Rating: 
Summary: A Girl's Guide to Totalitarianism
Review: With its non-US edition having a cover shot of a pouting beauty in red lipstick and a red sequinned top, Stasiland is not even pretending to be a serious history book. Nevertheless, there's certainly a place for lightweight, general human-interest books like this, in bringing the underlying civil and historical issues to an audience not otherwise disposed to wade through a deeper politcal analysis.Stasiland is written in a style like a personal journal - the stories told by ex-GDR citizens to the author are often prefaced with descriptions of where she had coffee before they met, and followed by what she thought afterwards while walking home. But altogether it works more than it doesn't work. Despite occasional lapses into waffle and naval-gazing, the author's cool observations are frequently disquieting and insightful. Found in a variety of ways, from advertising to chance meetings to word of mouth, the people interviewed are correspondingly varied themselves. They range from grandstanding ex-Stasi conspiracy theorists to truly ordinary people caught in a bizarrely cruel social experiment - it's the latter who truly highlight how misguided is the seemingly benign, 'Hello Lenin' nostalgia. One regret about the book is that much time is spent on some of the less interesting tales, and not enough on the more interesting people - like the haunting story of Frau Paul, seperated by chance from her sick baby, which leaves you stunned with both the humanity and the inhumanity of it.
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