Astonishingly she very nearly made it to the West, but this made her attempt seem like it must have been well planned and backed up, making her seem all the more dangerous, and consequently the interrogation and imprisonment that followed was all the more intense.Īnother story is that of Frau Paul and her husband, whose sick baby had been receiving specialist treatment from a hospital in West Berlin when the Berlin wall was suddenly put up. Her subsequent arrest, imprisonment in solitary confinement, sleep deprivation and interrogation, led her impulsively to try to escape over the Berlin wall when she was released. Miriam’s own life and mental health were destroyed by what started as a minor teenage act of rebellion when, aged just 16, she and a friend printed some posters at home complaining about heavy-policing of a demonstration and then pasted them up around Leipzig. There are a few key characters in the book, such as Miriam, a young woman whose husband died in a Stasi remand cell, and whose funeral was orchestrated to the point of substituting an empty coffin for a full one. She skillfully weaves historical facts with people’s stories, threading them together with her own experiences of interviewing these damaged people. Writing in the first person, Funder describes how in the 1990s she was drawn into researching what life had been like in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). History is made of personal stories, and Anna Funder’s sensitive but incisive investigation into life in East Germany since the end of the Second World War is a powerful example of how people’s stories can be used to reveal the multi-layered, complicated truth. Cambridge Publishing Management (CPM) writes this review:

Stasiland book review