Spy against spy in the exchange between East and West: The Glienicke Bridge was the most famous stage set of the Cold War.
Photo: dpa
It’s just a novel, I try to calm my pounding heart as I reach the last page. A novel, novel, novel.
Andreas Pflueger, perhaps known to crime fiction lovers as the author of six books about German secret services and numerous scripts for the “crime scene,” begins his seventh work with the end of several slacker careers, which is not for the faint of heart: The Glienicke Bridge flies into the air.
Glienicke Bridge? The most famous stage set of the Cold War. This was where high-ranking spies were exchanged between the USA and the Soviet Union for the first time in 1962, and because this apparently worked well in this central yet secretive border location between the GDR and West Berlin, further actions of this kind followed.
In the early 1980s, Pflueger’s heroes and anti-heroes commuted between this bridge, the southern German city of Pullach (headquarters of the BND), New York, Murnau and Berlin, the south of France and the Patriarch’s Pond in Moscow, which was already mentioned in Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita.” the scene is. The author has barely begun to tell the story when this bridge, of all things, is torn into 1,000 pieces and apparently drags a large number of the characters involved into the depths of the Havel with the rubble.
What had happened? Who blew up the structure? Are everyone involved really dead? 400 pages later there is certainty about the answers to all of these questions. Also about why a 30-year-old, sporty woman from southern Germany is driven to the role of agent leader for a Soviet spy, how she can then fall in love with his son, and what overestimation of herself leads her to marry three friends from the Soviet spy’s sphere of influence Soviet secret service wanted to get her out, even though she was being hunted as a spy in Moscow.
Pflueger tells the story skillfully and in a light tone. He formulates precisely, skilfully swings between humor and thoughtfulness, gives his characters time to develop and at the same time carefully guides readers through the labyrinth of spies and their surroundings. It is not always easy to understand who knows, uses, betrays, exposes, threatens, protects or wants to destroy whom. But that’s also part of the tension. By the way, the author’s habit of characterizing his characters by describing their laughter is very funny: “If amphibians could laugh, this is what it would sound like.” Or: “He laughed as if he had learned it in a correspondence course.” Or: ” His laugh was reminiscent of Bremerhaven in the rain.” It’s easy to find yourself looking directly for these amusing comparisons.
As we read, we learn a lot about dead mailboxes, shading strategies, shaking routes, cleaning locks, torture methods and the Moscow road and metro network. Of course, a reviewer, like a curious reader, cannot check all the street names and distances between Mayakovskaya and Tsaritsyno. What she looked up in her curiosity behaved as the author had named it; Whatever she recognized by chance had at most been renamed or the transcription had since changed. Some names and events are in fact part of the international espionage story, fit harmoniously into the fictional plot of the thriller and enhance it. Respect for research and care! Pflueger deserves the 2023 crime thriller award. And also the color cut of the blue book, for which he himself provides the explanation on page 316: “The sky was this color before storms.”
Andreas Pflueger: How to die. Suhrkamp, Berlin 2023, 448 pages, hardcover, €25.
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