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Anna Funder’s Stasiland is an Australian classic, the definitive account of tyranny and resistance in the former East Germany. In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell; shortly afterwards the two Germanies reunited and East Germany ceased to exist. Anna Funder’s Stasiland brings us extraordinary tales of real lives in the former East Germany. She meets Miriam, who tried to escape to West Berlin as a 16-year-old; hears the heartbreaking story of Frau Paul, who was separated from her young baby by the Berlin Wall; and gets drunk with the legendary ‘Mik Jegger’ of the East, once declared by the authorities - to his face - ‘no longer to exist’. And she meets the Stasi men themselves, still proud of their surveillance methods. Funder’s powerful account of the ordinary people who fought against the terrifying machinery of state surveillance is a deeply moving testament to the human spirit. Darkly funny and utterly compelling, Stasiland is a remarkable story of courage, cruelty, and the scars that totalitarianism leaves behind.