There is, and ought to be, a natural suspicion of ground-eye-view histories that make claims to narrative truth on the basis of "I came, I saw, I understood." This danger is especially apparent in journalism where famous reporters are parachuted into conflicts and, on the basis of a few staged interviews, draw sweeping conclusions about both the conflict and the region. They can't claim understanding. They are parrots echoing back to their readers nothing more than that moment's conventional wisdom. But this is the wonderful genius of Ms. Funder's brilliant piece about life in East Germany leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. She makes no claim to understand what life was like under East German Communism. Instead, she allows her subjects, her contacts, to tell their own stories and, in this, she permits her readers to reach their own conclusions about the experiences of her interviewees. She is a facilitator of understanding, not its augur. And this lends her account a wonderful and refreshing authenticity.
The title of this piece is inspired by the name of the secret police which, to a real extent, ran East Germany for most of its 40 years of troubled existence. In addition to its thousands of actual agents, the Stasi could boast of countless informants who were so pervasive, who had so deeply penetrated the social industrial scenes, that public discourse became a carefully guarded sideshow in which citizens did their best to say and reveal as little as possible. At the height of its influence, the Stasi had an agent for every 63 citizens it was tasked to watch. This stands in stark, and insane, contrast to other repressive regimes which can only boast of an informant for every few thousand citizens. This police state masquerading as communism separated families and destroyed lives, all while holding in its hand the power to make or break any business, any venture. It was an agency of truly Orwellian turpitude which, as Ms. Funder's interviewees will attest, cared not a wit for the souls it crushed. From the dissident musician, to the 16-year-old girl in the wrong place at the wrong time, the author relates the real lives of East Germans under one of the world's most oppressive regimes, doing so with an admirable capacity to get out of the way of their appalling narratives which pour off the page.
For anyone interested in the daily lives of those living under authoritarianism, this is a must read. Ms. Funder's dogged determination to gently pull life stories from these battered people is both admirable and slightly ghoulish. But boy does it make for a compelling read. Absolutely one of my best reads this year. (5/5 Stars)
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