In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell; shortly afterwards the two Germanies reunited, and East Germany ceased to exist. In a country where the headquarters of the secret police can become a museum literally overnight, and one in 50 East Germans were informing on their countrymen and women, there are a thousand stories just waiting to get out. Anna Funder tells extraordinary tales from the underbelly of the former East Germany - she meets Miriam, who as a 16-year-old might have started World War III, visits the man who painted the line which became the Berlin Wall and gets drunk with the legendary "Mik Jegger" of the East, once declared by the authorities to his face to "no longer to exist".

Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. Full of interesting accounts of life behind the Berlin wall.

Welcome to the Stasiland bookring.

We now have 6 members. I am sending the bookring to dododumpling on Sat 16th April and hope it reaches you all safely :-) Happy Bookring Reading!

Any problems, please PM me.
The list is as follows:

dododumpling, St. Neots, Cambridgeshire
ermintrude75, Norwich
blaisezabini12, Romania
AnglersRest, Teignmouth
coolboxuk, Egham, Surrey
Winterson, Brighton

...then back to me

Please remember to journal the book BOTH when you have received it (so we all know where it is) and once you have read it (so we all know what you thought of it).

I am really looking forward to hearing your feedback, thanks for participating.

Caroline

This was waiting for me when I got home yesterday. The homemade themed bookmark is really funky and clever! I flicked through it briefly and it certainly looks interesting - will read it as soon as possible.

It feels strange in a way to say that I "enjoyed" this book, as the subject matter is not what you might class as "enjoyable". But despite the serious/heavyweight subject matter it’s written in a very accessible style, and Anna Funder has put a lot of herself into this book, which makes it very easy reading.

The former East Germany is so near to us, both in distance from the UK, and in time. And yet somehow, it seems so very remote. The question of how the 40 years of Communist rule should be remembered is discussed here, and while clearly it’s incredibly important to remember, I can also see why people appear to wish to forget. So many people have lived through regime change - Nazism, Communism and now democracy, and with each regime change comes a different set of rules: "[the Soviets] required a rhetoric of 'Communist Brotherhood' from the East Germans whom they had 'liberated' from fascism. Whatever their personal histories and private allegiances, the people living in this zone had to switch from being (rhetorically at least) Nazis one day to being Communists and brothers with their former enemies the next." (The Gunter Grass novel Crabwalk is an interesting read and looks at the mental switches people have had to make.)

For me the most interesting (and heart-wrenching) parts of this book were those that examined the impact the Stasi had on ordinary people's lives, people like Miriam and Frau Paul. But Funder also met several ex-Stasi men to see how they have adapted to the changing society.

The Stasi and their informants were everywhere, to the extent that there were so many informers among religous groups protesting against the regime, that they appeared to make the protest groups stronger than they actually were. Hardly surprising in a country that had more secret service staff per head of population than the Gestapo or the KGB. And yet if you were approached to act as an informer and refused, there were no repercussions. But "no-one could know at the time that nothing would happen to him. So hardly anyone refused." And I guess that sums up the power of the Stasi.

Put in the post to ermintrude75 yesterday afternoon.

Fabulous! I am off to Berlin at the end of the month and would like to take this with me for appropriate reading if that's not hanging on to it too long? It'll be ready to post on the 30th, I promise :)

Thanks caro1 and dododumpling - and sorry for the delay in journalling, I've been away for a few days.

I'm really glad I read this book while in Germany (specifically in Dessau, part of the old GDR, and very briefly in Berlin), as I think the architecture and general atmosphere of the place added to what is already a gripping and fascinating book. The bland and faceless buildings, now often derelict or nearly so, always felt somehow spooky and oppressive, but I never truly realised the full history of the country and in particular the activities of the Stasi, and now those eerie feelings somehow make sense.

As dododumpling said, "enjoyed" is the wrong word for this book, but I found it hard to put down, and read with a mixture of sadness and incredulity as the author described the increasing paranoia of the authorities as the administration began to spiral towards its (inevitable?) demise. Ordinary people's lives were squashed and shattered in a calculating way which is hard to believe from our comfortable viewpoint today. The most amazing and lasting image for me is the "puzzle women" (and, it turned out, men), taking sacks of "destroyed" documents and from them piecing together the lost lives and, in some cases, deaths of people under the regime - just maybe giving some closure to those they left behind. An insurmountable task, surely, yet still it continues.

If I'd had longer in Berlin (instead of just five hours before catching my plane), I would have liked to have visited the Stasi museum, although I'm told that there is little information for non-German speakers. Instead, I contented myself with Alexanderplatz and its green-tiled U-Bahn station (which features in the opening scene of the book - photo coming soon), and a walk to the mouldering, monolithic Palast der Republik. This is the "People's Palace", which was supposed to be a monument to socialism, and now stands, its concrete crumbling and its bronze glass panels tarnishing, folornly in the shadow of the TV tower at Alex. I mention it because apparently plans are afoot to demolish it and replace it with a replica of the old castle which used to stand there until it was destroyed in WWII. I think this is sad - in a city which, while not overburdened with classical or baroque architecture thanks to the war years, has its share of surviving "historic" buildings, it seems that it would be appropriate to comemmorate all those years of the GDR, and the devastating impact on so many ordinary citizens. They deserve a place in Berlin's spotlight just as much as the holocaust victims remembered in the new memorial. What I can't do as an outsider is appreciate the memories and feelings that still exist towards the GDR and its authorities, but I don't think this period should be swept away - and this book is an important part of keeping it in the collective memory.

Picked up today from the post office.
Thank you for sending this book to Romania!
And ermintrude75, thanks for a lovely postcard:)
Will add while reading the book.

23 June 05(in the morning): I started reading this book yesterday evening and I was surprised in a positive way. The similarities between RFG and Romania before 1990 (and even after that!) are striking (we also had our own Stasi - it was called Securitatea/The Security).
And I thought I might recommend you a book (if you liked this one) wrote by a British historian, Dennis Deletant: "Ceausescu and The Security".
23 June 05 (in the afternoon): in my opinion people from GDR were luckier than Romanians - they got the opportunity ever since 1990 to check their files, to learn the truth (although this possibility wasn't open to all of them at least they got a chance).
24 June 05: Regarding the "OSTALGIA"...this is a common feeling in the ex-Eastern block. I'm not sure Anna Funder can understand it 100% but at least she is trying to. Everyday I hear people in my hometown saying that it was better before 1989, that at least they had food on the table and a place to live in (even if it was a small apartment); plus they had a job somewhere - the unemployment rate was small.
I was only 6 years old in 1989 and I can't immagine living in a communist regime (example: bookcrossing would have been an utopia for me!), but I can understand why some people would prefer it (and this is really frightening!).
I don't know if you have seen the movie "Goodbye Lenin!" but I think it would be a great experience and it explains really well the shock which followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in East Berlin.
25 June 05: Definitely one of the best books I have read this year (that good that I'll look for it this summer when going to Italy in order to buy my own copy and to share it with my friends) especially because it was a book written in the way most of the instant/contemporary history books should be written in my opinion.
I have already received AnglersRest address and I'll send the book on Monday.

27 June 05: sent this morning to AnglersRest. Enjoy:)

Arrived today from Romania. Will get to it as soon as possible.

I started this book on Friday evening and finished it this morning. I would have finished it earlier, but being away over the weekend at an event reduced my reading time.

Like others have said the book is enjoyable. Anna Funder has written the subject matter in such a way, it becomes easy to read and I was fascinated by some of the details that I read.

I was interested by the details on pg 268/9. It talks about those employed to reconstruct the documents and papers of the Stasi files. There are 15,000 sacks, which, if reconstructed at the current rate, by 40 workers will be completed in 375 years time. That demonstrates that literally everyone and everything was recorded and logged and to live in such an enviorment must have been increadibily difficult, and therefore the people were driven to desperate things because of the controlling regime.

Thanks so much Caro1 for sharing this wonderful book.

I already have Winterson's address, so will be in the post tomorrow.

How bad am I!!! Not only haven't I journalled to say the book was here, but it's already late and I haven't read it! My excuse is house-moving-no-internet-connection related. .
Will send this on asap and hang my head in shame for the rest of the day.

Received yesterday and gone into my pile of ring books. Sorry to keep it a little while - trust that's okay since I'm last... (Must have signed up ages ago for this one - I don't even live in Egham anymore, hahaha...)

This is a fantastic book. It gave me some insight into the GDR that I admit I had no idea of before... Maybe I should mention here that I'm German by origin, born - thankfully in the Federal Republic - in the days when the cold war was rife. The GDR was probably the most inaccessible country in the world to us and there was an incredible amount of rumours, but to be honest we only ever half believed them, and most of them were gentle compared to the revelations of this book! It sounds like it was Hitler all over again for them, only under another name and mantle! Horrific. I left Germany before the wall came down and although I've visited "back home" on occasion haven't had much chance to talk to "former Easterners", but it seems the book was well researched, so I suppose it's accurate. It seems uncanny (and frightening) how history repeats itself. Are we Germans really so gullible as to have this happen to us twice in a row? Or was there anything that could have been done before it was too late???

Ooo it's like second-chance Sunday! Thanks for letting me have another go at this. have no bookring backlog now, so should be able to get through this quite quickly.

Thanks all, :)