Stasiland examines the lives and times of those living in the GDR from 1949 to 1989. The former GDR is described by Funder as a manifestation of 'the dream of a better world the German communists wanted to build out of the ashes of their Nazi past...' (p.4). It is a place of pure nightmare; a place of surveillance, suppression, brutality; a place where civil rights do not exist and where citizens are controlled, persecuted, and lied to in a way that brings Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four to life. The GDR is synonymous with injustice and inhumanity. It is also a place of great absurdity.

Following Germany's World War II defeat by the allies in 1949, Funder explains, 'the Allies [England, America, France and Russia] divided up their 'conquered enemy' (p.160) and as a result 'the German Democratic Republic was established as a satellite state of the USSR in 1949' (p.161). Because the Russians were communists, 'the people living in this zone had to switch from being...Nazis one day to being Communists and brothers with their former enemies the next' (p.161).

Loathing the capitalism it associated with the West and fearing losing power and control, the Stasi were 'the internal army by which the [East German communist] government kept control' (p.5). Their job was 'to know everything about everyone, using any means it chose' and as Funder explains, 'It knew who your visitors were, it knew whom you telephoned, and it knew if your wife sleep around' (p.5). The Stasi employed a range of strategies to gather information about people, ranging from microphones in thermos lids and flowers, wearing wigs and fake moustaches and even collecting people's 'smells' in jars for later use with sniffer dogs (p.8). they even tapped people's phones, bugged apartments and read personal mail. The Stasi were methodical, meticulous and highly organised and this allowed them to create what the German media dubbed 'the most perfected surveillance state of all time' (p.57).