Stasiland: Stories behind the Berlin Wall
By Anna Funder
The Text Publishing Company
304 pages, $24 (pb)
REVIEW BY AMANDA PEARSON
Anna Funder's Stasiland is well written, lyrical and evocative. It is journalistic in style, and does not pretend to be a history. It purports to tell us what it was like for ordinary folk to live in the German Democratic Republic after the Berlin Wall was built and the GDR was cut off from West Germany. On this level, the book succeeds very well.
The book has won both international and national awards. But after 9/11, the unreflective conflation of Communism with abuses of human rights seems outdated. Funder's work should be seen in that long tradition of liberal critiques that label the so-called failed socialist states as totalitarian and evil empires (when criticism is at its most florid, which this book is not). Such an explanation for what happened in the GDR and the socialist states is totally inadequate. Exposure last year of the US military's routine torture should tell us that "democracy" is no protection against human rights abuse.
While the portraits of Ossis (East Germans) are well drawn and sympathetic, they rarely break from stereotype. The people in Funder's book are ordinary folk, from the woman whose husband was killed after a failed escape, to one who sent her child to West Germany for medical treatment and was separated from him for many years, to the Stasi (East German secret police) official of the "just following orders" kind. Funder clearly tried to cover a spectrum of people in her portraits, but there is a glaring omission: People who resisted the regime in an organised and consciously political manner.
Funder makes no mention, yet in 1945, the GDR's constitution made provision for multiple political parties, and not just socialist ones. They included the Christian Democratic Union and the Liberal Democratic Party of East Germany. What happened between then and the end of the regime in 1989 was an ongoing, bitter struggle between the forces that sought to retain and extend democratic rights in the GDR and parts of the ruling elite that sought to curtail them.
Markus Wolf's autobiography Man Without a Face vividly illustrates this, and there are many other accounts. Many dissidents worked for change both within the official state apparatus and without. Also missing from Funder's account of the Stasi is an appreciation of the way the state security organisation was used against leftist opposition — not just against ordinary people — to silence those organising to create democratic socialism in practice, not just as propaganda.
This is where the journalistic approach Funder takes fails. It is unreflective and ahistorical. For example, what has happened to the former GDR since unification is largely missing from Stasiland, apart from some references to life being a bit harder. A bit harder! In German Unification — The Destruction of an Economy, the book's editor Hanna Behrend summarises the consequences: "German capitalism can make more money by importing and selling cheap industrial commodities from the Third World and ex-Second World countries than by adapting East German enterprises to West German market conditions."
The promises of prosperity were lies. East German women, for whom Funder displays a certain empathy in her book, have been the big losers from unification — many of the women contributors to Behrend's book, though highly qualified, became unemployed after unification. The dismantling of social infrastructure such as child care also had far reaching effects.
It was while reading Funder's description of the flat she was occupying — it was all beiges and browns, the furnishings old and outdated — that the ahistorical nature of her account first struck me. I too lived in a house like this, in 1960s Australia. The GDR, once it was cut off from the West, was also cut off from consumer goods. What did Funder expect the East Germans to do? With a command economy, they could continue to establish needed social infrastructure, or they could invest in production facilities to make consumer goods. These are not the same decisions that are made in a capitalist economy, where one type of investment is made by the private sector and one by the public sector. To compare the two economies distorts history.
My view of the book has been illuminated from discussion on the Green Left Weekly email discussion list (<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GreenLeft_discussion>) and Amazon reviews of the book (<http://amazon.com>). Posts to these highlighted issues such as the discrepancy in East and West Germany's resources, the successes of the GDR in areas of health, education, housing and other essential services, and opinion polls conducted in East Germany since reunification that indicate disillusionment with the lack of solidarity and difficulty in making ends meet.
None of my comments negate the fundamental abuses of human rights that occurred in the GDR. But in many ways, this is where Funder's book is most inadequate. Funder does not ask the right questions of the Stasi officials she meets. If she had, she might have received responses not dissimilar to those from some of the US soldiers who have participated in the torture of Iraqis. They were sold a message by their government that by invading they were saving the Iraqis from a hated, oppressive government, and by torturing these few, they would flush out the "bad elements" and keep the place safe for themselves and ordinary Iraqis. The US government cynically trades on their hope for a better world, as did the Stasi.
Journalism, which simply records what is being told and what the author felt about it, does no justice to history, to those who strove for 40 years against massive odds for a better East Germany. Nor does it contribute to understanding why similar abuses are occurring in Western democracies today. Funder should not forget: "She who fails to understand history is doomed to repeat it."
From Green Left Weekly, January 19, 2005.
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