STASILAND.

STASILAND. Because it is gone, we tend to forget what life was like in East Germany. This review of STASILAND, a book by Anna Funder which won the BBC4 Samuel Johnson prize, has a lot of facts about the Stasi, the East German secret police. The Stasi had 180 kilometers (over 100 miles) of files about citizens. It had “”smell samples’ of underpants that the Stasi used– or at least pretended to use – in order to trail and identify dissidents with the aid of sniffer dogs.” The Stasi had one informer for every 6.5 citizens (I assume that children are included as citizens so that the ratio would be higher if only grownups are considered.) When I read about nostalgia for East Germany, I always wonder how much of it is felt by people who once had privileged positions with the East German government.