stories from behind the berlin wall

[entropyman]

I just finished reading Anna Funder's Stasiland, which I learned about from Charlie Stross, and it was an unbelievably good book

Comments

[teencake]

Have you read any books by Milan Kundera? He's a Czech writer, but it sounds like he's interested in a lot of the same things this book discusses only from a fictional point of view.

[entropyman]

Yeah, I've read several of his books. I really enjoyed them, but it's been a long time since I've read them, and I read them in German, so it's debatable how much I got out of them. :)

[entropyman]

Thinking a little bit more about this, I think part of the reason this hit me harder than any of the Kundera books is because it's history. It's real people's stories. Especially the story that inspired the author to really dig into her research. It was the story of a girl who at 16 pulled a normal, stupid 16 year old political stunt and ended up in prison for 18 months and all of the subsequent fallout from that. It was something that you could easily see yourself doing here, where it would have just been laughed at, but in the GDR, pulling that stunt screwed her up for life.