Stasiland: True Accounts of Life in East Germany During the Berlin Wall Era

Veronica Husted: This was a brilliantly written book which kept me riveted until the end. the terrible things people do to each other is sickening and it continues. when will we stop?

Australia on Oct 15, 2023

Deborah Fowler: A sad book about the needless harm inflicted on a population that had been defeated in war and then had to endure an overbearing secretive and cruel rule by communists

Australia on Aug 31, 2023

Kindle Customer: Well written about a most weird fanatical regime but all too believable of the way politics can turn into reality. The account about the separated child moved me and pissed me off the most.

United States on Apr 27, 2023

Martina Krellner: Among other very interesting books about the Cold War, Iron Curtain, and the last days of the GDR and the general end of Communism in East Europe, I found this jewel. I grew up in Dresden, in the "Tal der Ahnungslosen" ("Valley of the Clueless" as Anna Funder rightfully mentioned), belonged to the group of teenagers in the Eighties that needed to "get out" of East Germany because of the political situation. It took me four years to finish my goal, and together with my girlfriend, finally escaped through the "Green Wall" in Hungary in August 1989, barely 19 years old at that time. My friend and I had a difficult time because we did not know whom to trust in Hungary - everyone could be a Stasi spy. We tried to escape at different parts of the boarder but got caught a few times by the Hungarian border patrol (deep at night in a dark forest, on a rainy mountain hill, in a meadow close to the Austrian border) while no one of our family back in East Germany knew where we were or what we did. We finally made it after being interned and questioned three times at Hungarian boarder camps over the course of one week. We arrived end of August 1989, in the morning at 4 a.m., in a little town...

United States on Sep 19, 2022

Mr. R. J. Pantlin: Extremely readable. I saw one reviewer here complaining that Anna Funder included too much about herself in the book and that nearly put me off buying it. However, it would have been much drier without those personal touches. They provide an important link between the past and the present. I did not find them intrusive into the sweep of the narrative - in fact, they absolutely enhanced it, making it read more like a novel than a documentary.
I thought that I had a reasonable understanding of how a police state such as the GDR operates (partly due to having had a girlfriend in East Berlin very many years ago). And still, several of the stories were quite shocking in terms of the psychological barbarity of the system.
There are hints that there was a form of continuation of the Nazi approach and it would be interesting for someone to explore that further. Equally, I was disturbed by reading about the continuation of informal Stasi networks in the unified Germany and how they can still exert power and offer support and patronage to former members - hardly any of whom have been prosecuted for the crimes against decency that they committed.
The only reason not to give the book...

United Kingdom on Jan 24, 2022

MisterHobgoblin: On the 25th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is hard to imagine that the German Democratic Republic ever existed. On the day before the wall fell, it was hard to imagine it could ever end.

Younger readers may not appreciate just how impenetrable the wall seemed. If you were behind the wall, you stayed behind the wall. There were no east European visitors to the west, and precious few western visitors to the east. Of all the eastern bloc nations, East Germany seemed to be the strictest, most monolithic of the lot. The wall was their public face. When the wall fell, the Federal Republic of Germany quickly subsumed its eastern counterpart; there were stories of poverty and skinheads, but the history of the GDR was quickly wiped from both books and minds.

So it is interesting to read Anna Funder’s account of time spent living in the former GDR in the 1990s, meeting some of the people whose lives had been affected by the Ministry for State Security – or Stasi as it was commonly known. It is clear that Funder has a particular agenda – that the Stasi were monstrous and that the socialist system was an abomination – but through the people’s stories, a...

United Kingdom on Nov 10, 2014

dog trainer: This is a remarkable book and piece of writing.
Anna Funder tells the history and modus operandi of the Stasi secret police from it's inception in 1949, through to the end and fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. Not only does she tell the story of the Stasi but also that of the whole regime of the DDR.
She does this, NOT, by spewing boring historical data, but by telling the stories of real German's in the third person, whose lifes were directly or indirectly affected by the Stasi.
These interviews with the Author were all conducted shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall.

We meet numerous ex-stasi men, some who have moved with the times and the'New' Germany, some who cannot and in their minds will always hanker for their old life in the DDR.

We meet a woman whose baby son needed specialist care in the Western side of Berlin and as a result, after a failed escape attempt spent years apart from her and came back to her a stranger , five years later after he recovered.
This woman also served time in the dreaded Hohenschönhausen prison and now is on the preservation committee of the same institution.

We meet the Stasi man who drew the line for the...

United Kingdom on Jan 02, 2010

Mike: I became fascinated again with the topic of East Germany and the Berlin Wall with the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall back in November. Looking around on Amazon for books on the topic and especially the subject of the Stasi, this book kept appearing. Though I was looking more for a macro-history of the topic rather than a human angle piece, the consistently positive reviews for Ms. Funder's book grabbed my interest. I was not disappointed I took the bait.

Ms. Funder's book is alternatingly moving and enraging, but always intriguing. She captures well the tragedy of the eastern part of Germany that was never truly freed from tyranny after World War II and indeed only transitioned from one set of brutes, thugs and criminals to another set of the same. You cannot come away from this book not appreciating the freedom God has blessed us with in the Western world nor taking it for granted again.

Ms. Funder's chronicle of the brutality of the criminal Hoenecker/Mielke regime is intelligent and well crafted. Funder is a terrific writer and she is a supremely talented at chronicaling history with a name and face attached as she brings forth the accounts of ex-Stasi...

United States on Dec 08, 2009