For any ordinary Canadian, who follows international news stories fairly regularly, the word Stasi will bring instant recognition of something foreboding, constricting, and something representing depravation of personal freedom. It also brings to mind Berlin, John Le Carré, and The Spy Who Came out of the Cold.

The things that come to mind are manifold when someone mentions Berlin. There is the infamous Wall that separated the city into East and West Berlin from 1961 to its fall in 1989. There is the fateful bridge which spans the Spree River, across which spies were exchanged during the Cold War; there are the victims of senseless shootings along the Wall, who died trying to escape to the West. It is the place where the word Stasi (Staatssicherheitsdienst), the East German equivalent of the Soviet KGB, seemed most accessible to Westerners. Who has not heard at one time or another the famous words "Ich bin ein Berliner," that a defiant John F. Kennedy uttered shortly after the city was divided by the Communists in 1961? Berlin means many things to many people. Check Point Charlie, the barricade, where those willing to take the risk to visit East Berlin could pass through, surely is burned into our collective memory of the past.

The city is irrevocably entwined with the Nazi regime that tumbled the world into World War Two, and with Hitler's ignominious suicide in his bunker with Eva Braun, his wife of a few hours. It is also the place where the famous Allied Airlift brought food daily to West Berlin, when that part of the city was suddenly cut off from the West. Berlin's children called these planes Rosinenbomber (raisin bombers) because Allied fliers often dropped candies and raisin packages to the children looking up to the sky as they watched the planes flying in.

Of all the major cities I have visited on three continents, Berlin is the one that struck me as the most dismal, small-town mentality, big town. In the western section a certain glitz tried to cover what the eastern section emphasized. Namely, there is a lack of joy perceivable in the place despite the famous cocky personality of the 'typical' Berliner, referred to as 'die Berliner Schnauze' (the Berliner's snout). Streets and train stations, East and West, are dirty, and frequently smell of urine, and of a strange antiseptic solution used in cleaning every public building and trains. Apartment buildings, even if each individual apartment is well appointed, lack concierges and no one bothers to clean the staircases. Elevators are few and far between in even the more modern buildings, government and private alike.

Various squares throughout the city, and major thoroughfares, are not only filled with visitors and local pedestrians, but with hucksters, who try to part unsuspecting victims of money. Pickpockets, as in almost all European cities, are more than plentiful. For a woman, carrying a purse can be hazardous. The Fernsehturm (TV Tower) at Alexanderplatz, with its red and white TV antenna, looks like a giant barber pole with a bump in the middle. Before its renovation in 1996, it must have been the most dismal, grimy sightseeing tower in the world. Today it is a little more friendly and even boasts a small gift shop.

Berlin, though largely destroyed in WWII, still has plenty of remnants left from the Hitler years, which when combined with the sterile architecture of the Communist era in its eastern section, lends a coldness to parts of the city that stands in contrast with the overtly decorative monuments from the pre-Nazi, pre-Weimar Republic eras. Add to this mix the new structures now rising in the old-new German capital, which often clash with everything around them, in an effort to lend an air of modernity to the place, and one can only shake one's head in dismay.

Despite parks throughout the city, it is hard to rid oneself of a sense of overcrowding, created in part by cars parked half on the street and half on the sidewalk. True, there seem to be no double- or triple-parked cars as in Paris or Rome, but the grumpy faces of local residents, who appear to resent the presence of foreigners in their midst, make the chaos of those cities preferable.

My reason for these observations is the book, Stasiland - True Stories from behind the Berlin Wall, written by Australian Anna Funder. Her book recounts her sought out experiences in East Berlin during its first flush of recovery from no longer being cut off from the outside world by the now mostly defunct Berlin Wall. She captures the atmosphere of the place well in her recounting of her experiences while being a writer-in-residence at the Australia Centre in Potsdam in 1996-7. It wasn't her first visit to the city. She had been in West Berlin in the 1980s and had sought out those who could tell her what it was like behind that wall.

What she learned then and during her second stay is told in her book in a manner that leaves no doubt what she writes about is the truth. The people she met, some of them victims of the former East German regime—she prefers to call them heroes, and one would hardily agree—and some of them the perpetrators, have an undeniable ring of authenticity about them. Yet, despite this authenticity, they appear almost surreal, sometimes touchingly humorous, and ultimately sad.

What makes her book of timely importance is that she tells the stories as if she had written a novel, not a historic document that recounts experiences. Consequently, one wants to read the book for not only what it has to say about the past—and in some ways the present—but also for how it is written. It is a work of non-fiction of superior quality that captures color— or lack of it—and mood in a way few non-fiction 'memoirs' usually do. She also confirms one's own impressions of this city. She, too, tells of the smell of urine, and of the ever-present odor of some kind of antiseptic used to cover the urine, though it never succeeds.

To this day Funder, born in Melbourne, is not sure why she chose to learn German in school. "My family was nonplussed about my learning such an odd, ugly language and, though of course too sophisticated to say it, the language of the enemy. But I liked the sticklebrick nature of it, building long supple words by putting short ones together," she recounts at the beginning of her book as she describes her journey from Berlin's Ostbahnhof (East rail station) to Leipzig. Staatssicherheitsdienst is, of course, the perfect sticklebrick word, having been made up of three words, state (staat), sicherheit (security), and dienst (service).

Now, if you wonder about the word sticklebrick, it appears to be a UK children's toy made up of colored pieces—maybe akin to Lego—that can be put together into various objects, and also is the name of a music festival connected with the University of Bristol, consisting of bands with very strange names from across Europe. So, let your imagination roam. It just is a sample of the expressive nature of Funder's description of the mundane world of East Germany, in all its shades of gray and ordinariness, which hide the nastiness beneath it.

But, back to Leipzig, where she has gone to not only view the Stasi Museum at the Runde Ecke, a round building that had formerly been the Stasi offices, but also to find Miriam, one of the heroes of her tale. The museum is surely one of the surreal wonders of the East German experience, where among the many things that have been put on view, are the jars that apparently contain 'smell samples' of various individuals that had once been under surveillance by the Stasi. The theory behind this collection was that by capturing personal odors, it would help sniff dogs to find someone wanted for questioning in a future search.

Miriam, whom she eventually finds, is by now a woman, but when her story begins she is a mere teenager, who decides that all is sham in the DDR (Deutsche Democratic Republic or German Democratic Republic). As an aside, I have often wondered how come it is that the most repressive countries in the world invariably have the word 'democratic' in their name. When Miriam is caught trying to escape over the wall, she ends up in jail, but is first subjected to horrific nights of interrogation followed by daytime sleep-depravation. Later, she also lost her husband, who is killed while remanded in a Stasi cell.

There are several of these heroes in Funder's story, but there are also the perpetrators, whom she sniffed out by placing an ad in a newspaper. While these men would never have answered a German reporter, they felt secure calling her, and some meeting her, because she was foreign, and promised anonymity. One even gave Funder a copy of Karl Marx's manifesto because he felt that the media in Australia might be open to socialism.

While Funder's book is essentially about the East German experience then and now, it is also an indirect commentary on the attitude of the Wessies (West Germans) toward the Ossies (East Germans) and vice versa. West Germans are embarrassed by their cousins in the East, and the experiences they may or may not have had. The East Germans feel resentful toward their western cousins because, for the most part, their better lifestyle has mostly eluded them. Curiously, it is also that many of the former Stasi people have never been prosecuted and have found far better jobs in a variety of occupations from insurance to reality, which are not available to the ordinary East German. Just as the Nazi past has for years been swept under the carpet by Germans, so the communist past is now being ignored. Funder's book, therefore, is a breath of fresh air in a very murky atmosphere.

There is an excellent example of West German embarrassment in the book, and the discounting of the East German experience, when Funder tells about a meeting with her boss and another colleague at the German overseas television service located in West Berlin. Her job was to answer viewer mail. She received a letter from Argentina, which requested some true-life experiences of East Germans. She suggested that they do a story about the 'Puzzle Women', women that have been hired to put back together huge quantities of shredded Stasi documents, so that East Germans can look up their files—East Germans were in the former country's heyday the most spied on people anywhere, even outdoing the Soviet and Chinese systems.

"Look," her boss said during the meeting as she tells it in the book, "they are just Germans who had Communism for forty years and went backwards, and all they want now is the money to have big TV sets and holidays in Majorca like everyone else. It was an experiment and it failed." Funder objects. "For God's sake!", Scheller said. "You won't find the great story of human courage you are looking for—it would have come out years ago, straight after 1989. They are just a bunch of downtrodden whingers, with a couple of mild-mannered civil rights activists among them, and only a couple at that. They just had the rotten luck to end up behind the Iron Curtain."

Well, as it turns out, Funder found more than just mild mannered civil rights activists. She found heroic men and women, and even though she gives us only a few examples, it is clear from how she writes, that there are many more. Even is she did not indicate so, statistical averages would indicate that there had to have been more than the couple Herr Scheller believed to exist.

>What the book doesn't say is that it will take considerable numbers of years before there is a melding of East with West. Don't ever get caught on a cruise ship where both Wessies and Ossies are fellow passengers. If the two groups should, by chance, encounter each other, it would invariably lead to fights. I have my own sad tale to tell. A young West German couple, just married, accepted an invitation from the bride's East German girlfriend for a weekend barbeque this July. The bride was born in East Germany, but her family escaped before the wall came down, yet she had kept in touch with her school friend. On arrival at the inn in a picturesque East German village, owned by her friend's boyfriend's mother—both East Germans are police officers—all seemed hunky-dory. But then everything was done to sabotage this weekend honeymoon, leaving the two young people bewildered and deeply hurt. One of the interesting points to me of this sorry tale, which has many turns and twists, is that among other things the Wessies were told by their Ossie hosts that there had never been such a thing as the Stasi. History, so it seems, repeats itself in Germany in strange ways. Denial appears to be an affair of the German mind whose cause is a subject well worth investigating.

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The above reviewed book recently received the £30,000 Samuel Johnson prize, Britain's highest award for non-fiction. What is also interesting, is that it took 23 tries for Funder to find a German publisher for her book in German translation. German publishers, on the whole, felt that this was not a book that would interest Germans. As it turns out, it received critical acclaim from the German media when it came out in late spring 2004, although it also caused some controversy. Funder, 38, before turning to journalism and then to writing books, was an international lawyer and also a documentary filmmaker. She is now expecting her second child, and working on a novel set in Sidney.