Summer Reading Project, BookLikes Satellite

The statistics tell us that the East German population was the most surveilled population in history. In Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, Anna Funder tells her readers that there was a Stasi officer for at least every 63 citizens. The ratio gets closer to 1:6 if the part-time informers are thrown in (57*). In the 1990s, Australian Funder took a job at a German television program responding to viewer mail. Letters from a viewer condemning the lack of coverage about life in the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) resonated with Funder's own interest. When she failed to convince her bosses to film a program about former East Germans and their surveillors, Funder placed an ad in a newspaper asking ex-Stasi agents for information about their old occupations. She also followed leads to people whose lives had been touched by Stasi influence...

Read the rest of my review at Summer Reading Project.