And in the red corner... Stasiland!
Written: Aug 11 '04 (Updated Aug 11 '04)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: The fascinating stories of people who experienced the Berlin Wall first hand.
Cons: The tabloid journalism
The Bottom Line: Stasiland offers some fascinating glimpses of life behind the iron curtain. However, the ham fisted attempts to identify goodie and bad guy sucks big time.
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| cr01's Full Review: Anna Funder - Stasiland: True Stories from Behind ... |
In this media age, there seems to be a constant supply of dramatic news events on tap for our evening entertainment. These seem to be so common it is increasingly easy to forget the human impact behind them.
One of the most moving events for me must be the pictures of the breached Berlin Wall in late 1989. I spent the night trying to imagine what dreams and hopes were going through the minds of the men and women scaling that wall. My thoughts also strayed to the loss and despair of those sat behind who felt that their revolutionary dream had ended. In terms of scale, it must have been one of the most moving and life changing events of the Twentieth Century.
Even now, I wonder whether the western dream was all that these eager faces imagined, or those frightened faces feared. Do people still marvel and celebrate the sight of a Starbucks and the fifteen types of tomato ketchup available on the supermarket shelves? Alternatively, do they hark back to a time when they lived amongst an ordered certain world with low unemployment and low crime rates? Do the former leaders regret the level of oppression that they placed upon their people?
I never actually got to experience a divided Berlin, a fascinating city separated by an ugly scar of concrete wall, patrolled no-mans land and barbed wire fences.
A piece of opportune product placement at Liverpool John Lennon’s airport bookshop ensured that Anna Funder’s Stasiland recently ended up in my grubby hands, as essential reading for my first trip to Berlin.
The author
Anna Funder is an Australian journalist who had been working for a German TV station for a number of years. When her suggestion that the thoughts and experiences of the former East Germans would make for a great news item was rejected, she decided to undertake the research anyway. The result is Stasiland – Stories from behind the Berlin Wall.
Funder spent the next couple of years talking to people with a tale to tell. These include the woman who aged sixteen was caught trying to cross the wall, the couple who almost escaped through a tunnel, the woman whose work prospects were junked because the Stasi mistakenly thought she was a traitor to the state. Funder also claims to attempt to get a view from the other side with interviews from former Stasi police and their informers.
Mixed feelings
While the stories are fascinating and obviously well researched, they hardly tell the story of the average East German, or give much impression of what these people think of the unified Germany. I was hoping for a slightly less sensationalist approach. I am sure that some of the prisoners currently held at Guantanamo Bay without charge would have an equally interesting story to tell and be just as unflattering towards their captors.
Worse, is the clumsy sense of good versus evil that Funder bestows upon her subjects. The former Stasi worker is invariably depicted as elderly, spittle flaying shouting manic with a fascination for control and petty rules, and a henpecked wife lurking in the shadows. Former victims of the regime meanwhile, tend to be bestowed with kinder descriptions; gently spoken with drawn sorrowful expressions, and frequently caught gazing wistfully at faded and torn photographs.
The whole effect almost reduces the stories into some kind of WWF pantomime, which for me rather devalues the dramatic tales that these people have to offer.
In and amongst this clumsy and stark world of black and white, there are some hints of the positive and the negative that the average former people of the east feel towards unification. I suppose obviously, there are people who regret the collapse of the old East Germany while others have embraced the change.
Behind the gloss
There are also some hints in the book of just what went wrong in East Germany. One interesting section describes the old dictatorship’s justification for sealing off East Berlin. There was a large income disparity between West and East and the West Berliners tended to travel to the east to buy food and basic provisions. This meant their spending power distorted the East German economy and caused food shortages for its own people. While it is a moot point whether the end justified the means, the explanation offers some kind of logic to a country struggling to get to its feet after the war.
The other fascinating story is around how the East German leadership went into overdrive to convince its people that the Nazis had all come from the West. By doing this, the government immediately absolved its people of any wrongdoing in the war.
Of course, I’m not attempting to claim that life in East Germany was peachy. Towards the end, almost one in seven East Germans had spied on their neighbours and work colleagues. The sheer volume of paperwork and bureaucracy meant that the Stasi grew out of all proportion. Out of this they moved into a state of self-perpetuating paranoia as more and more evidence of the traitors to the cause came in. There were tales of the outsides of buildings only painted to the height that the East German dictatorship could see from the windows of their cavalcade.
In the end, the leaders lost control and the machinery of government went mad in a tangled web of deceit, bribery and lies.
Conclusions
On one level, Stasiland makes for compelling reading and offers some fascinating glimpses of life behind the iron curtain. It shows the extremes of what some did to both get away from the country and to preserve it.
It also perhaps serves as a timely warning to us about the erosion of our own civil liberties and of our government’s suspicions about its own people.
Unfortunately, the author’s ham fisted attempts to provoke cheers and boos for the heroes and villains of the piece let the book down. Instead of a tale of extremes, I would have preferred more input from less involved East Germans and what they thought of the huge changes to their lives over the last 15 years.
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cr01 asserts his right to be associated as the author of this review -2004-
Recommended:
Yes
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cr01
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Member: Chris
Location: Yorkshire, England
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