She packs her journalistic expertise behind the task of telling the stories of selected individuals who suffered under the Stasi, as well as several stories of those who worked for the Stasi. I had nearly finished Funder's book by the time I reached my destination.įunder takes a different approach than I might have presumed based on her title, and a legitimate one, I believe. I have never slept so little on a transatlantic flight. It was with some skepticism then, that I packed her book into my carry-on luggage for my most recent flight to Germany.

It would therefore be difficult to give a picture that all would regard as fair. But I felt hesitant to present them as representative, because I knew that East Germans experienced life in the GDR, and therefore with the Stasi, in a variety of different ways, depending on whether their circumstances and personalities put them at odds with the state. I had been amazed and horrified, had written some of these stories down and shared them with family and friends. I had, during that stay and subsequent others, heard and read first-hand and second-hand accounts of life with the Stasi, both from ordinary citizens and from those more visible in the culture industry. As a scholar who works on issues of East German identity in cinema, I had lived in the former East Berlin in the 1990s as Funder did. It sounded so reductive, as if one might sum up East German experience as having to live with the Stasi, the East German State Security Service. I was at first put off by the title of this book.

Reviewed by Laura Green McGee (Department of Modern Languages, Western Kentucky University) Stasiland: Stories from behind the Berlin Wall.

Stasiland funder