Stasiland (38 page)
My first debt of thanks is to the people who told me about their lives, most of all Miriam Weber, whose story was the impetus for finding the others. I am grateful too, to the people who spoke with me but whose stories are not in this book, in particular Herr Wolfgang Schellenberg, whose life deserves a book of its own.
I am indebted to many other people I spoke with in Germany. Frau Hollitzer at the
Museum in der Runden Ecke
in Leipzig was generous with her time and hospitality. The staff at the Federal Authority for the Files of the Former GDR (
Der Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen DDR
), in particular Regina Schild, Dr Klaus-Dietmar Henke, Thomas Auerbach, Roger Engelmann, Jens Gieseke and Bernd Eisenfeld were most helpful with their information and, sometimes, their own experiences. Frau Neubert at the
Bürgerbüro e.V. Verein zur Aufarbeitung von Folgeschäden der SED-Diktatur
provided invaluable insights, as did her colleague Uwe Bastian. Martin Gutzeit, the
Berliner Landesbeauftragte für die Stasi Unterlagen
, was helpful, as were staff at the
Antistalinistische Aktion Berlin—Normannenstraße e.V (ASTAK),
the
Bürgerkomitee ‘15 Januar’ e.V. zur Aufarbeitung der Stasi-Vergangenheit
, and the
Forschungs-und Gedenkstätte Normannenstraße, Berlin
. My thanks too, to Professor Manfred Görtemaker of the University of Potsdam.
This book would not have been written without the extraordinarily generous support at its inception of members of the Australian German Association. I thank the AGA for the award of the Educational Development Fellowship 1995, and most particularly its members BMW (Australia) Ltd, Dresdner Bank AG, Mercedes Benz (Australia) Pty Ltd and Deutsche Bank Group in Australia. I thank also Mr Andrew Grummet for his facilitation and friendship.
My heartfelt thanks to the Australia Centre, Potsdam, where I was writer-in-residence over 1996–97. Dr Ditta Bartels in Australia and Ruth Bader and Rico Janke in Potsdam provided invaluable encouragement and administrative support while the real work began.
I am grateful for the Felix Meyer Creative Writing Award, and a New Work grant from Arts Victoria which bought me time to write. A fellowship at Varuna—The Writers’ House and the support there of Peter Bishop were terrific.
I thank the Australian Society of Authors and John Tranter for their assistance through the Mentorship Program. I am much indebted to Marion Campbell of the University of Melbourne for her insights and wisdom. I thank also Jenny Lee, whose early reading came at a crucial time and Gudruna Papak of the Goethe Institute, Sydney.
My great friends in Berlin provided a much needed sense of normal life while I explored Stasiland: Annette and Gerhard Pomp, Charlotte Smith and Markus Ickstadt, Harald and Marianne Meinhold, Lorenz and Monika Prell and Rainer Merkel. My father John and my late mother Kate were enormously supportive. I am especially grateful to my publisher Michael Heyward, whose unstinting enthusiasm kickstarted me many times whilst I was writing, and whose editing is magnificent. Most of all I am indebted to Craig Allchin, my constant inspiration, who asked all the right questions, without ever questioning whether this was worth four years of our lives.
Anna Funder
was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1966, and grew up there and in Paris. She has worked as an international lawyer and a radio and television producer. She is the author of
Stasiland
, winner of the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction in the United Kingdom (the world’s biggest prize for nonfiction), the Index Freedom of Expression Award, and the W. H. Heinemann Award from the Royal Society of Literature. The book was also short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award. Anna Funder’s debut novel,
All That I Am
, will be published in hardcover in February 2012 by HarperCollins. She lives in Brooklyn.
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Praise for Anna Funder and
Stasiland
“The Stasi were the secret police of the former East Germany, infamous for their obsession with detail and for being, literally, everywhere. Some believe their network of collaborators and informants numbered one in every six people. Anna Funder went back to East Germany seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall to interview those whose lives had been affected by the Stasi. Her portraits are by turns funny, heartbreaking, and stirring. She tells the story of the collapse of a way of life with wit, style, and sympathy.”
—
Marie Claire
“Impressive. . . . Funder’s fully humanized portrait of the Stasi’s tentacles reads like a warning of totalitarian futures to come.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
“As well as the horror, Funder writes superbly of the absurdities of the Stasi, such as their practice of keeping the underpants or knickers of tens of thousands of GDR citizens in carefully labeled jars.”
—
Evening Standard
(London)
“Written with rare literary flair. I can think of no better introduction to the brutal reality of East German repression.”
—
The Telegraph
(London)
“A highly readable and stylishly written account of the Stasi’s forty-year reign of terror.”
—
Irish Times
“To call the stories that she relates Orwellian is rather an understatement; the fact that they are true alone goes beyond Orwell: the mysterious death of a husband while in detention, the sudden ‘nonexistence’ of a rock star, a mother’s separation from her critically ill infant. What the reader learns from these stories is that evil swings like a pendulum, from the banal to the surreal, but no matter where it is in the spectrum, it always leaves pain behind.”
—
Booklist
“Funder moves through the former East Germany with a gimlet eye and a journalist’s ear for the poignant, the perverse, and the absurd. . . . In clean striking prose she shifts with graceful ease from the telling blushes and tics, habits and souvenirs of her subjects to the concrete evidence of official documents to reveal the persistent effects of vast events.”
—
HQ
All That I Am: A Novel
Cover design by Alison Forner
Cover photograph © Tom Stoddart Archive/Getty Images
A hardcover edition of this book was published in Australia by Text Publishing and in the United Kingdom by Granta Books, both in 2003.
STASILAND.
Copyright © 2002 by Anna Funder. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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EPub Edition © AUGUST 2011 ISBN: 9780062077332
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