* Above, a reader-submitted photo at New York Times.
A few weeks ago I finished reading Stasiland, an award-winning non-fiction book (Granta, 2003) about the lives of East Berliners in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Anna Funder, an Australian, recounts her time meeting and interviewing regular people whose lives were ensnared by the all-seeing eye of socialist East Germany, the Stasi, one of the "most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies in the world."
Funder gives voice to a people who were essentially cut off from the rest of the planet for almost 40 years, and whose ghosts were left unattended after all the celebrations of the fall subsided. It is a vivid and affecting book, written in an intimate but not overbearing manner -- a very hard balance to strike. She also writes about encounters with former Stasi spies, whom she found living ho-hum regular lives in a reunited Berlin despite having consciously destroyed the lives of so many others.
But history is always poking upward toward the sunlight. From Chapter 7, 'The Smell of Old Men':
Here at the Normannestrasse headquarters, there was panic. Stasi officers were instructed to destroy files, starting with the most incriminating -- those naming westerners who spied for them, and those that concerned deaths. They shredded the files until the shredders collapsed. Among other shortages in the east, there was a shredder shortage, so they had to send agents out under cover to West Berlin to buy more. In Building 8 alone, members of the citizens' movement found over one hundred burnt-out shredders. When the Stasi couldn't get any more machines, they started destroying the files by hand, ripping up documents and putting them into sacks. But this was done in such an orderly fashion -- whole drawers of documents put into the same bag -- that now, in Nuremberg, it is possible for the puzzle women to piece them back together.
Monday marked the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Check out more NYT reader photos here, and also this interactive feature showing sites along the Wall before-and-after the fall. And here is the special coverage on the anniversary at the English edition of Bild.