Adventures in Stasiland
Dan Katz reviews Stasiland by Anna Funder (Granta, £7.99) There’s a photo above our fire taken on New Year’s Eve, 1989. Me (compulsory donkey jacket) and girlfriend (long-hair, long-gone) and four pints of Guinness. We were drinking enthusiastically for the smashing of Stalinist rule across Eastern Europe. The Berlin wall had been pulled down in November 1989, Russian miners had set up workers’ councils, and then, over Xmas, the Romanian dictators, the Ceausescus, had been put up against a wall and shot. As one Romanian commentator declared: “When I saw the Ceausescus dead, I, like everybody...