Stasiland
by Anna Funder
East Germany's Stasi, interviewed by a disbeliever.
you want to understand how a surveillance state actually functioned — not as abstraction but as people with jobs and careers and families
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Funder went to Germany in the 1990s and started interviewing people who had worked for the Stasi — East Germany's secret police, which employed one informant for every sixty-three citizens. She also interviewed the people they watched. What she found was not monsters but ordinary people who had made ordinary choices inside an extraordinary system. The dispatch that makes the surveillance state comprehensible — which is more disturbing than making it monstrous, because comprehensible means possible, and possible means it could happen again.
WHERE THIS BOOK LIVES
- Setting
- Germany • Eastern Europe
- Voice
- An outside perspective on Germany
- Themes
- Authoritarian PlaybookWitness
