In an Australian radio interview in May 2006 about her best-selling book Stasiland (2002), a non-fiction, personal account of the GDR's aftermath, Anna Funder was asked by commentator Terry Lane: ‘What was a nice Australian girl doing poking around in Germany's dirty linen?’ When Funder first started writing the book, only seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, information regarding the activities of the East German secret police was still emerging in the media. Although she grew up in Melbourne, Funder lived and worked in Germany over several years and speaks fluent German. After studying in West Berlin in the late 1980s, where she heard stories from behind the Wall, Funder returned to Berlin in 1997 with the intention of writing a text that would delve into a very specific part of Germany's recent past, uncovering the untold stories of various victims of the Stasi. She wanted to explore the lives of those who had stood up to the regime, thus revealing significant acts of courage. Readers of Stasiland are progressively introduced to these figures as the protagonist ‘Anna’ encounters them: Miriam, whose husband, Charlie, died in a Stasi prison; Julia, who sublets her apartment in the former eastern part of Berlin to Anna, and whose education and career chances were cut off by the Stasi, and Frau Sigrid Paul, whose sickly baby was stuck on the western side of the Wall, prompting Frau Paul and her husband to undertake an escape attempt through a tunnel into West Berlin.

On her journey through this so-called Stasiland, Anna also meets the state cartographer responsible for painting the line of the Berlin Wall through the city, while her friend, the late East German rock star Klaus Renft, divulges to her his experiences of living behind the Wall. Funder presents these ‘real stories’ – mediating them as they have been conveyed to Anna – as a means of validating her creative non-fiction text.

In terms of Stasiland's reception, the question of genre is extremely relevant. Frequently, non-fiction is read as truth; Funder argues that, by its very nature, non-fiction holds ‘the cachet of being true. This means that things which are literally stranger than fiction can have a place there’.