Tag Archives: Rebecca Makkai

Stasiland by Anna Funder won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2004 (now known as the Baillie Gifford Prize) and chronicles the lives of several people who lived in the German Democratic Republic, also known as East Germany, during the Cold War. Funder, an Australian journalist, was working in television in the mid-1990s when she put an ad in a newspaper seeking stories from those who experienced life under the Stasi regime. They include Miriam who was caught trying to cross the Berlin Wall as a teenager, Julia whose Italian boyfriend raised suspicion among Stasi officers, and Frau Paul whose baby son was taken to a west Berlin hospital on the night the Wall was constructed leaving her stuck on the other side after refusing to inform for the Stasi. Funder also spoke to former Stasi officers, some of whom remained sympathetic to the regime. The number of Stasi officers and informants – estimated to be as high as 1 in 6.5 of the population – is staggering and their methods of surveillance, control and manipulation even more so. Given Funder collected these stories not long after the Wall fell, ‘Stasiland’ is an important collection of eyewitness accounts told by those who had recently lived through such a turbulent time. Continue reading →