Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall - Vendido!

by Anna Funder
288 pages
The Text Publishing Company, Australia

Rights Sold
*** Brasil: Cia das Letras ***
Portugal: Civilização
Netherlands: Ambo | Anthos
US: Granta
UK: Granta
Denmark: Rosenkilde
Sweden: Forum
Norway: Cappelen
Germany: EVA
Turkey: Citlembik Publications
Italy: Feltrinelli


About this book
WINNER OF THE BBC FOUR SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2004
Truth can be stranger—and more fascinating—than fiction. Anna Funder tells extraordinary stories from the underbelly of the most perfected surveillance state of all time, the former East Germany.
Funder meets Miriam, the sixteen-year-old who might have started World War III. She visits the regime’s cartographer, obsessed to this day with the Berlin Wall, then gets drunk with the legendary ’Mik Jegger’ of the east, once declared by the authorities ’no longer to exist’. And she finds spies and Stasi men, still loyal to the Firm as they wait for the next revolution.
Stasiland is a lyrical, at times funny account of the courage some people found to withstand the dictatorship, and the consequences for those who collaborated. Funder exploress the daily chaos and harsh beauty of Berlin, a place where some people are trying to remember, and others just as hard to forget.
Stasiland is a brilliant debut by a prodigiously gifted writer.

Book Description
In this anecdotal history, Anna Funder tells extraordinary stories from the underbelly of the most perfected surveillance state of all time: the former East Germany. Stasiland is a powerful account of the courage of those who withstood the dictatorship and the consequences for those who collaborated: from Miriam, a 16-year-old who failed a desperate attempt to scale the Wall, to an ex-Stasi cartographer living in an apartment lined with propaganda. This is a lyrical and gripping debut novel.

Quotes and Reviews:
’Moving and exhilarating, Stasiland is the kind of book that makes us love non-fiction. With her tenacious curiosity and energetic intelligence, Anna Funder is a natural: she has amazing nerve, a fresh prose style and a novelist’s warm response to character and human drama.’
--Helen Garner

‘Informed judgements and historical background are communicated with deceptive ease. Targeted at a broad audience, Stasiland is compelling reading.’
--Sydney Morning Herald

‘In a gripping, often chilling account that peels away the clandestine layers of the former German Democratic Republic, Funder charts a precarious course through a world of broken dreams and shattered lives… Funder’s exceptional investigation is required reading towards some understanding of the complex sociological weave in the now-united Germany.’
--Australian Gourmet Traveller

‘fascinating’
--Canberra Times

‘Colorful, intensely observed, well executed, with lots of black humour and disturbing undertones.’
--Kirkus Review

’Stasiland is her brilliant account of this passionate search for a brutal history in the process of being lost, forgotten and destroyed. It is a masterpiece of investigative analysis, written almost like a novel, with a perfect mix of compassion and distance.’
--Sunday Times

From Publishers Weekly
"Its job was to know everything about everyone, using any means it chose. It knew who your visitors were, it knew whom you telephoned, and it knew if your wife slept around." This was the fearsome Stasi, the Ministry for State Security of the late and unlamented German Democratic Republic. Funder, an Australian writer, international lawyer and TV and radio producer, visiting Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, finds herself captivated by stories of people who resisted the Stasi-moving stories that she collects in her first book, which was shortlisted for two literary awards in Australia. For instance, Miriam Weber, a slight woman with a "surprisingly big nicotine-stained voice," was placed in solitary confinement at the age of 16 for printing and distributing protest leaflets; she was caught again during a dramatic nighttime attempt to go over the Wall. Filtered through Funder’s own keen perspective, these dramatic tales highlight the courage that ordinary people can display in torturous circumstances.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
During its 40-year history, the German Democratic Republic--East Germany--was, with Soviet assistance, the perfect police state. The organ of surveillance within the GDR (as well as foreign intelligence activities) was the Stasi, which, better than any other modern secret police, had organized a large army of citizen informers. Australian writer Funder thoroughly documents that culture of domestic spying and its effects on a cross-section of East German society. To call the stories that she relates as Orwellian is rather an understatement; the fact that they are true alone goes beyond Orwell: the mysterious death of a husband while in detention, the sudden "nonexistence" of a rock star, a mother’s separation from her critically ill infant. What the reader learns from these stories is that evil swings like a pendulum, from the banal to the surreal, but no matter where it is in the spectrum, it always leaves pain behind. Frank Caso
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Marie Claire
"Funny, heartbreaking, stirring...she tells the story of a collapse of a way of life with wit, style, and sympathy."


Kirkus Reviews
"Funder shrewdly blends memoir elements with personal histories and casts an attentive eye on the decrepit landscape."

Sydney Morning Herald
"An appealing blend of investigative and reflective reporting, with powerful human-interest stories...There is no denying Funder’s journalistic talents."


Excerpted from Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder. Copyright © 2003. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From the seventh chapter:
"Here, at the Normannenstrasse headquarters, there was panic. Stasi officers were instructed to destroy files, starting withthe most incriminating--those naming westerners who spied for them, and those that concerned deaths. They shredded the files until the shredders collapsed. Among other shortages in the east, there was a shredder shortage, so they had to send agents out under cover to West Berlin to buy more. In Building 8 alone, members of the citizens’ movement found over one hundred burnt-out shredders. When the Stasi couldn’t get any more machines, they started destroying the files by hand, ripping up documents and putting them into sacks. But this was done in such an orderly fashion--whole drawers of documents put into the same bag--that now, in Nuremberg, it is possible for the puzzle women to piece them back together."




About the Author
Anna Funder was born in Melbourne in 1966. She has worked as an international lawyer and a radio and television producer. In 1997 she was writer-in-residence at the Australia Centre in Potsdam. Stasiland is her first book. It has been shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year Awards (non-fiction) 2002, the Guardian Best First Book Award 2003, the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards 2002, the Festival Awards for Literature (innovation in writing) 2004, the Index Freedom of Expression Awards 2004, the W.H. Henemann Award 2004, and was awarded the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize 2004. Anna Funder lives in Sydney.