The book Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder provides several personal accounts of life under the rule of the socialist East German state. The government closely resembled that imagined in George Orwell’s 1984, in which the citizens suspect each other of disobedience to the government, except this event actually took place. Orwell’s novel may, at first, seem too imaginative to take place in the real world, but East Germany’s surveillance methods were awfully similar. In the case of the Stasi, the East German secret police, power was used to mold submissive citizens due to the uncertainty of whether one’s neighbor is an informant. Funder explains the workings of the Stasi police as “a bureaucracy metastasised through