Stasiland

Anna Funder

All the Eastern Bloc countries were weird but the weirdest of all was East Germany and this was the first thing that struck me reading this book. Anna Funder identifies the heart of the problem for the East Germany. All the communist countries were prisons of a kind but only East Germans had a richer, freer neighbour in which everyone looked and sounded like them and spoke the same language as them. The second thing that struck me was that all books about East Germany end up being the story of the Wall. Funder's book is about the Stasi. It's a personal journey of discovery, in the years since 1989, meeting and talking to ex-stasi men and their victims. But it's really about the Wall and what the Stasi had to do to keep their people their side of it.

Everywhere Funder looks she finds that strange mix of the absurd and the sinister which marked the Stasi. She talks to Stasi men involved in collecting in jars the smells of their victims, hoping, it seems, to capture the essence of the dissident. We meet the man who painted the line on the tarmac to mark where the new wall was to go. There is the story of the woman who managed to get her sick infant son into a top West Berlin hospital only to discover that permission to join him in the West had been revoked. They were kept separate for years. Most simply of all we meet a number of very ordinary Stasi victims whose lives were damaged needlessly in ways large and small over the communist period. The pointlessness of it all would be funny if it weren't so depressing. Here was a regime which co-opted perhaps a fifth of the population as spies, policemen and informers in order to protect itself and yet was able to do nothing to predict or prevent its own collapse almost overnight.

In all traumatised countries people look for a mechanism to heal the past and move forward. In Northern Ireland, in South Africa and in other places they are trying different approaches. Funder doesn't think today's Germans have yet found how to deal with the problem of East Germany. But she describes her visit to the offices of the "puzzle women" in Nuremburg where the jigsaws of millions of shredded documents are pieced together. People who want to find out what happened to their relatives wait for the answer to come from Nuremburg. It isn't going to solve the problem of how Germany moves on but at the moment it's all they have. At current rates it's going to take centuries to stitch back together the shredded history of the Stasi. In the meantime we have Anna Funder's moving and valuable book.