 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
Stasiland
By Anna Funder
Text $24.00
 A young Australian lawyer with a good command of German, Anna Funder has penned a comprehensive portrait of the East German secret police, the Stasi, spotting a significant yet largely untold story, at least at the personal level, and researching and writing it well.
Praise should also go to her subjects who discussed frankly their roles as citizens or apparatchiks in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), kept intact by the Stasi until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
In what was called the 'most perfected surveillance state of all time,' the Stasi had 97,000 employees and more than 173,000 informers.
'In Hitler's Third Reich it is estimated that there was one Gestapo agent for every 2000 citizens, and in Stalin's USSR there was one KGB agent for every 5830 people," Funder writes. "In the GDR there was one Stasi officer or informant for every sixty-three people.'
Atop its greasy pole sat Erich Mielke whose now-deserted office sported a white plaster death mask of Lenin but otherwise could have been 'the mayor's office in the down-at-heel council chambers of a small but proud rural town whose people recall fondly the days when wool prices were high.'
The most entertaining of Funder's cameos are the creepy TV propagandist who churned out ludicrous anti-western programs, and 'the bad boy of East German rock'n'roll', Klaus Renft, leader of the GDR's most popular band.
A fan of Chuck Berry, the Stones and Led Zeppelin, he tamps 'tobacco and small beads of hash into a white-handled pipe' and reveals that the band didn't understand the English lyrics but loved the sounds.
They achieved such fame that the regime could no longer tolerate the challenge and summoned band members to renew their work licences, a process that involved fronting a panel of hostile comrades.
Klaus hid a tape player behind his guitar and recorded being told the group was now banned because 'the lyrics have absolutely nothing to do with our socialist reality... the working class is insulted and the state and defence organisations are defamed... as a combo, you no longer exist.'
Renft has since reformed and tours the old GDR, 'playing to sell-out crowds hungry for something that was theirs.' It has released an album that includes an extract of the secret tape on which communist officials can be heard declaring the band no longer exists. Now it's the GDR that has disappeared.
- Thanks to Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore for supporting this column.
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