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 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.