This was a regime ruled by dour old men - Marxisten-Senilisten. You could only avoid contact with the regime if you opted out, and went into 'inner emigration' - not an option for the ambitious. Any attempt to achieve success in East Germany involved a pact with the devil - you paid with your soul if you wanted to attend a university, enter a sports-club, become a lawyer or a clergyman or marry a foreigner - like Funder's friend Julia. Some estimates run as high as one for every six and a half members of the population. It possessed armies of spies, paid and unpaid. Through the Stasi it pried into every aspect of your life. The GDR was a furtive and insidious tyranny. Funder shows that the Stasi-men like Koch were also victims in their way. Koch was a model citizen who mapped out the Berlin Wall, but something went badly wrong when his superiors began to meddle with his marriage. Hagen Koch, for example, whose council flat is now a museum to the old regime, has covered the walls with mementoes, such as a dress uniform of an officer in the elite Felix Dzerzhinski regiment - East Germany's equivalent of the Prussian First Foot Guards. There is much humour and even affection in her portraits of the handful of Stasi-men she meets. The only difference was they now had plenty of time on their hands.

She found them living in the same drab houses in compounds on the outskirts of Potsdam the same stained Plattenbauten - or high rise blocks - in East Berlin and frequenting the same pubs they did in their glory days.

By placing an advertisement in a newspaper she arranged meetings with a number of old Stasi-men, including the noble renegade Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, who once hosted a notorious television programmerunning down the west.

Stasiland funder