LIVES IN Stasi(s) In All That I Am, a novel set during Hitler’s rise to power, and Stasiland, an investigative account of life in erstwhile East Germany, Anna Funder reconstructs the Germans’ fraught history with oppressive regimes,

LIVES IN Stasi(s)

In All That I Am, a novel set during Hitler’s rise to power, and Stasiland, an investigative account of life in erstwhile East Germany, Anna Funder reconstructs the Germans’ fraught history with oppressive regimes,

Anna Funder’s two books are different, yet bear some similarities. While her first book, the 2006 Stasiland: Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall, is a non-fiction account of life in what was then East Germany, her more recent work, All That I Am, is a novel set in the ‘30s against the backdrop of Hitler’s rise to power. While Funder uses two completely different forms to tell her stories, both books depict the history of Germany, in different eras, using common themes of politics and personal morality, told through the voices of its people. For instance, very early in Stasiland, Funder has an argument with her boss at a television service in Berlin, in which she says, “...we’re always talking about the things that Germany is doing for people in the former GDR. It would be great to do an item from the eastern point of view. For instance, to find out what it’s like to wait for part of your life to be pieced together.” Funder decided to find out for herself. The result is an extraordinary account of a history in the process of being forgotten, and a poignant telling of the stories of ordinary men and women who spent decades under the most intense scrutiny. The German Democratic Republic (GDR), or East Germany, was an oppressive Communist regime that kept control of its people through the Stasi, an internal army of spies whose job it was “to know everything about everyone, using any means it chose.” Some estimates say there was one Stasi spy — paid or unpaid — for every six citizens. On a visit to Runde Ecke, the former Stasi office building now turned into the Stasi museum, Funder comes across an item on display, a document that describes signals that the Stasi spies used while observing their subjects, and she writes: “I pictured the street ballet of the deaf and dumb: agents signalling each other from corner to corner: stroking noses, tummies, backs and hair, tying and untying shoelaces, lifting their hats to strangers and riffling through papers — a choreography for very nasty scouts.” By placing herself in the narration, Funder personalises the people and politicises the history, which gives Stasiland an extra dimension, making an investigative non-fiction account read almost like a novel. This blend of distance and consideration extends to her interactions with all the people in the book, even the former Stasi men that Funder meets. As Funder tells it, even Hagen Koch, a poster boy for the GDR regime, the man who maps out the Berlin wall, who makes a living out of talking about the Stasi which employed him for 25 years, is a victim of the Stasi’s meddling in his family affairs and marriage. But what makes the book most compelling is the voice it gives to a people, who’ve probably not been given this chance before. People like Miriam, who became an enemy of the state at age 16, for distributing leaflets protesting the Communist regime; or Julia, who could never find employment because she wanted to marry a foreigner; or Frau Paul, whose family was split overnight by the Berlin Wall. These are stories that deserve to be heard and, in Funder, they’ve found the ideal storyteller. Funder’s second book and first novel, All That I Am, continues to explore Germany’s fraught history but at an earlier time, before World War II, during the years of Hitler’s rise to power. Told from the point of view of Ruth Becker, a character based on one of the refugees who Funder became friends with in Australia, and Ernst Toller, a leftwing playwright whose citizenship was cancelled by the Nazi government and who eventually killed himself in 1939, it is the story of a group of German dissidents who are forced to flee Germany and become refugees. They continue their resistance to the Nazi regime outside of the country with intensely dramatic and tragic results. Funder draws from books, essays and other non-fiction works to reconstruct the people and the events of this time, but fictionalising and dramatising them through two parallel narratives — that of Toller in New York in 1939, remembering the events of the previous years, and that of Becker dying in Sydney at the beginning of the 21st century, both of them joined by their memory and love of Dora Fabian, another political exile. It is a complicated past that Funder recreates with ease and clarity as she describes how this group of educated middle-class writers and activists is caught up in a fight for survival but, more importantly, she gives voice to a less-publicised side of life under the Nazi regime. But, while there is undeniable grace in the writing and attention to detail, All That I Am lacks the searing honesty of Funder’s first book. This is good storytelling, but let’s hope the next book — and there must be one — will be great.