by Adrian D’Ambra
Coming once again to the end of Anna Funder’s ‘Stasiland’ and finding – once again, as so often with literary reading – that it’s the structural features of the text, the symmetry and order of the structure, that I find so satisfying and from which I infer so much meaning.
Anna’s reunion with Miriam at the end of the narrative counterbalances their meeting at the beginning of Anna’s research into the Stasi surveillance of the GDR. Miriam’s current job working at a radio station in Leipzig reminds us of Anna’s initial impetus to research the forty year history of East Germany when she was working at a radio station in Berlin. Miriam’s refusal to produce a programme on Ostalgie nostalgia parties for the GDR reminds us of Anna’s radio boss’ initial refusal to allow her to produce material about people’s experiences of the postwar division of Germany from the Eastern point of view. And then there’s the figurative ‘china stare’ of a porcelain doll on its crucifix of strings that Anna sees in the middle of the night in Miriam’s flat alongside the pierrot description of Miriam sleeping: ‘so slender and crumpled… strings cut, in the spotlight’ of the moon.
Some of us who read look to the structures of language to give literature its meaning. Some of us look to literature to give life meaning. And some of us do both.
english literature teacher 
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