By Anna Funder (2003)
Pages: 288, Final verdict: Great-read
East Germany no longer exists, but its stories are still present everywhere in Berlin if you know where to look. When Anna Funder moved here in the late 1990s, she found that the most revealing parts of the former GDR were not in archives or museums. They were in people. So she began knocking on doors, following rumours, and listening to anyone willing to speak.
The result is Stasiland, a book that doesn’t tell the history of East Germany the way a historian would, but the way its citizens lived it: through memories, scars, and the details no official record ever captured.
As someone who has lived in Berlin for a few years, I recognise the feeling that drew her in. I think that's why, ever since I returned to Portugal, I find myself reading another book about the Wall, Berlin, and the GDR every six months or so.
A history told through lives, not timelines
Funder avoids the usual structure of Cold War histories. There is no clear chronology and no broad argument about the regime. Instead, she builds the book around the experiences of ordinary East Germans. Each chapter grows from an encounter: a conversation at a kitchen table with her neighbour, a walk through an abandoned office, a memory shared with hesitation or frustration. This method gives the book an unusually human centre.
Funder meets people whose lives were bent by the state in ways large and small. She speaks to former prisoners, quiet resisters, and ex-Stasi men still proud of their work. Each encounter offers a different angle on the same system.
One of the most moving stories is that of Torsten, a newborn baby in urgent need of specialized medical treatment only available in West Berlin hospitals. Before the Wall went up, his parents could bring him there freely every Monday for medicine and food that was only available in the West. But once the border closed, and Torsten needed to be urgently transferred to the West, the parents and son were separated. His parents begged for permission to visit, fought through endless layers of bureaucracy, and were repeatedly denied. Torsten spent the first 5 years of his life on the other side of a newly built border, recovering without them.
Then there is Miriam, who attempted escape at sixteen, was imprisoned, and later lost her husband in circumstances that still haunt her. Funder meets her several times, each conversation revealing how a person rebuilds their life after the state has interfered with its core.
"On 30 October we buried a coffin. We buried a coffin and they are setting the date for cremation for the next day. Either there is no-one inside that thing, or there is someone else in it." - Miriam on the suspicious circumstances of her husband supposed suicide in a GDR jail.
Funder also visits former Stasi officers. Some speak with irritation, others with pride. A few remain certain they were on the right side of history. Their perspectives make the book more complex. They show how systems of control depend not only on fear, but also on belief.
Seeing the GDR through its details
What ties Stasiland together is how Funder observes small details that reveal a vast machinery. She describes how the Stasi kept smell jars to identify suspects, files with information about its citizens stacked floor after floor, and the bureaucratic rituals that made surveillance feel predictable even when it was arbitrary. She never steps back into broad theory; each piece connects to a person she has met or a place she has visited.
Through these stories, the book shows how authoritarianism operates. It affects families, friendships, and the simple act of deciding whom to trust. It leaves marks that didn't disappear when borders opened.
Bottom line
Stasiland is not a history book in the traditional sense. It is a collection of lived truths that together explain a country better than a timeline could. Funder writes with clarity and humanity, letting the experiences of ordinary East Germans speak for themselves.
And that's why, if you've never read much about the GDR or the Iron Curtain, Stasiland is not your book. You'll get more out of titles like Checkpoint Charlie, or Anne Applebaum's tour de force, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe.
But if you want to understand the emotional reality of life under the GDR, or if living in Berlin has made you look twice at old buildings and wonder what they once contained, this book will stay with you. It offers no single narrative, only the stories that people carried. And those are the ones that matter.
