47 pages • 1 hour read
Stasiland
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Symbols & Motifs
Smell
Funder consistently notices the scent of the world around her. In the book, smell is a way of evoking the immediacy of memory, symbolic of the past entering the present, as smell is the sense most closely linked to memory.
Disinfectant stands in for methods of eradicating the past: “It occurs to me that the purpose of disinfectant globules is to mask the smells of human bodies with something worse” (2). The cleaning woman in the Stasi HQ says, “‘at that time the whole building smelled—we cleaned and cleaned and we just couldn’t get rid of the smell’” (75).
Smell also ties in to what Funder says about the past influencing the present, even when one does not remember it. Of a man spreading orange coal dust, Funder says, “the hopper clangs shut in a burst of orange cloud. This dust is everywhere. When you can’t smell it, it’s still there, in the orange winter air” (139).
The Wall
The divide between east and west takes many forms in the book, but there is no more obvious symbol of the literal and ideological divide between east and west than the Berlin Wall. Almost everyone in this book interacts with it unsuccessfully. Miriam Weber tried to climb over it; Frau Paul and her husband tried to tunnel under it. Hagen Koch marked the route it would follow. It looms in the city as an oppressive force and a reminder that citizens are, in effect, prisoners of the country in which they live. Some that Funder talked to believed it was necessary and cite reasoning that sounds logical, but the story of Frau Paul and her separation from her son serves as an emotional counterpoint:
I thought this was just a shorthand way of referring to how Germans define themselves still as easterners and westerners. But I see now a more literal meaning: the Wall and what it stood for do still exist. The Wall persists in Stasi men’s minds as something they hope might one day come again, and in their victims’ minds too, as a terrifying possibility (233-34).
Order and Chaos
At one point, Funder is “visited by a blinding question: what am I doing in this chaos anyway? In this chaotic city?” (146).The East German regime emerged from the chaos that was the end of World War II, when the regime was taken under Soviet control. The order of the Communist regime rose up in response to a Germany shaken in the aftermath of the war. But the desire for order was in this case partially a desire for the erasure of Nazism.
Swimming gives Funder a way of expressing the strange mixture of orderliness and chaos that was East Germany. Funder finds the public pool she tries to swim in an appropriate metaphor: “This pool must be the subconscious of the country: the mess that gives rise to all that order” (147).
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