HistoryErich Mielke, the head of the East German secret police, the Stasi, had a simple maxim in his daily work: everyone is a suspect. To that end, the short, fat general kept a secret file on his boss, the East German leader Erich Honecker.
Shortly before he died three years ago, Mielke even applied to the authority controlling his former archives to see if there was a Stasi file on him. The culture of suspicion the Stasi created was so potent it even infected its highest ranks. Once a suspect, it was a short skip of Orwellian logic to the rank of criminal and from criminal to traitor.
The State Security Service (Staatssicherheitsdienst, Stasi) was established in 1950 to protect the burgeoning socialist German state from outside enemies, but it wasn't long before it was using most of its considerable resources to spy on its own people.
Within a few years, the Stasi had, hidden among the GDR's population of 17 million people, an estimated quarter of a million full-time and part-time informers. There was one Stasi informer for every 68 people, according to conservative estimates, compared with one KGB agent for every 5800 people in Stalin's Soviet Union. East Germany was the Valley of the Squinting Windows on crack.
Germany has gone to extraordinary lengths to deal with the legacy of the Stasi. A special body allows people to apply to read their Stasi files, some six million unauthorised biographies. A handful of people are employed to piece together, jigsaw-like, files torn up in the last, panicked hours of the regime, a task that, according to precise calculations, will take 375 years. Money is thrown at museums that safely lock the Stasi past behind glass while labour-of-love museums run in original Stasi buildings by victims of the regime are starved of funds.
But most official solutions miss the wood for the trees: the reality of the Stasi is to be found all around, in the stories of ordinary Germans.
It was this realisation that encouraged Australian-born Funder to begin her trek through Stasiland to meet its inhabitants.
She meets the Stasi's victims: a 16-year-old girl branded an enemy of the state for distributing political flyers; a woman blackballed by the Stasi simply for having an Italian boyfriend; a young mother imprisoned by the Stasi for attempting to flee in a tunnel under the Berlin Wall to her desperately ill new-born baby on the other side.
She meets the perpetrators, too, from the ordinary Stasi officers to the head propagandist of the GDR, all more than willing, grateful even, for their chance to tell their tale of the long-vanished secret police.
The book's personalised narrative style can be jarring, and the author frequently kills the momentum of the story by elbowing her way into the narrative, like a journalist edging themselves into the photograph of an interviewee. But her research has brought dividends, with stories that are not so much a gold mine, as a coal mine of dusty, dirty memories, of shamed and angry victims and arrogant, unrepentant perpetrators.
To that end, she manages to humanise the history of the Stasi more than another recent book on the subject, The File, which saw Timothy Garton Ash visit friends and strangers who spied on him during his time as a student in East Berlin.
Though academically and intellectually solid, The File suffered under the author's admission that he was willingly drawn into the Cold War espionage net, like a conceited player in a game for upper-class gentlemen, like British defectors to the Soviet Union, Philby and Burgess.
Stasiland has one huge oversight, however: its failure to look at the motivation of ordinary Germans to spy on each other, often for decades at a time and for very little obvious reward other than the human need to feel important. Neighbour reported on neighbour, pupil on teacher, husband on wife, daughter on mother.
This network of Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (Inofficial Workers - IM) was the most chilling aspect of the Stasi and its most poisonous legacy.
Funder's attempt to humanise the story of such an inhuman organisation yields only limited results, but the book is nevertheless a highly-readable and stylishly-written account of the Stasi's 40-year reign of terror.
Derek Scally writes for The Irish Times from Berlin
Stasiland By Anna Funder Granta, 288pp. £12.99
