Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

by Anna Funder

‘Spezialdisziplin is the science of recruiting informers. Spezialdisziplin is the art,’ he says, ‘of the handler.’

‘Every informer,’ he says, ‘knew exactly what he or she was doing.’ He reaches behind himself to switch on a small lamp.

At the bus stop there’s a Vietnamese flower-seller with a stall of sad and frostbitten flowers. The GDR imported North Vietnamese ‘socialist brothers’ as workers, and treated them badly. They lived in camps, and were bussed to work in factories each day so as to avoid contact with the locals. Now, they manage as best they can.

people united by nothing more than a tenuous acquaintance and a desire to get out.

The sky was pale blue and high, and the sun shone like a small light in a freezer. Brunnenstrasse hits Bernauer Strasse, which is where the Wall ran, and where the famous pictures of people jumping out of their apartments onto mattresses on the western side were taken on 13 August 1961.

Now, there’s just a stretch of overgrown grass here. If you didn’t know that the Wall had been in this place, you’d find it hard to imagine. Eventually, there will be new apartment buildings built over it in the same style as the older ones, and in less than one generation this scar will be invisible. For the moment though, there is something strange about this stretch: it’s not a park, it’s not even an empty lot. It’s just a hole in the city.

GOVERNMENT OF THE GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC Ministry for State Security ATTESTATION On the existence of a tunnel from West Berlin into the Capital of the German Democratic Republic. In the course of a cellar check by members of the National People’s Army on 18.02.1963 at 45 Brunnen Street in Berlin Mitte it was established that there was a hole in the floor of the cellar that gave rise to the supposition that a tunnel was to be found here. A widening of the hole and subsequent examination gave rise to the confirmation that in this building at 45 Brunnen Street was the end of a tunnel built across from West Berlin territory.

She didn’t know where she was taken, ‘but I knew I was at the Stasi’. She now has the record of her interrogation and it shows that she was at Magdalenenstrasse, part of Normannenstrasse at Stasi HQ.

Karl Wilhelm Fricke is well known in Germany as a broadcaster and journalist, and as a phenomenon: ‘the case of Fricke.’ He has always been an agitator against the German Democratic Republic. On April Fools’ Day 1955, at a meeting in West Berlin, Stasi agents drugged his cognac and then shunted him, unconscious, over the sector border. He was convicted of ‘war and boycott instigation against the GDR’ and sentenced to four years in solitary confinement, which he served until the last day. There was nothing the west could do to get him out.