Stasiland
Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall
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- $9.500
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- $9.500
Descripción editorial
“Stasiland demonstrates that great, original reporting is still possible. . . . A heartbreaking, beautifully written book. A classic.” — Claire Tomalin, Guardian “Books of the Year”
Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction: a powerfully moving account of people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship of East Germany, and of people who worked for its secret police, the Stasi.
Anna Funder delivers a prize-winning and powerfully rendered account of the resistance against the German Democratic Republic’s communist dictatorship in these harrowing, personal tales of life behind the Iron Curtain—and, especially, of life under the iron fist of the Stasi, East Germany’s brutal state security force in one of history's most notorious surveillance states. In the tradition of Frederick Taylor’s The Berlin Wall and Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families, Funder’s Stasiland is a masterpiece of investigative reporting and a vital work of twentieth-century history, written with novelistic vividness and the compelling intensity of a universal, real-life story.
Through meticulous reporting, Funder reveals the haunting reality of life in the GDR—a world of quiet heroes, conflicted enforcers, and the ghosts left behind by a fallen state.
A Chilling Surveillance State: Delve into the inner workings of the Stasi, a secret police force that used everything from collecting “smell samples” in jars to a vast network of informers to control the populace.Unforgettable True Stories: Meet Miriam, who became an Enemy of the State at sixteen for distributing leaflets, and Frau Paul, who made an impossible choice to protect a stranger at the cost of seeing her own critically ill child.Life Behind the Berlin Wall: Experience the strange, often absurd reality of the German Democratic Republic, a country that no longer exists but whose secrets still haunt the present day.The Perpetrators’ Perspective: Hear directly from the men who served the regime, from professors who taught the art of recruiting informers to the officer who physically painted the line where the Wall would be built.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Its job was to know everything about everyone, using any means it chose. It knew who your visitors were, it knew whom you telephoned, and it knew if your wife slept around." This was the fearsome Stasi, the Ministry for State Security of the late and unlamented German Democratic Republic. Funder, an Australian writer, international lawyer and TV and radio producer, visiting Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, finds herself captivated by stories of people who resisted the Stasi--moving stories that she collects in her first book, which was shortlisted for two literary awards in Australia. For instance, Miriam Weber, a slight woman with a"surprisingly big nicotine-stained voice," was placed in solitary confinement at the age of 16 for printing and distributing protest leaflets; she was caught again during a dramatic nighttime attempt to go over the Wall. Filtered through Funder's own keen perspective, these dramatic tales highlight the courage that ordinary people can display in torturous circumstances.
