Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

"When Anna Funder’s book came out there hadn’t been that much written about the Stasi. When it did I felt this massive professional envy, that there was this incredible story – and often they are, these incredible stories – hiding in plain sight. It just takes somebody smart enough, like Funder clearly was, to see it and get out there and do the work. At the beginning of the book, she’s working as a researcher at a TV company in Berlin, and she’s always saying: ‘We should do some stuff on the Stasi.’ And they say, ‘No one’s interested in the Stasi.’ I think there’s always the temptation, when you look at stories from recent history, because it’s recent history, to think it’s boring or irrelevant – it somehow doesn’t count as ‘history’ yet. What definitely informed a lot of my work after reading Stasiland was her evenhanded approach to the subject. I was brought up with this straightforward story that said the capitalists are the good guys; the Communists are the bad guys. There’s a lot of truth to that, of course – look at the hundred million people killed under Communism . But then there’s a sequence in Stasiland where she comes across these people, I think they’re homeless, and they’re drunk. She talks to them. They start saying: ‘We wish it had never happened. We wish the wall was still up and Communism was still here.’ She’s asks: ‘Why?’ They say, ‘There weren’t any homeless people under Communism. Everybody had a job, everybody had a home.’ “The story that you’ve been brought up with is only part of the truth” It’s that amazing moment of: wow, there’s another side to this story. Those are the bits in narrative nonfiction that I really adore. And of course Communism was in most ways a terrible thing. But they weren’t bad guys in that cartoon, two-dimensional, rubbing their hands together with evil delight on their faces way that we’re too often told about. They had a dream for the world that was amazing: we’re going to get rid of inequality! We’re going to get rid of unfair hierarchy! Everyone is going to work together and be the same, and earn the same, and everyone is going to have a place to live, everyone is going to have a job, everyone is going to have a great school to go to! It was a disaster, taking many more innocent lives than the Nazis did, but we’re so used to being brought up with these bloody cartoon characters that it’s a shock when you hear the truth. This is what nonfiction writing should be. It should be having the courage to give perspectives that make us uncomfortable and tell us, actually, the story that you’ve been brought up with is only part of the truth. One of my favourites was Hagen Koch, who actually mapped out the Berlin Wall. She tells the story of how he, an incredibly loyal member of the German Communist regime, started to rebel against them when they start meddling with his marriage. The stories of people having big reversals of belief were fascinating. But also, his defence of the war – he said it was a good thing, because ‘we were a nation under attack.’ You see that narrative repeated in Israel. I’m sure lots of Trumps supporters would see that idea: we’re a country under attack from Mexico. I’m not making any comment about the right or wrongness of those arguments. It’s just interesting to see those same arguments cropping up again, and again, and again. What Stasiland does really well is it shows that these aren’t just arguments. That these people believed these views to the roots of their souls. They absolutely believed that this was the right thing to do, that they were a nation under attack, that they had to protect themselves. I think that really informed The Heretics . The thesis that emerged in The Heretics was that we live our lives very much as stories. The human brain is a storyteller. We are the heroes of our own story. We like to think we’re morally good characters, and we like to think that everything that we believe is true. So we rearrange the ‘facts’ of the world in such a way that flatters our sense of personal heroism. I do that, you do that, that’s how the brain works, if you’re mentally healthy. So we’re all prejudiced, and we’re all biased, we’re all partial and partisan, and we find it very, very hard to truly understand the stories of the people on the other side of the window. I think Anna Funder understands this very well and I’d love to see more of her kind of work in journalism generally. We don’t get enough, especially in our current moral outrage phase, when major news organisations are reliant on the generation of moral outrage to pay their bills. To me, it’s corrupted the form in a really unpleasant way. The economics of journalism these days means that writers have to hit those outrage buttons, because outrage means clicks and clicks mean keeping your job."

"Stasiland is written by a journalist from Australia, Anna Funder, who moved over to Germany just after the wall fell. She placed an advert in the newspaper asking to speak to old Stasi officials. Nearly one in seven people informed for the Stasi. There were 91,000 full-time employees, whereas the Gestapo had more like 7000. It was so pervasive. People love all the gory details of how the Stasi wired people’s houses, tapped their phones, collected smell samples from suspects in jars with the idea that sniffer dogs might be able to track their movements, all sorts of crazy spy equipment that feels so foreign to our world—although with Edward Snowden, perhaps not. She really brings all of that to life. “Nearly one in seven people informed for the Stasi” Her book is a collection of stories about people whose lives have been affected by the Stasi. She describes the whole process, from the correspondence she has with them and how she feels about what they’re saying. For example, she agrees to meet a man under a clock and he’ll have a newspaper under his arm—this is pre-mobile phone. And she sits down opposite him, and she describes the whole thing—not just what he says about being a Stasi officer. It’s very lively and journalistic in its style. It really brings to life elements of life with the Stasi and made me particularly interested in life in East Germany. Her whole approach of interviewing and reporting on the experience of the interview as well as the content was the approach that I used in my own book. I suppose, in my book, I was trying to report more of a range of experiences of life, the people who have more positive experiences too. But her book prompted me to delve into this area and I love her writing style. For some people, it gave them the chance of a promotion and they might get better rations. In the communist state, not everything was available all of the time. They might be able to go on holidays. And often, I think, the level of informing was not as formal as we might think. You might have a casual chat with someone on the street and they might be pumping you for information without you fully realising that that was what they were doing. “A lot of people I spoke to didn’t realise how pervasive the Stasi was” I think sometimes people informed because they thought that by giving some information, but not the worst information, they might be protecting someone—a loved one. And maybe some people were strongly convinced by the importance of adhering to the rule of the state. These are the curtain twitchers, the people who wanted to uphold the law. But I think the numbers are slightly misleading. It isn’t that each one in seven were rabid communists who were fully committed to the cause. It depends. The whole point of my book is that your experience hugely depended on your background and your attitude to the government. Mario—the subject of chapter five of the book—was imprisoned by the Stasi. He was a homosexual and had tried to escape East Germany, which was a crime. That was the reason for his incarceration. He felt the force of the state very strongly in prison, spending three months in solitary confinement and with regular interrogations. “There’s this idea that information is power—and so they just hoarded the stuff” But I would say a lot of people I spoke to didn’t realise how pervasive the Stasi was. They didn’t have any direct interactions with it, and so they were surprised, after the wall fell, to discover just how much information the Stasi had gathered. They gathered more paper files in forty years than had been gathered in Germany from the Middle Ages until the end of World War II. They gathered information on what brand of toothpaste you bought, what time you collected your children from school, whether you ate your main meal in the evening rather than in the middle of the day and if you were a deviant. All this kind of stuff. So when you were hauled into interrogation, someone could say ‘Well we know you buy xxx toothpaste.’ And then you’d go, ‘oh no! They know everything already. There’s no point withholding!’ There’s this idea that information is power—and so they just hoarded the stuff. I think precisely that. From a western perspective, you might think, ‘Oh great. Why would you not think it was all rosy to have freedom of travel, freedom of speech, freedom to vote as you choose in elections?’ And it’s not like anyone I spoke to actually wanted to go back to the old system. But the point that always sticks with me is this woman who said, ‘I always wished to travel to foreign parts but I always wanted to be able to come home.’ And I guess, as East Germany was absorbed into West Germany, home became increasingly unfamiliar. As East Germans, they didn’t know how to pronounce items on the McDonald’s menu or how to work a coin-operated trolley at the supermarket. They knew that their clothes looked different and that their whole behaviour was just not quite right. Some East Germans tried to buy cars with western number plates and to change the way that they dressed. But after 40 years, their whole outlook and mentality had been shaped by the communist system. Even if they hadn’t been particularly ardent in their support of it, their whole world has been shaped and moulded by it. It was not possible to just shrug it off overnight. There might be something that could be learned from those systems. As you say, not all of it works but there were some good things that could have been considered in the blending of the two countries. That was certainly the view of a lot of East Germans who I interviewed. That 98% figure for women: on the face of it you might say, ‘Brilliant female employment high!’ But women persisted, even after 40 years, in preferring to have male bosses, and they were still in lower-paid, lower-status jobs. Who was doing the housework at home? Well, that was the women as well. You can say it wasn’t really emancipation, because they weren’t choosing it. But the people that I talked to had, for most part, grown up with their mothers working while they went to free state kindergarten, and the expectation that they too would be working mothers. They then found, in the western system, that childcare was expensive and women weren’t so readily accepted into the workforce. So they hit a roadblock there. Many found that it wasn’t financially possible or viable to work in the west. It’s not straightforward what emancipation is. On the one hand, it was enforced in East Germany, but, on the other hand, it did affect women’s attitudes to work."

"The book is about people’s lives in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Anna Funder is an Australian journalist who was living in Berlin after the fall of the wall. She was really interested in the fact that the stories of East Germans just weren’t being told. When she brought this up with German colleagues, they were quite dismissive, and said: ‘oh, if there were stories of resistance, they would have come out by now. People were just quite downtrodden and miserable, and sorry for themselves, you know. No one is interested in that. We’re moving on. It was a failed experiment.’ She didn’t agree at all with this assessment. The book is the account of her attempts to find these stories. She speaks to people who were resisting the Stasi – the secret police that controlled East Germany – and to people who were involved in the regime. It’s incredibly gripping, an eye opening account of the ways that people’s lives were touched—sometimes in small ways, and often in huge, seismic ways. Through these close, personal retellings she builds up a compelling view of the whole infrastructure of control. I think it’s a really good example of what we’ve been talking about. Exactly, exactly. You can empathise with people and see the impact of major world events. If you’re reading about two young people whose love affair was interrupted by this regime, you’re immediately drawn in, in a way that you might not be if you read a more technical account of the mechanisms of control in East Germany at the time. If you see lives pulled apart, their ambitions thwarted, and all these human things—love, careers, family, and so on—being impacted, these are things we can all understand. I think it’s a very effective way of showing how things work in practice."