Anna Funder

There are few defining historical moments in one’s life – the type that sears itself on one’s memory so that one can always remember where one was or what one was doing when the moment occurred. For me, the fall of the Berlin Wall was one of those moments. Coming home from school, I first caught a glimpse of this historic event while trying to get my daily fix of Jeopardy. I was transfixed by the site of the people swarming the Wall on both sides, taking pick-axes to it, helping each show more other over it and just standing there and celebrating. It was a visually thrilling and life-altering image because it is what started me down the path of studying German.

In 1993, I was lucky enough to visit Germany as part of a student program, during which a two-day stop in Berlin was part of the itinerary. Four years after the fall of the Wall, there was still a marked difference between the East and the West. The desolation, the starkness of the architecture, the creep factor of the death zones, which could still be seen even though the Wall was all but gone – these left indelible memories. Part of the tour was through the former Checkpoint Charlie, which at that point was already set up as a tourist destination. There is something exceedingly disturbing about the boom gates, the tanks, and the passport office required that was required to visit another part of the city.

In college, one of my German professors was from East Germany. I used to bombard him with questions about life in the former GDR (Democratic Republic of Germany, or the official name of the country), changes he has seen, his opinions on the German socialist regime versus the new capitalistic one. We would argue/debate about the merits of capitalism and democracy quite frequently. At the time, being the young college know-it-all, I chalked up his opinions to being deluded and considered him a brainwashed fool to think that the East was better than the West.

I mention these stories because they all played a part in the reason why I chose to read Stasiland. Interestingly, much of what I had seen with my own eyes and experienced through the debates with my professor so many years ago was corroborated in the stories Anna Funder shares. There is no denying that there were definite drawbacks to living in the GDR. The stories about Stasi infiltration/observation, the net of informers, and their interrogation/intimidation tactics are absolutely horrifying. Yet, to deem the GDR an unmitigated failure is not accurate either. The sense of complete loss and abandonment that people still felt years after its end indicates a regime that was successfully working on some levels.

As one would expect, many of the stories that are shared within the pages of Stasiland will get one’s Western blood boiling. One in 50 East Germans informing on friends, neighbors, and family. Horrific interrogation tactics that border on the medieval. Intimidation and bribery tactics that include threats to family, to careers, to freedom. Being able to look at the West and its wealth of riches and know that to even attempt to try to reach it would mean incarceration at a minimum and possible death. This was life in the GDR.

However, for every horror story Ms. Funder shares, there are also stories of tremendous strength, courage as well as complaisance and acceptance. The sixteen-year-old girl who fails to capitulate even after she was imprisoned for trying to escape. The mother who tearfully chooses between being reunited with her son for a day versus betraying a friend in the West. A rock band that refuses to amend its politically charged lyrics after direct orders and threats to do so. There are also the stories of everyday existence, of those who did not necessarily oppose life in the GDR. They recognized its shortcomings but were not interested in leaving or surreptitiously protesting. Ms. Funder does an excellent job presenting a very fair view of life in the East.

Stasiland highlights the positives and negatives of life in East Berlin as a microcosm for life in East Germany. There are the stories that bring a reader to tears, with its elements of loss and ignorance of civil rights. There are also stories that cause a reader to pause and reevaluate one’s perception of life in the East. Throughout it all, Ms. Funder maintains a sense of wonder not only at the existence of such a regime and especially of the Wall but also at the quick destruction of almost everything related to the regime after the unification of Germany in 1990. As Ms. Funder found, something that pervasive cannot be swept under the rug or sanitized without causing mental anguish to former citizens regardless of their feelings for the regime itself. East Germany is a topic that does not generate much historical discussion, but as Ms. Funder found, it continues to be a part of the German identification process and the ramifications of its governing policies still pervade the German culture, making this a topic that should not be ignored but should continue to be studied. Stasiland is an excellent first step. show less

The author is an Australian journalist who went to Berlin a year after the Wall came down and interviewed a number of people from former East Berlin who now could speak relatively openly about what it had been like living under the communist GDR state and Stasi police rule. The stories they tell convey the extraordinary pressures exerted by Stasi in the most intimate aspects of their lives (in one case a woman had to explicate pet names in her love letters to a police lieutenant), pressures show more to conform, spout the party line, and ultimately to agree to spy on neighbors for the state. As a reading experience, this book is more than adequately horrifying and thought provoking. show less

During a period of mental overload Anna Funder returned to one of her favourite authors - George Orwell - and read all six of the major biographies. What soon starts to become apparent is how the the influence of women in Orwell’s life was almost totally neglected, and particularly the influence of his first wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy.

As I read the biographies, I began to see that just as patriarchy allowed Orwell to benefit from his wife’s invisible work, it then allowed biographers

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to give the impression that he did it all alone. The biographers are choosing the facts for his story in a world that has already sifted them in his favour. The narrative techniques of patriarchy and biography combine seamlessly so as to leave the woman who taught and nurtured Orwell, influenced and helped him, like offcuts on the editing floor, buttresses to be removed once the edifice is up.

What emerges in [Wifedom] is a portrait of Eileen that portrays someone much more than the traditional help meet than had been previously portrayed. During Orwell’s time in Catalonia, rather than twiddling her thumbs in a hotel room awaiting his return, we find Eileen organising the supplies, communication and banking operation for the organisation for which Orwell has come to fight, a position which means she is equally endangered when the organisation falls foul of the Stalinists. In London, during WWII, it is Eileen’s fairly senior work at the Ministry of Information that keeps the couple financially afloat. In fact, throughout most of their marriage it is Eileen who seems to be responsible for most things.

George Orwell does not come out of this well, to be honest, rather a man who is negligently careless of other people as well as himself. A man who had numerous affairs despite having contagious T.B. A man who dragged his wife to live in cottages with no electricity or sanitation (in which she had to do all the work) despite her own poor health. (I’d always thought his time on Jura when writing 1984 was strange, but not until reading this had I realised just how ill he was at the time. I’ve been to Jura, twice, it’s the back of beyond in U.K. terms and even today I don’t think I’d be happy staying there if there was a likelihood of a medical emergency. You’d need the air ambulance, and they can’t always fly in bad weather …) Overall, clearly a man who didn’t want to think about his wife’s own health at all.

Overall, this is an interesting and well written book which everyone in my RL book group enjoyed. show less

A brilliant book about George Orwell's overlooked, usually unnamed wife, Eileen. Despite her admiration for his work, Anna Funder has revealed him as a monster of the patriarchy. Not so much misogynist as utterly neglectful of Eileen's needs, especially of her health. Is he though simply a man of his extremely patriarchal times, or is the extremity of his masculine selfishness at least partly due to the school he attended, Eton? His disregard of women as human beings made me think of Boris show more Johnson. Their politics could hardly have been more different, but they seemed to have shared a complete inability to see women as people with human needs and demands. Both attended Eton. show less