Book of the Week: Stasiland

Stories of Tyranny and Despair from Behind the Berlin Wall

Anna Funder
Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall
Harper: New York, 2002.

Anna Funder is an Aussie author who spent time in Germany in the 90s after the Berlin Wall came down and when East German Communism collapsed.

This book is about her meetings with former Stasi agents and their victims. It is a terrific book on tyranny and resistance! An energetic read with many moving stories about the people she encountered.

For me, the takeaway was the massive surveillance state the Stasi were able to create through a huge network of informants. Informants were everywhere, in the schools, clubs, pubs, churches, and apartments. My gosh, think what the Stasi could have done with the internet, surveillance cameras, and cyber spying. All driven by a desperate need to crush any and all dissent to the State.

Things I learned.

The Stasi had 97K employees and 173K informants, in other words, one informant for every 6.5 persons in East Germany!

65% of church leaders were Stasi informants.

In East German prisons, criminal prisoners were given rewards if they abused political prisoners.

The Berlin Wall was known as the “anti-fascist rampart” and it was designed to keep people in rather than lock the capitalists out.

East Germany would often sell political dissidents to the west for hard currency. Pastors were sold cheaply because “they were often anti-regime thinkers, and it was worth it to the regime to be rid of them.”

People had to affirm lies in order to survive:

“In the GDR people were required to acknowledge an assortment of fictions as fact. Some of these fictions were fundamental, such as the idea that human nature is a work-in-progress which can be improved upon and that Communism is the way to do it. Others were more specific: that East Germans were not the Germans responsible (even in part) for the Holocaust; that the GDR was a multi-party democracy; that socialism was peace-loving; that there were no former Nazis in the country; and that, under socialism, prostitution did not exist.”

One thing that comes across clearly is that in the GDR, the State was your God, savior, and reason for existing! And it demanded absolute loyalty.

“I am mulling over the idea of the GDR as an article of faith. Communism, at least of the East German variety, was a closed system of belief. It was a universe in a vacuum, complete with its own self-created hells and heavens, its punishments and redemptions meted out right here on earth. Many of its punishments were simply for lack of belief, or even suspected lack of belief. Disloyalty was calibrated in the minutest of signs: the antenna turned to receive western television, the red flag not hung out on May Day, someone telling an off-colour joke about Honecker just to stay sane.”

“The sense of having someone examine your inner worth, the violence of the idea that it can in fact be measured, was the same [as Catholicism]. God could see inside you to reckon whether your faith was enough to save you. The Stasi could see inside your life too, only they had a lot more sons on earth to help.”

In sum, a great read, lots of stories about individuals who went through suffering, survival, escape, terror, tragedy, and more.

A wise reminder that left-wing authoritarians are no better than right-wing authoritarians.