Anna Funder, Stasiland, Granta, London, 2003
Watch this video and listen to this audio:
Anna Funder on courage: Sydney PEN 3 Voices Project | SlowTV | The Monthly She begins with Anna Anna Politkovskaya before moving on to Stasiland.
Podcast talk with Anna Funder on East Germany - Shanghai - Shanghai Blogs Blog | City Weekend Guide 12th May 2008
I wrote these comments and sent them as an Email to Anna Funder c/o her agent after I finished reading Stasiland.
I have just finished reading Stasiland which I found powerful beyond words. I should say that I and the surveillance crew who have been tracking me for 13+ years 24/7/365 just finished Stasiland.
As incredible as it might sound, this is a profoundly accurate statement and why I found Stasiland so powerful. This experience is not behind us. It is alive and well and in a way far worse in London's North Kensington today than the GDR ever thought.
I don't want to go into detail at this point because what is happening, how it is being done and the surveillance technology being used are all quite unbelievable which is why this goes on and on. No one addresses it. [They don’t believe it can be true.]
I knew nothing about Stasi except in name and its terrible reputation. Stasiland was an education for me in what had been done, and I could empathise with its victims in many ways. The stories of the people were incredible and almost beyond words, but you managed to capture it.
After reading sections of people's experiences, I would recount what you had described for my own notes and for the benefit of those using surveillance technology so that they could have an explicit rendition of what you were describing since it reflected their activity as well.
On page 123 you describe Julia's comments about surveillance as "it's the total surveillance that damaged me the worst." You have no idea what that means today with the neuroscience based surveillance technology that is totally invasive and can track a human being anywhere and do anything day or night.
I happened to hear your interview on the BBC Radio3's Night Wave programme. I'll have to read your new book, but first I wanted to read Stasiland, and what a reward that was. I had never heard of it until now. Well, I've been busy living in today's Stasiland.
The only Email address I could find so far was this to your agent. I hope that this is not a bother for him/her to forward to you.
Thanks for a marvellous contribution to human understanding. I just hope that somehow what you have written about historically after the Wall came down and with some perspective of distance in time can get transferred to today's "Wall" that is now surveillance technology that I call "Toxic Surveillance."
I was 18 in 1961 when the Wall went up that August and remember it well. I was in the USAF at basic training in San Antonio [Texas]. After that I served in the USAF Security Service at its HQ's there and in Trabzon, Turkey.
While in San Antonio at HQ, a guy I knew had just come back from West Berlin in 1963 after being there for three years and wanted to go back for another three years which he got because he was a Polish linguist having grown up speaking Polish. He really liked West Berlin at that time. He had an apartment about three blocks from the Wall, he said, with a German girlfriend and new child.
During the Cold War at that time including the Cuban Missile Crisis and assassination of JFK, Berlin was very much in our minds all the time. I recall the day when JFK made his "Ich bin ein Berliner" gaff which I knew immediately was wrong from the little German I understood. but no one said anything because they knew what he meant. The fact that he was in West Berlin was phenomenal.
It is amazing that you were not born until 1966 and do not have these events as part of your existence, yet you have written this extraordinary book that has educated us all about Berlin, the Wall and the incredible government in the GDR. How much we did not and still do not know is incredible. That's why these museums are so very important which you described at the end of your book.
The USAF Security Service had its station in Berlin at Templehof airport, and the Berlin airlift was something that was not very far away from memory and what had been done to keep West Berlin open. I did not know the details that you described especially about the power station shutdown that was in East Berlin. 277K flights is incomprehensible.
I recall this guy who was there and going back saying that an aircraft landed every minute or two, and that it was such a small space that if they missed the landing they had to fly back out to the "Zone" as it was called then by them in order to return.
I have also noted more recently that there was a reward out for our capture in West Berlin at that time which I didn't know. I now have a little better understanding of what I thought was risible after having come to understand the full force of the Stasi and its total preoccupation with all information about everyone especially West Berlin and Western Germany. It seems quite likely that such a reward was on offer for anyone to capture any one of us.
When I was in Trabzon, Turkey, there were guys there who had come from West Berlin. Everybody knew everyone else. It was a small world. We never considered ourselves at risk, but then maybe we just didn't know. Ignorance is bliss. We considered our job as extremely important at that time during the Cold War.
Now I know better especially after having recently read Richard J Aldrich's GCHQ where he describes in his chapter 16 Disaster at Kiizildere how three USAF Security Service guys were taken hostage in Ankara in 1971. They managed to escape. But, the three GCHQ guys captured in 1972 were not so lucky. They were taken from a base on the Black Sea near Samsun which was our sister base down the coast in the middle of Turkey. We were on the Black Sea about 90 miles from the then Soviet border of Georgia.
At the end of August 1964 when I was coming back from holiday in Athens, I arrived in Ankara on a day that the USAF barracks there had been stoned by demonstrators, and US personnel were advised to stay indoors and not go out with their uniform on. I was walking around the centre of Ankara in uniform because I had flown MATS from Athens quite blissfully ignorant of all this. Nothing happened to me, but it did show that things were unsettled even then.
The great tragedy now concerning me and my experience is that I am being subjected to what I consider treatment that transcends what the Stasi did and portends a great problem for the West if it is not made widely known and brought under democratic control for it is the antithesis of all that is democratic and the epitome of what the Stasi were trying to do. The surveillance technology is such that they will succeed beyond the Stasi's wildest dreams if this is not made well known and stopped.
I recall your description of Frau Paul's incredible and devastating experience and how she and her husband became part of only nine people known so far at the time of the writing of your book out of the 38,000 who were "sold" to Western Germany but were dumped paperless in East Berlin instead of West Berlin/Germany as promised and paid.
That's the same thing that Lt Harry Bird USMC Ret is trying to do to me in London along with the help of the government including the police, NHS and others. He wants me removed from my home and dumped on the street by being locked out with all my possessions confiscated by him and a woman [BS] whom I had reported for child abuse in 1998 just before they got surveillance technology to use against me.
The parallel goes further than this. Frau Paul and, if I recall correctly, Miriam, had an unfortunate experience with the same supposed legal representative. Frau Paul believed that their failure to be be completely sold was due to their refusing his legal counsel. Finally, on page 255 you describe her as being followed because "there are a lot of people who don't want us to raise our voices, to fight for what we deserve."
It's the same here in the UK now. The law enforcement, legal system and prison system are all one wrapped up together. Those using the surveillance technology against me have damaged my computers so that I cannot use them and prevented me from filing annual financial accounts for three years now. They make every effort to stop this from happening by keeping me tied up with their abuse 24/7/365 which I address as top priority since it is life threatening.
I've been prosecuted by Companies House located in Cardiff, Wales twice now on an annual basis and convicted of a criminal offence for the first time in my life for any such legal matter. I've never gotten a traffic ticket. [Well, err, I had my car towed once when parking in the last 15 minutes of a Tow-Away zone time to see a production of the David Frost programme in New York when he had King Hussein of Jordan as a guest.] I could not go to Cardiff to attend the court trials, and they would not transfer it to London despite all my efforts where I can mount a defence based upon what is happening here. I have never seen a judgement just an order to pay fines. I am now threatened with a third criminal proceeding for the same problem all of which will take place in Cardiff.
Strangely, I got a letter earlier this year about an appeal when I had not filed an appeal. I provided the written information requested but did not know which conviction it was about although they were both the same. I then got a second letter from the woman who was the appeals clerk in the Crown Court in Cardiff stating that my appeal was denied because what I described could not possibly be true she said the judge had written. [“No adequate or intelligible explanation for the delay in appealing or as to the claimed merits of any appeal” was provided to me in the 24th June 2011 letter from the Appeals Officer as to what the “Resident Judge” had written.]
I never saw an appeal document; did not know what it was and never saw an appeal decision. I was just told what it was in what I considered an abusive manner. I have never seen a judge's name for the criminal trials or the appeal and haven't a clue who is doing all of this. I deal with the clerks and get my rejection letters in the post.
As you can see, the Stasi has landed alive and well in the UK and is far more advanced in its destruction using this surveillance technology to seek taking over all my and Xandor Limited's property as well as have me removed from my home and dumped on the street. While all of this might be torture abuse to get me to overreact, the criminal convictions in the Cardiff Magistrates' Court are all too real as are the fines levied when I haven't a penny for anything.
But, who is doing all of this? They are all hidden and stay behind the surveillance technology where they all watch and comment continuously on what I am doing while heaping vast amounts of abuse on me. When you described the process of being under investigation creating the status of enemy of the nation, that is exactly what is happening here too only it is explicitly rendered by continuous non-stop verbal abuse that has gone on for many years as name calling.
The current situation has reached a point that would amaze the hardest Stasi officer by what has been done in terms of informers. Please read the enclosed Email which sets forth the process of distributed surveillance technology placed in neighbours' flats to watch and abuse me by manufacturing allegations in order to get me out when I do nothing at all except report accurately what is happening. This should never be happening in the democratic West and certainly not in the UK, but it is.
I think I'll read Stasiland a second time now.
