The collapse of the GDR in 1989, signalling the end of Eastern Bloc Communism and a drastic shift in the balance of world power, was very much presented by the Western media in large-scale terms - velvet revolutions, mass protests against and the eventual demolition of the Berlin Wall, the end of an ideology and of a society of oppression, the culmination of nearly fifty years of political secrecy and violently enacted dogma.

Funder’s Stasiland insists that a society damaged in the way the former GDR was will take an awfully long time to recover. Améry asserts that he who has been tortured remains forever tortured. That “further east” is a telling comment, implying that torture is something Westerners associate with non-Western cultures - and yet, as Améry and Funder amply demonstrate, 20th century Europe seems to lead the field in the institutional technologies of torture. This contraption belonged further east and further back in time, in some Pythonesque sideshow of history.” “It seemed too primitive for the mid-20th century and too primitive for here. In the course of her gripping and alarming book about the former East Germany, Anna Funder finds, in East Berlin’s Hohenschönhausen Prison for Political Prisoners, the machinery of torture used by the Stasi, presumably into the late twentieth century. In his memoir of his imprisonment by the Nazis in the Danish fortress of Breendonk (translated into English as At the Mind’s Limits, Jean Améry describes and tries to rationalise his own experiences of torture. “Irgendwann fällt jede Mauer” (“Eventually every wall falls”)

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