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Review [published August 2004]
Anna Funder: Stasiland
Chris Mitchell
Recently I re-read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty
Four, 15 years after first reading it. Orwell’s future
vision is an inherent part of our culture now, commoditised
and trivialised, denied shock value or reconsideration
due to its very familiarity. Re-reading the book
and returning to Winston Smith’s world, however, is
to feel a distinct unease. Nineteen Eighty Four is a
book that has a potent physical effect on the reader
(this reader anyway) – the claustrophobia of Winston
Smith’s world, the subtle monstrous insanity of its rules
and regulations and the ultimate futility of resistance
produce a distinct sense of horror and helplessness
within the reader, activating an involuntary empathy.
Orwell’s prose is never better than here, and the shock
of recognition at the similarities between elements of
his fictional nightmare world and our own grow with
each year. Nineteen Eighty Four is one of those truly
great books that becomes greater with age.
I write this by way of introduction to Anna Funder’s
Stasiland because her book shares much of Orwell’s
concerns and indeed, provides an excellent, if equally
traumatic, real-life counterpoint to Nineteen Eighty
BUY Anna Funder books online from and
Four. Where Orwell was writing in reaction to the totalitarian
regimes of Hitler and Stalin, Stasiland provides a
collection of personal stories from the police state that
was seemingly modelled on Big Brother – that of Cold
War East Germany caught behind the Berlin Wall.
East Germany’s secret police were known as the
Stasi, and the absurd yet terrifying lengths they went to
in order to meticulously survey and document the lives
of millions of their citizens defies belief. Kafka’s worst
nightmare does not even begin to match the reality of
Stasiland. Some estimates reckon one in six people
within East Germany was an informer. When the Berlin
Wall finally fell, the Stasi headquarters were stormed by
angry but peaceful mobs who found millions of pages
shredded within each building, a last desperate attempt
to destroy the evidence of the most perfect police state
ever created.
Funder describes how there is a team of people
charged with the task of meticulously reassembling all
these documents so that citizens can find out what was
written about them in the Stasi’s files and what became
of loved ones, friends and relatives. It is an absurd,
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