Stasiland: Stories from behind the Berlin Wall

East Germany may have been-until now-the most perfected surveillance state of all time. In Stasiland Anna Funder tells extraordinary stories of ordinary people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship, and of those who worked for its vicious secret police, the Stasi.

She meets Miriam, who as a sixteen-year-old was accused of trying to start World War III. She visits the regime's cartographer, a man obsessed to this day with the Berlin Wall, then gets drunk with the legendary “Mik ...