I learned a lot, though, and the author did embed these people's sordid histories into the post-Cold War context. She's good at narrating things - this happened, then that happened, then I thought about this event in history and looked into this person's eyes which reminded me of this - but her style is unadorned, and the adornments that are there feel so forced and obvious that they diminish from the overall style. And others who worked for its secret police, the Stasi. It is about individuals who resisted the East German regime. But in the hands of this author, the writing became much more of a struggle than it should have been. Stasiland by Anna Funder is a book first published in 2003.
The topic itself fascinates me, which is why I kept on reading. This is not the work of an expert historian, nor of an expert writer.
Instead I read an Australian woman's Berlin travelogue, tinted throughout with her overbearing opinions about the GDR and interspersed with about ten interviews of some former Stasi agents and their victims. I expected an assemblage of short narratives, telling distinct stories of people who've survived their own encounters with the Stasi.
I realize this has been a disappointment. Ishiguro (Book Review) Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro Review Walled in: The inner German border DW English Book Review Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.
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