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Reassuringly mundane
Jan. 23rd, 2021 04:32 pmBook Review: Stasiland - Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, by Anna Funder
Of course, behind depends on your viewpoint. I found it difficult to anticipate being enthusiastic about this book, but whenever I picked it up, it was engaging. Inspired by the life story of a Leipzig widow, Funder advertised in the late 1990s for former Stasi operatives to be interviewed and give their perspectives on life in East Germany.
Some of the Stasi men (they are, in these cases, all men) remain defiant and fully signed-up to the mission, seeing it very definitely in the same terms as the Anti-Fascist Protection Wall. The more prevailing attitude seems to be that it was "just a job", prefer not to examine their consciences too closely, some with regret for the lack of rehabilitation following German reunification. Nearly 20 years after the book was written and more than 30 years after the fall of the Wall, there's still a distinction in living standards between East and West, with some ugly political consequences too, even if support for AfD is falling. Although the GDR pursued a limited programme of de-Nazification, the teaching to future generations quickly followed a path of denial, insisting that Nazism had been (and was still) a problem purely for western Germany.
The book collects their stories and intersperses them with other of Funder's acquaintances, whose experiences were as subjects of the regime and were more varied. Most brushed up against the regime at some point, some were imprisoned; but for others there was no sanction to their defiance. The author's semi-absent and quasi-comical landlady has a story of her own which lifts the lid on lifelong consequences for the state of mind; the story of Sigrid Paul is particularly harrowing, but other tales of anti-heroism are just as important.
Of course, behind depends on your viewpoint. I found it difficult to anticipate being enthusiastic about this book, but whenever I picked it up, it was engaging. Inspired by the life story of a Leipzig widow, Funder advertised in the late 1990s for former Stasi operatives to be interviewed and give their perspectives on life in East Germany.
Some of the Stasi men (they are, in these cases, all men) remain defiant and fully signed-up to the mission, seeing it very definitely in the same terms as the Anti-Fascist Protection Wall. The more prevailing attitude seems to be that it was "just a job", prefer not to examine their consciences too closely, some with regret for the lack of rehabilitation following German reunification. Nearly 20 years after the book was written and more than 30 years after the fall of the Wall, there's still a distinction in living standards between East and West, with some ugly political consequences too, even if support for AfD is falling. Although the GDR pursued a limited programme of de-Nazification, the teaching to future generations quickly followed a path of denial, insisting that Nazism had been (and was still) a problem purely for western Germany.
The book collects their stories and intersperses them with other of Funder's acquaintances, whose experiences were as subjects of the regime and were more varied. Most brushed up against the regime at some point, some were imprisoned; but for others there was no sanction to their defiance. The author's semi-absent and quasi-comical landlady has a story of her own which lifts the lid on lifelong consequences for the state of mind; the story of Sigrid Paul is particularly harrowing, but other tales of anti-heroism are just as important.