A view of East Germany by a semi-outsider, an Australian living in the East. Perhaps this gives a better perspective.

The Stasi come across in this book as the most dedicated and efficient secret police force imaginable. They want to known everything – to the extent of imprisoning one of their own agents for not reporting something that he knew would get him into trouble – and co-opted a large fraction of the East German population to report on their friends and families, even when those reports served no purpose other than simply to be reported.

It’s surprising how many former Stasi men (and they were all men) Funder managed to persuade to speak to her, and how open they were about some of the frankly amazing technology and tradecraft they employed. She is clearly a skilled journalist and a good listener, perhaps aided by her outsider status and fluent German.

There are some comic incidents, as one would expect, notably the Stasi man who steals a cheap trinket when he retires and is then persistently investigated even though no-one cares about the object itself. And then when Germany re-unifies he is investigated again by the authorities: once for the theft (which now concerns reunified Germany’s state property) and then again for lying about the theft. Kafka would have approved.

But the main story is one of persecution, where a single mistake – the details of which may never be apparent – can blight someone’s entire life. It can make them unemployable, with the additional twist that they can’t actually be unemployed because that is considered a Western phenomenon that the state has declared does not exist in East Germany. The Party invents and publicises a new dance that’s designed to eliminate all contact between dancers so as to avoid temptation. It’s hard to imagine the level of false consciousness living under such a system required of everyone – and even harder to understand that some still yearn for its barren certainties.

4/5. Finished Monday 22 June, 2026.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)