Travel Book Review ~ Stasiland by Anna Funder

Stasiland by Anna Funder Toast. First Published 2002.  288 pages. We usually have a copy of this book in stock, click here to see if one is available now.

Stasiland is a fascinating look at the victims and perpetrators of paranoia in the former communist East Germany. Author Anna Funder moves an apartment in the crumbling city of Leipzig with the aim of interviewing East Germans about life under the Stasi, the ultra paranoid secret police. The interviews are amazing to say the least, and are cleverly interlinked with the author's day to day life in post-wall Germany. It is very well written and very hard to put down. Highly recommended.

As with all my reviews, I could blab on endlessly about the how good the book is, and you would have no reason to believe me because I would really like to sell a copy to you; so I select a favourite passage or two from the book and leave it up to you...

Miram - Enemy of the State at Sixteen.

'I became, officially, an Enemy of the State at sixteen. At six-teen.' Miriam looks at me through her glasses, and her eyes are wide and blue. In her voice is a combination of pride in how she became such a fiend, and disbelief that this country created enemies of its own children. 'You know, at sixteen you have this sort of itch.'

In 1968 the old University Church in Leipzig was demolished suddenly, without any public consultation. Two hundred and fifty kilometres away the Prague Spring was in full swing, and the Russians had not yet brought the tanks into the streets to crush the demonstrators for democracy. The demolition of the church in Leipzig provided a focus for the expression of a widespread malaise the Leipzigers had caught from their Czech cousins. Twenty-three years after the end of World War II, the next generation was asking questions about the way their parents had implemented Communist ideals.

The Leipzig demonstrations were interpreted by the East German regime as a sign of the times, a cinder likely to ignite. The police doused people with fire hoses and made many arrests. Miriam and her friend Ursula thought this was not right. 'At sixteen you have an idea of justice, and we just thought it was wrong. We weren't seriously against the state— we hadn't given it that much thought. We just thought it wasn't fair to rough people up and bring in horses and so on.'

The two of them decided to do something about it. At a stationer's they bought a child's stamp set with ink, small rubber letters and a rail to put them in.

'You could buy that sort of thing?' I ask. I know that roneo printers, typewriters and later photocopiers were strictly (if not particularly effectively) controlled by licence in the GDR.

'Not after what we did,' she smiles. 'The Stasi had them taken off the shelves.'

Miriam and Ursula made leaflets ('Consultation, not water cannon!' and 'People of the People's Republic speak up!') They stuck them up around town one night. The girls wore gloves so as not to leave fingerprints. 'We had read as many novels as the next person,' she says, laughing. Miriam had the posters tucked in her jacket; Ursula had a tub of paste and a brush hidden in a milk crate. They were clever—they slapped the leaflets up in telephone booths over the instructions and at tramstops over the timetables. 'We wanted to make sure people read them.' They made a circle around the town, and then they went straight through it.

The girls passed the Communist Party Regional Headquarters. Things were going well. 'We just looked at each other and we couldn't resist.' They marched in and told the guard on duty they were there to see Herr Schmidt, on the off-chance that someone by that name was in the building. They didn't stop to think what they would have done had a Herr Schmidt come out.

The guard made a call. He put the phone down. 'Uh no, Comrade Schmidt's not here at the moment.' The girls said they would come back the next day.

'On the way out there were these beautiful smooth columns.

Miriam is convinced, however, that had they left it at that they would have gotten away with it, but on the home stretch they went one step too far. Passing a building where some of their classmates lived, they put leaflets in the letterboxes of two boys they knew. The next day, one of the parents rang the police.

'Why would you call the police about some junk mail?' I ask.

'Because they were silly, or maybe they were in the Party, who knows?'

'It seems so harmless,' I say.

Miriam comes back quiet but strong. 'At that time it was not harmless. It was the crime of sedition.'

In East Germany, information ran in a closed circuit between the government and its press outlets. As the government controlled the newspapers, magazines and television, training as a journalist was effectively training as a government spokesperson. Access to books was restricted. Censorship was a constant pressure on writers, and a given for readers, who learnt to read between the lines. The only mass medium the government couldn't control was the signal from western television stations, but it tried: until the early 1970s the Stasi used to monitor the angle of people's antennae hanging out of their apartments, punishing them if they were turned to the west. Later, they gave up: the benefits of soporific commercial programming apparently outweighed the dangers of news bulletins from the free world.

Sedition was handled by the secret police, not the ordinary Volkspolizei. The Stasi were methodical. They questioned all the classmates of the boys who had received the pamphlets. They talked to the principal, teachers, parents. Several days went by. Miriam and Ursula agreed on an arrest and incarceration plan: neither would admit anything. The Stasi arrived at a shortlist of suspects. Men with gloves and dogs combed Miriam's house.

'And we thought we had been so careful, thrown everything out and destroyed all the evidence.'

The Stasi found some of the little rubber letters in the carpet. Miriam's parents told the officers they did not know how such a thing could have happened in their house.

Both girls were placed in solitary confinement for a month. They had no visits from their parents or from lawyers, no books, no newspapers, not a phone call.

In the beginning they stuck to their plan. 'No sir, I don't know either how the leaflets got there, no, it couldn't possibly have been her.' 'But eventually,' Miriam says, 'they break you. Just like fiction. They used the old trick and told each of us that the other had admitted, so we might as well too. After no visits, no books, nothing, you think: well, she probably did say it.'

The girls were let out to await their trials. When she got home Miriam thought, there's no way they're going to put me back in that place. The next morning she got on a train for Berlin. It was New Year's Eve 1968, and Miriam Weber was going over the Wall.