Stasiland

This book, Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall, by Anna Funder, which I bought second-hand through Amazon, fell apart while I was reading it, but this did not detract from the enjoyment, if that is the correct word for it, of reading about life in the German Democratic Republic.

The GDR was the most perfected surveillance state of all time.  The Stasi had 97,000 employees, 173,000 informers and in addition many part-time informers.  This is in a relatively small country with a population of 19 million in 1948 – which declined to 16 million in 1990.  There was an informant for every 63 people.  The Stasi had files on virtually everyone, for no-one was trusted.

Funder talked to various people who experienced life in the GDR, and also, in several cases, about their life after the Wall came down.  She interviews Herr von Schnitzler, who had broadcast anti-capitalist TV programmes in East Germany.  He was unrepenting, and obviously still a maniac.  Von Schnitzler was not pro-GDR or pro-Stasi, but simply anti-capitalist.  He sounds like my friend Fat Mac when he’s had six pints of Guinness and starts sounding off against the evil bourgeois.  I think I’ll recommend that Fat Mac reads this book so that he can see what life is really like in a socialist state.

She talks to Hagen Koch, who drew the line along pavements where the Berlin Wall was then built.  She talks to many more, normal, people, many of whom had horror tales to tell.  She also asks her interviewees about what it was like when the Wall fell, and the barriers that had held them in opened up like a dream.

Funder explains that “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.”  The GDR lasted forty-one years during which it tried to create a Socialist German Man and get the population to believe in him.  Socialist German Man was to be different from Nazi German Man and different from western (Capitalist Imperialist) German Man.  Emphasis was placed on an educational system that taught history as a series of irresistible evolutionary leaps towards Communism: from the feudal state through evil capitalism and then on, via a great leap forward, to socialism.  Complete codswallop, of course, but unfortunately some people (for example Fat Mac) still believe this tosh.

Funder visited several old Stasi buildings, and describes Communism’s gift to the built environment as being linoleum floors and grey cement walls, asbestos and prefabricated concrete and, always, long long corridors leading to all-purpose rooms.  Those who were called in by the Stasi never knew what they would find behind each door.