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Prescribed Text for HSC 2019-2023 – Standard Module B: Close Study of Literature

Anna Funder’s Samuel Johnson Prize-winning Stasiland is an Australian classic, the definitive account of tyranny and resistance in the former East Germany.

Winner of the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize
Truth can be stranger – and more heartbreaking and hilarious – than fiction.

In this now classic work, Funder tells extraordinary stories from the most perfected surveillance state of all time, the former East Germany. She meets Miriam, condemned as an enemy of the state at sixteen, and Frau Paul, for whom the Berlin Wall ‘went through my heart’. She drinks with the legendary ‘Mik Jegger’ of the East, once declared by the authorities to ‘no longer exist’. And she meets ex-Stasi – men who spied on their families and friends – still loyal to the deposed regime as they await the next revolution.

Stasiland is a brilliant, timeless portrait of a Kafkaesque world as gripping as any thriller. In a world of total surveillance, its celebration of human conscience and courage is as potent as ever.

About the Author

Anna Funder is one of Australia’s most acclaimed and celebrated writers. Her multi-award winning novel All That I Am was a homage to four extraordinary German anti-Hitler activists in exile in London in the 1930s. It won the Miles Franklin Prize, spent over one and a half years on the bestseller list, and is being made into a feature film. Anna’s Stasiland tells true stories of people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship of East Germany, and of people who worked for the Stasi. A contemporary classic, Stasiland won the 2004 Samuel Johnson Prize for best non-fiction in English. Tom Hanks called it ‘fascinating, entertaining, hilarious, horrifying and very important’. Both books are international bestsellers, published in over 24 countries. Anna is a former DAAD Fellow in Berlin, Australia Council Fellow, and Rockefeller Foundation Fellow. She lives in Sydney.