Berlin’s long echo: How the German capital shaped the work of Australian author Anna Funder

Australian author and Miles Franklin Award-winner Anna Funder first experienced Berlin as a 20-year-old in 1987 — a few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It was a stint at Free University on a DAAD German scholarship exchange that inspired her to query life behind the Wall and to forge a connection with a city she’s visited many times since the 90s. Still, it was a sabbatical last November, almost 40 years since she first visited, that enabled the author, best known for All That I Am, Stasiland and Wifedom, to reconnect with her younger self. Ahead of a literary tour of Australia this July and August reflecting on what inspired the books that have shaped her career, Funder spoke to ROAM about Berlin’s pull and the personal and professional imprints it has left.

“I didn’t know anybody when I arrived in Berlin in 1987. I was a Melbourne University undergraduate studying literature, German and law and got a scholarship. I arrived in the winter and by accident, fell in with a group of male artists and writers — a generation older than me who had been exiled from over the Wall from East Germany. They had been good enough to be thorns in the side of the Communist regime, and bad enough to be exiled from their own home. We would meet in cafes, drink and have fun in a place near the Wall near Kreuzberg. Their stories never left me and nor did what it was like in the socialist bloc. I remained in Berlin until mid-1988; the Wall fell at the end of 1989.

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I can remember conversations with these friends. One was the painter Penck who wondered whether the Wall would ever fall. He got laughed down. And then the Wall fell the next year! That’s when it became possible to go back and see what it was like behind the Wall. I visited regularly and gathered enough knowledge to know there were stories I wanted to write. I spent all of 1997 there writing and in 2000, went back to finish Stasiland for three months. It’s a hugely important place for me.

Going back for an artist in residence fellowship was emotional. It was all about reconnecting with my 20-year-old-self again. Nowadays it’s hard to tell East and West — you have to know what you’re doing, because the city is really knitted back together. It was like I was ghosting myself as I went around.

Back then, I lived in the student accommodation Hardenberg Strasse, opposite the technical university. I’d go to the Hardenberg Cafe, which is still there. Being back in Berlin in my late 50s allowed me to acknowledge I always wanted to be a writer. I looked at my former self with sympathy, a little bit of embarrassment and in some ways, not feeling entirely disconnected from her either.

I also lived in Prenzlauer Berg — the former East filled with beautiful old buildings with shabby facades and no plaster. The Stasi and their victims, and everybody else in-between was here — beautiful town squares and streetscapes all around Kollwitz Platz. I remember wine shops, cafes and poetry readings in this place that had been the literary centre of East Germany. Now this area is posh and very gentrified.

I’d also go back to the Pasternack restaurant in Berlin — named after Nobel literature prize-winning writer Boris Pasternak and author of Doctor Zhivago.

I started writing Stasiland in 1997 and had heard the story of Miriam Weber back in 1994 while on a Goethe Institute fellowship. I couldn’t get her story out of my head and it becomes the main anchor in Stasiland — a 16-year-old who tries to get over the Wall. At the time I was working at the Attorney-General’s Department in international law in Canberra, but I decided to leave a good job to move to Berlin and find her.

The Neue Nationalgalerie and the Berlin State Library which was designed by Hans Scharoun, hold special memories for me. The latter is a beautiful 1970s designed building — a modern, light and airy space where I used to work.

If you have seen Jim Jarmusch’s 1987 film Wings Of Desire you’ll remember the Swiss actor Bruno Ganz who is an angel inhabiting that very library. He can’t be seen by people, but he listens with great empathy to their thoughts as they sit there working trying to figure their problems. That library has the ghost of me in it, and the angel you don’t know is watching you is also there.” au.thinkable.events