AustLit

To write this non-fiction work about life in the former East Germany, Anna Funder interviewed former Stasi officers and the people they surveilled. Described in the National Library of Australia record as 'A book of travel, history and biography that reads like a documentary novel,' Stasiland takes 'a deliberately subjective and "literary" approach' to its material with an 'emphasis on a sympathetic authorial persona as the source of the reader's perspective' (Susan Lever 'The Crimes of the Past: Anna Funder's Stasiland and Helen Garner's Joe Cinque's Consolation'.

Written for the Reading Australia project, this essay serves as an introduction to Anna Funder's Stasiland. Knox discusses the cultural setting in which the work was first published and examines the narrative techniques that Funder uses to depict her subjects. Knox also discusses how Funder's gender and her status as a foreigner affected her telling of the story.

Gert Reifarth grew up in East Germany. In this essay, first published in Meanjin, he reflects on life behind the Iron Curtain and the tactics he used to circumvent government control. At one point, he sends coded letters to friends in the west so that they will smuggle in a copy of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. As an adult now living in Melbourne, he discusses his feelings about the past and future of the former GDR.

In this essay, Leslie Bodi writes about the 'role of intellectuals and writers in ensuring the reinstatement of civil society and democracy in East Germany after the opening up of German border in November 1989 [...] Their participation in struggles to allow GDR citizens to view the documents gathered by the GDR Ministry of State Security (Stasi) or the Stasi files is highlighted for their efforts to support the victims of government surveillance in GDR.' (Source: Author's abstract.)

In this conference paper, available at the Academia.edu repository, Susan Lever compares Stasiland to Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation. The paper 'considers the similarities in approach to real events of Anna Funder's examination of the GDR and its system of surveillance, and Helen Garner's account of the trials of the killer of a young man in Canberra.

'This article contends that literary journalism, like its component parts of literature and journalism, is a construct based on different culturally and socially accepted conventions. German and Australian views of literary journalism are shaped by different histories and expectations, as the reaction to Anna Funder’s book Stasiland in Germany demonstrates. It examines the German cultural context at the time of Stasiland’s publication, and argues that the different approaches to privacy and to literary journalism in Australia and Germany resulted in vastly different receptions for the book.

The 3^rd Conference of the International Association for Translation & Intercultural Studies (IATIS) was held at Monash University, Melbourne, in July 2009. The theme of the conference was 'Mediation & Conflict: Translation and Culture in a Global Context' and embraced such topics as cultural translation, the translator/interpreter as cultural broker in a trans-national world, the role of literary translation in challenging or reinforcing cultural difference, new media in translation, and political and ideological dimensions of translation.