV, 1993. The same program also has Stasi border guard Herr Jger admitting that passports were to be stamped in such a way as to refuse certain people re-entry. Schabowskis speech is available at 198940 Jahre DDR at http://ddr-im-www.de/Geschichte/1989.htm

p. 69 On the numbers of Stasi informers participating in the Runden Tisch negotiations, see Der Spiegel 49/1999 (6 December 1999), Wende und Ende des SED-Staates (11) at http://www.spiegel.de/druckversion/0,1588,52264,00.html

p. 84 Frau Neubert of the Brgerbro e.V. Verein zur Aufarbeitung von Folgeschden der SED-Diktatur told me of porn and ticking-package deliveries; the Neuberts cars brake leads had been cut; the writer Jrgen Fuchs told the puppy story, and his daughter was detained after school. For the threatened acid attack on the border guard, see Koehler, p. 29. Koehler also quotes Manfred Kittlaus, director of Berlins Government Crimes Investigation Unit, calling the associations of former Communist functionaries a classic form of organized crime, p. 30.

In 1998 a federal government parliamentary inquiry found that, in the weeks of the fall of the SED regime in 1989, somewhere between three and ten billion westmarks disappeared. See reference to Untersuchungsausschuss DDR-Vermgen at Der Spiegel 50/1999 (14 December 1999), Wende und Ende des SED-Staates (12) at http://www.spiegel.de/druckversion/0,1588,52264,00.html

p. 100 Although most people were able to watch western television, the western signal could not penetrate a geographically inaccessible area that included Dresden. The region came to be known as the Tal der Ahnungslosen, the Valley of the Clueless.

p. 119 Surveys conducted in the immediate postwar years showed that the Hitler period of German history (193345) was assessed positively by about 40 per cent of the German population: Umfrage des Instituts fr Demoskopie Allensbach