Worse, the 37-year-old Australian detected a distinct frostiness among the judges towards Stasiland, her remarkable account of repression and courage behind the Berlin Wall. “At the reception I met one of the judges, who behaved with impeccable cool towards me, as you would to a losing contender. I thought, ‘It’s clearly not me’.”
Just to rub it in, the judges “gushed” about each book in turn, but not about Funder’s, she noted. Then, astonishingly, this little-known author was declared winner of the £30,000 Samuel Johnson prize, defeating the likes of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything and Anne Applebaum’s Pulitzer-winning Gulag.
Some critics carped that it was a triumph for the trend of “autobiographical” investigations and a blow to objective reportage. True, Funder’s gushes take some beating. On page 3 of Stasiland, while travelling in Germany, she confides: “I remember my mother’s moustache in the sun, I remember the acute hunger-and-loss feeling of adolescence, I remember the burnt-chalk smell of tram brakes in summer.”
After the awards delirium had abated, a judge confessed to her after several drinks that the panel had downplayed her literary qualities in order not to give away the winner. She also learnt the judges had been told “she’s eight months pregnant and she’s flown here against doctors’ orders”.
In fact, Funder is six months pregnant, exudes rude good health and has no worries about flying back after a couple of days to her architect husband and 2½-year-old daughter in Sydney. When we meet at a friend’s flat in north London, the first impression is of a Viking princess — the product of a Danish father and an Irish mother filtered through six generations in the Australian sun.
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This is the blonde vision that confronted unsuspecting former members of East Germany’s Stasi security apparatus when they responded to her intriguing advertisement in the personal columns of a Potsdam newspaper — “Australian seeks Stasi men, with a view to conversation, discretion guaranteed”. For good measure, she added her phone number. Wasn’t that a bit provocative, not to say risky? Funder looks shocked, as if the notion has never occurred to her. “ I didn’t want it to be remotely provocative,” she insists.
Oh, come on. Here were ruthless men who delighted in stealing suspects’ underwear and bottling the smell so that sniffer dogs could track them down at will. When they suddenly found themselves on a blind date with Olivia Newton-John, didn’t she notice what big teeth they had? Her eyes are blue pools of innocence. “No, no, there was never any hint of anything untoward. I was never scared that they were going to touch me or do anything, because they were fundamentally bureaucratic apparatchiks of human misery.”
She remains convinced that the reason they were willing to spill the beans to her, resisting all other entreaties, was that she is Australian. “That was the draw card for them: I was an outsider. They said, ‘The media here in Germany is prejudiced against us and we want to set the record straight’.”
With its vast network of informers, the Stasi was an internal army by which the Socialist Unity party kept control of the German Democratic Republic until the Berlin Wall crumbled in 1989.
Funder wanted to learn about a society in which at least one in every 63 citizens was an informer. “What interested me was courage and conscience, capitulation and collaboration,” she says. It was the most perfected surveillance system in history, more repressive than the KGB in Russia or the Gestapo in Nazi Germany.
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“In 40 years, the Stasi accumulated more written records than in the rest of German history since the Middle Ages.”
In its final days agents frantically bought shredding machines, but when those burnt out they hand-ripped personal files and emptied them into 15,000 sacks. There are currently 31 “puzzle women” piecing them together; it is calculated that it will take them 375 years to complete the task.
How did the Stasi men justify this obsession? “They said basically that socialism was a good idea but that it had suffered in implementation. So next time round they want to get it right.”
And there will be a next time, most believe. “Underground networks of ex-Stasi men still exist,” Funder affirms. “They watch videos demonstrating the perfidy of the western media. The feeling is, ‘We have gone to ground, as we did in the Nazi time, and we are waiting for the next revolution — and mark my words, young lady, it will come’.”
Her journey to the former East Berlin had been circuitous. Born in Melbourne, she had lived in San Francisco and Paris by the age of 10, thanks to her peripatetic father, a medical researcher. Back in Melbourne, she opted to learn German and pursued the language in a university degree, culminating in a scholarship place at the Free University of Berlin in 1987.
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“I loved West Berlin and was fascinated by what was going on over the Wall. I’d met people who had been kicked out of East Germany, leaving their families on the other side of the Wall only a kilometre away. Nobody knew what was going on, even the people who lived there.”
She returned to the city in 1996 as a legal adviser to the federal government. “It was a terrific job, but the law didn’t suit me and I gave it up.” Her writing mission began the following year, while writer-in-residence at the Australian cultural centre in Potsdam.
The city had been the Stasi’s administrative headquarters and was crawling with former Stasi men. The Wall was down and the secret police were in denial. The mindset was most clearly spelt out by a man responsible for recruiting informers.
“I asked him how they knew someone was an enemy. He said that once an investigation was started into someone, it meant there was suspicion of enemy activity, which warranted all their methods. Everyone could be an enemy. I think that’s pathological.”
When pressed, she admits she was rattled on one occasion. She had just interviewed a particularly unpleasant Stasi man at his home on the outskirts of Potsdam and was compelled to return to ask him to call a cab.
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“He had the whole house in darkness and didn’t switch on any lights. He said, ‘I don’t think cabs come here’. I said, ‘Let’s try and call one.’
“He made a great show of finding a telephone book, then finding the telephone and calling in the dark. I think he enjoyed that.”
Her book caused such resentment in Germany that it was rejected by 23 publishers before a small independent firm took it up. In east Germany, people demanded: “What gives you the right to write this book?” Yet across Germany, she was asked: “What is it about us Germans that makes us do these things?” In her view, the question itself pointed to the answer: an uncertain identity that allowed Germans to be reshaped by tyrannical leaders.
How those Stasi monsters must be cursing to have allowed themselves to be mesmerised by a pair of blue eyes.
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Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall, Granta, £7.99.