Stasiland is the new album by electropop trio Ekkoes, with lyrics/spoken excerpts taken from the book of the same name by Anna Funder. This is the first in a series of eight mini essays to accompany each of the main songs on the album, which will be released each week, beginning Friday 1 November, finishing on Friday 20 December
“In August 1961, a fresh Stasi recruit named Hagen Koch walked the streets of Berlin with a tin of paint and a brush, and painted the line where the Wall would go. He was twenty-one years old, and he was Secretary-General [Erich] Honecker’s personal cartographer. Unlike most heads of state, Honecker needed a personal cartographer, because he was redrawing the limits of the free world.” — Stasiland (Anna Funder), 2003.
The opening lines of this song, and the words of induction in verse 2 both come from this young Stasi recruit, who grew up attending a school where he was taught the doctrine of Communism by his father, and also took part in the socialist youth system — The Free German Youth. He became a poster boy for the new regime and one day accompanied Honecker along the length of the border through the city — nearly 50km — to draw the line which would become the Berlin Wall.
The rest of the words in this song are those of Anna Funder, the author of Stasiland, a book published in 2003. An Australian writer, she lived in West Berlin in the 1980s, and then returned there in the mid-90s, after the Wall had come down (in 1989). She soon discovered many hidden stories of life in East Germany, under the watchful eye of the Stasi — described as “one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies ever to have existed”.
But first — a quick historical recap. At the end of the second world war, Germany was divided up into four zones allocated to the victors — USA (south), UK (northwest), France (southwest) and the Soviet Union (east). Berlin, located in the east zone, was considered too important for the Soviet Union to have alone, so was also split into four zones.

The three ‘west’ zones were quickly consolidated to form West Germany (likewise the three ‘west’ zones of Berlin), and given aid under the Marshall Plan to prosper, in order to shore up Western Europe against its new Cold War enemy: the Soviet Union. East Germany — officially the German Democractic Republic (GDR) began to function as a state in 1949, as a satellite state of the Soviet Union, and as a one-party communist state. After many years of the country losing talented people to the West — where they could earn more money — the country began to strengthen its western borders and, in 1961, built the Berlin Wall — a guarded concrete barrier that encircled West Berlin and prevented people escaping to the West via this route, creating a capitalist island in the middle of the communist GDR.
When the GDR was created, the aim — at least in theory — was to build a utopian, equal society. As Funder puts it: “The GDR, in its forty years, tried strenuously both to create Socialist German Man and to get the people to believe in him… History was taught as a series of inevitable evolutionary leaps towards Communism: from a feudal state through capitalism and then — in the greatest leap forward to date — socialism. The Communist nirvana was the world to come.”
As Koch says:
“…the GDR was like a religion. It was something I was brought up to believe in.”
As one of the tactics employed to make people believe, the GDR created the Stasi, headquartered in East Berlin. One of its main tasks was to spy on the population, to identify and nullify ‘enemies of the state’, and to ensure that everyone was working toward the common good — as defined by the Stasi of course. The Stasi infiltrated almost every aspect of daily life — by 1989, it had over 91,000 employees and more than 173,000 informants. Counting part-time informers, the Stasi had one agent for every 6.5 people.
When the GDR collapsed and the Wall came down in 1989, the Stasi was disbanded, and most former agents simply became normal citizens of the newly reunified Germany, which was keen to look ahead to the future and not to dwell on the past. Funder set out to uncover the hidden stories of those who had been in the Stasi, and those who had suffered at its hands; the book details the people she met, the experiences they had, and the opinions they now held.
In 1949, though, after the horrors of the war, at least some of the population dared to hope that their new Communist way of life might lead to a vision of utopia. Thus, the opening track of our album, Stasiland, tries to create that feeling of dreaming of something better, something noble, something beautiful.
“They’d all been through hell on earth. Didn’t they deserve heaven?”
Preorder Stasiland by Ekkoes here
Read Stasiland Stories #2 — Across The Tracks here
Read Stasiland Stories #3 — Spezialdisziplin here
Read Stasiland Stories #4 — Julia here
Read Stasiland Stories #5 — The Black Channel here
Buy Stasiland by Anna Funder here