Stasiland
Anna Funder went to Berlin in the late 1990s to ask a question that the official histories had skipped, namely what daily life had felt like inside the East German surveillance state. She advertised for former Stasi officers willing to talk, then sat with them and with the people they had watched, recorded, and broken. The book moves between her interviews, archive visits, and her own life in a half-renovated Berlin flat. Funder writes with restraint about extraordinary cruelty, and with sympathy about the small acts of resistance that kept some people whole. Stasiland won the Samuel Johnson Prize and remains one of the clearest accounts of how a modern state can try to own the inner lives of its citizens.
What you might want to know about Stasiland
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Anna Funder tracks down former East Germans, both victims and Stasi officers, to map the surveillance state a decade after the Wall fell.
On his One Grand Books list Hanks wrote that readers may not be able to comprehend how far a state will go to keep its people subjugated, pointing to Funder's portrait of East Germany as evidence.
It is mostly reportage built from interviews, with a thread of personal narrative as Funder lives in Berlin and tracks down her sources.
Stasiland was written by Anna Funder, published in 2003 by Harper Perennial.
Stasiland is 304 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Stasiland takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Stasiland is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.