Anna Funder

I was recently in Germany touring around and was struck by the complete lack of any war memorials to dead German soldiers. I am told it is something they would like to forget and I have also been told of German men and boys going to war and not coming back and their families not knowing where or when they had died. On visiting some of the cities that were bombed flat, it was somewhat marvellous to see them re-constructed as if the bombing had never happened but you are left with the feeling show more that it is more as if the war had not happened, like it has been erased.

Which brings me to Stasiland. The author brings us a description of the absolute power of the Stasi regime. She talks to people greatly affected by the Stasi, including one woman whose husband was murdered by them, and pretty much it is a book in peoples' own words. It is about the lies that have been left behind and the continuing willfull desire to "forget" this short but tragic episode in modern history. She also discovers how many former Stasi people are still in the local/government/police/judicial systems. She says that for the most part you'd no longer know where the Berlin Wall previously went and some of the preserved bits are reconstructions and not original. More erasing of history.

The book does not romanticise or nostalgicise its existence. It details many of the horrors perpetrated on people in such a fashion that people around them had no idea. About secret torture prisons in the heart of Berlin completely unknown by the locals around them and about how many met horrible deaths there. About prisoner transport vehicles disguised as normal delivery vans so the population would have no idea about any of it.

A regime besotted with spying on its citizens and dutifully recording everything in words, audio and film. Such was their proclivity for this that in its short (41 years) history the Stasi accumulated more records than had previously existed in all of Germany since the Middle Ages.

One of the most interesting bits was how the East Germans distanced themselves from the Nazis. They re-wrote their history to imply that all the Nazis were in what was now called West Germany. This was epitomised by the author seeing a plaque on a bridge in Dresden over the Elbe that "commemorated the liberation of East Germans from their Nazi oppressors by their brothers the Russians". So where we once had just Nazis we now have the existence of East Germans 4 years before East Germany existed!

Less than 27 years before I was there this year, all that existed and yet now, there is hardly a trace of it left, except inside people.

I know for certain what shaped my world and I cannot imagine what it would be like to be born into a world that disappears without a trace in just a few short years. 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

*Any political comments will receive the axe. Don’t try to provoke me, you’ll fail miserably.*

‘’Peter Fechter, the eighteen-year- old shot trying to escape in 1962 and left to die on the death strip, because each side thought the other would retaliate if they went to help him. Someone has thrown him a roll of bandages, but he lies immobile and bleeding.’’

This book doesn’t need many words. Anna Funder has created a punch in the stomach, a work that you could characterise as show more ‘’Orwellian’’ if it weren’t for the fact that this is reality. It is not fiction, it is a horrible nightmare that lasted too long. That should have never been created in the first place. One of the darkest moments in History told through a series of interviews, mixed with the writer’s personal experiences, centered around the Stasi and its deadly grip on a divided country.

‘’And just remember Comrades this one thing : the most important thing you have is power! Hang on to power at all costs! Without it, you are nothing!’’

‘’I wonder how it worked inside the Stasi: who thought up these blackmail schemes? Did they send them up the line for approval? Did pieces of paper come back initialed and stamped ‘Approved’: the ruining of a marriage, the destruction of a career, the imprisonment of a wife, the abandonment of a child?’’

To say that Funder’s writing is powerful is a frightful understatement. Her chronicle of the events leading to the fall of the Wall is shuttering, so vivid it makes your heart pound loudly. We think we know all there is to know about the GDR experiment and the Stasi but we may be deceived. We don’t know half of it and it is unthinkable for those who have not experienced oppression and threat in every second of their lives. The tyranny that denies your loved one a proper burial after having murdered him. Obviously. The state where babies are not considered ‘human beings’ (and who is considered as a human being in a totalitarian state, I wonder…) if they are unhealthy. How else could they become ‘useful comrades’’, faithful to the ‘one, true state’, ready to ‘do their duty’ ?

‘’I said you are not unemployed! You are seeking work!’, and then, almost hysterically, ‘there is no unemployment in the German Democratic Republic!’’

This is the sheer madness of a world that was an endless living nightmare for millions of people who had the misfortune to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Eastern Bloc.

‘’Night has fallen, and the city lights are spread out beneath us. In the dark, this could be any city, in any normal place.’’

The confessions of victims and perpetrators are harrowing and raw but Funder doesn’t restrict herself in dry interviews and textbook paragraphs. She creates a background painted in grey colours, a scenery that is strangely beautiful and darkly fascinating in its bleakness. The chapters are rich in beautiful descriptions of Berlin during the night, worthy of the unique, atmospheric capital, a metropolis that has always attracted me since I was old enough to wanderlust and understand. Funder takes us to Alexanderplatz, one of my favourite Berlin spots, and to every corner of the city but she doesn’t stop there. We join her in Potsdam. In Leipzig, the ‘’City of Heroes’’, the city where liberation began, leading to the unification of Germany.

She talks about the Herculean task of the ones responsible for recreating the shredded Stasi files. About doping, constant surveillance, the propaganda against the West, the disappearing citizens. About the change that took place in the West and in the East once the Wall fell and GDR was no more. She gives voice to people who want to forget and to others who want everyone to remember. Miriam, Julia, Frau Paul. Brave women who were victims of a tyrannical force…

I cannot stress enough how much this book touched my soul. I couldn’t let it go, I still can’t and I obsessively discuss it with my mother who’s currently reading it. It is written in a language that may remind you of an exquisite literary work but it is not. It is a chronicle, a memoir of the finest kind. And now, allow me a brief rant because I am done with the stupidity of certain people in the universe. Those who said that Funder didn’t do her research, that she resorted to unfounded generalizations. Have they even paid attention? Or even worse, are they disappointed that their twisted dream of a surveillance state didn’t last? What did they expect, I wonder? A eulogy? A hymn to one of the most horrible human creations? To Communism and Fascism? Because the two are two sides of the same coin. Well, as I always say there is an idiot in every corner, even in Goodreads. Pay no attention to the lovers of a twisted past. They are so miserable their world has ended for good…This is one of the best non-fiction books you’ll ever read on the subject of oppression and pain inflicted by the human race.

‘’Does telling your story mean you are free of it? Or that you go, fettered, into your future?’’

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com show less