MML Computer-Assisted Translation

Anna Funder, from Stasiland (novel)

Silke Mentchen

In Leipzig, I got thoroughly lost. I was looking for the Stasi museum in the Runde Ecke [1] or 'round corner' building which had formerly been the Stasi offices [2]. I needed[3] to see for myself part[4] of the vast apparatus that had been the East German Ministry[5] for State Security.

The Stasi was the internal army by which the government kept control. Its job was to know everything about everyone, using any [6] means[7] it chose. It knew who your[8] visitors were, it knew whom you telephoned[9], and it knew if your wife slept around[10]. It was a bureaucracy metastasised[11] through East German society: overt or covert, there was someone reporting to the Stasi on their fellows [12] and friends in every school, every factory, every apartment block, every pub. Obsessed with detail,[13] the Stasi entirely failed to predict the end of Communism, and with it the end of the country. Between 1989 and 1990 it was turned inside out.[14]Stalinist spy unit one day[15], museum the next. In its forty years, 'the Firm' generated the equivalent of all records in German history since the middle ages. Laid out upright and end to end, the files the Stasi kept on their countrymen and women would form a line 180 kilometres long.