Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction: a powerfully moving account of people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship of East Germany, and of people who worked for its secret police, the Stasi.

Anna Funder delivers a prize-winning and powerfully rendered account of the resistance against the German Democratic Republic’s communist dictatorship in these harrowing, personal tales of life behind the Iron Curtain—and, especially, of life under the iron fist of the Stasi, East Germany’s brutal state security force in one of history's most notorious surveillance states. In the tradition of Frederick Taylor’s The Berlin Wall and Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families, Funder’s Stasiland is a masterpiece of investigative reporting and a vital work of twentieth-century history, written with novelistic vividness and the compelling intensity of a universal, real-life story.

Through meticulous reporting, Funder reveals the haunting reality of life in the GDR—a world of quiet heroes, conflicted enforcers, and the ghosts left behind by a fallen state.

• A Chilling Surveillance State: Delve into the inner workings of the Stasi, a secret police force that used everything from collecting “smell samples” in jars to a vast network of informers to control the populace.
• Unforgettable True Stories: Meet Miriam, who became an Enemy of the State at sixteen for distributing leaflets, and Frau Paul, who made an impossible choice to protect a stranger at the cost of seeing her own critically ill child.
• Life Behind the Berlin Wall: Experience the strange, often absurd reality of the German Democratic Republic, a country that no longer exists but whose secrets still haunt the present day.
• The Perpetrators’ Perspective: Hear directly from the men who served the regime, from professors who taught the art of recruiting informers to the officer who physically painted the line where the Wall would be built.