Stasiland / Anna Funder.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Funder, Anna, 1966-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Germany (East). Ministerium für Staatssicherheit.

Germany (East).

Berlin (Germany)--History--20th century.

Berlin (Germany).

Physical Description:

288 pages : maps ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

London : Granta, 2003.

Summary:

It's Berlin in the 1990s. A city split for forty years by the Wall is trying to knit itself back together -- a city where former Stasi men and their victims now pass one another in the street, and where, just under the surface, the Nazi past now lies buried. When Anna Funder hears of ordinary people who resisted the fearsome Stasi -- the Communist regime's secret police -- she sets out to investigate the extraordinary stories from the underbelly of the most perfected surveillance state of all time, the former East Germany. Funder finds Miriam Weber, imprisoned as a teenager after scaling the Berlin Wall, and Frau Paul, who never, ever wanted to be a hero. She visits the regime's cartographer, obsessed to this day with the Wall; she gets drunk with the legendary "Mik Jegger" of the east, rock star Klaus Renft, who was once declared by the authorities to "no longer exist." Then she finds former Stasi men, now coping with the end of their world -- men who spied on their families and friends, who irradiated people in order to keep track of them or stole pieces of their underwear to store in jars as "smell samples." A fiercely talented new writer, Funder has a novelist's eye for character and story. Stasiland is a lyrical, at times blackly funny look at courage, conscience and the extremes of what humans will do to one another.

Contents:

Map of Germany 1945-90 ix

Map of Berlin Wall 1961-89 x

1 Berlin, Winter 1996 1

2 Miriam 10

3 Bornholmer Bridge 19

4 Charlie 31

5 The Linoleum Palace 47

6 Stasi HQ 54

7 The Smell of Old Men 67

8 Telephone Calls 76

9 Julia Has No Story 88

10 The Italian Boyfriend 98

11 Major N. 106

12 The Lipsi 118

13 Von Schni 129

14 The Worse You Feel 139

15 Herr Christian 148

16 Socialist Man 155

17 Drawing the Line 168

18 The Plate 177

19 Klaus 184

20 Herr Bock of Golm 195

21 Frau Paul 204

22 The Deal 213

23 Hohenschonhausen 222

24 Herr Bohnsack 235

25 Berlin, Spring 2000 245

26 The Wall 253

27 Puzzlers 262

28 Miriam and Charlie 270.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 283-286) and index.

ISBN:

1862075808

OCLC:

52691152