Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

by Anna Funder

I mean you see the mistakes of one system—the surveillance—and the mistakes of the other—the inequality—but there’s nothing you could have done in the one, and nothing you can do now about the other.’ She laughs wryly. ‘And the clearer you see that, the worse you feel.’

The sense of having someone examine your inner worth, the violence of the idea that it can in fact be measured, was the same. God could see inside you to reckon whether your faith was enough to save you. The Stasi could see inside your life too, only they had a lot more sons on earth to help.

And almost overnight the Germans in the eastern states were made, or made themselves, innocent of Nazism. It seemed as if they actually believed that Nazis had come from and returned to the western parts of Germany, and were somehow separate from them—which was in no way true.

People’s dreams had been honed by suffering, whittled into sharp and definite shapes.

orange sky as I walk. The first thing I reach is the garden colony. A path leads through the plots, each one fenced off from its neighbour with cyclone mesh. There are small huts on them—for garden tools and seeds, for barbecue grills and folding chairs and ladders. There are a few larger trees, but mostly there is just sodden black earth arranged into rectangles, waiting for a lick of sun to bring up vegetables and flowers. These are squared-off places for contained fantasies—in one plot I find Snow White and her dwarves, two fawns and two portly gnomes all cohabiting peacefully with an almost

‘There are no people who are whole,’ he says. ‘Everyone has issues of their own to deal with.

think life can end much too quickly, so I have no long-term aspirations. Whatever it is I want, I want it now, to experience it today. I have no patience for saving money, or building up some kind of enterprise. It makes me nervous. Other people say, “You have time, you’re still relatively young.” But I’m always so afraid that things can come to an end at any time.’ He pauses. ‘Or that politically, too, it could all change again, and then I’d have no chance to experience certain things.’

‘Who would have thought that a wall could be built!’ she says. ‘That was also impossible! And who would have thought at the end that it might ever fall! That was also impossible!’

I think of the generational cycles of tragedy the Germans have been inflicting on themselves.