Name: Stasiland
Rating: 4.053571428571429 (28 reviews)
ISBN: 9781862076556

Anna Funder

A collection of anecdotes compiled about the people of East Berlin.

Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

Stasiland

In this book, Anna Funder tells the stories of people who found the courage to resist the Stasi, the communist regime's secret police.

Jan Jackson

A book I’ve always wanted to read. And I’m glad I did. A book about ordinary people; victims and oppressors. A book about the dangers of abdicating power, and the damage it can do. The fact that the Wall came down 30 years ago is irrelevant; the message in this book still carries a weighty truth that we should all be aware of. The case of Alexey Navalny - currently spending the initial portion of a two-and-a-half-year jail term in penal colony no 2 (IK-2) in Vladimir region - should tell you that. 
The psychological damage done to the East German people by their Government, the restrictions and oppression meted out, are recounted with humanity; even those high officials, and Stasi officers get a fair hearing. 

This book is an opportunity to listen, and to learn. What is history for, if not to benefit from?

Mert Ozturk

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell; shortly afterwards the two Germanies reunited, and East Germany ceased to exist. In Stasiland, winner of the 2004 Samuel Johnson Prize, Anna Funder tells extraordinary tales from the underbelly of the former East Germany, a country where the headquarters of the secret police can become a museum literally overnight, and one in fifty East Germans were informing on their countrymen and women. She meets Miriam, who as a sixteen-year-old might have started the Third World War, visits the man who painted the line which became the Berlin Wall and gets drunk with the legendary 'Mik Jegger' of the East, who the authorities once declared - to his face - to 'no longer exist'.

Luisa Mallory 

Suzanne C.

Patrick Book

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell; shortly afterward the two Germanys reunited, and East Germany ceased to exist. Anna Funder’s bestselling Stasiland brings us extraordinary tales of real lives in the former East Germany. She meets Miriam, who tried to escape to West Berlin as a sixteen-year-old; hears the heartbreaking story of Frau Paul, who was separated from her baby by the Berlin Wall; and gets drunk with the legendary “Mik Jegger of the East,” once declared by the authorities—to his face—“no longer to exist.” And she meets the Stasi men themselves, still proud of their surveillance methods. Funder’s powerful account of that brutal world has become a contemporary classic.

Stasiland Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

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