Brandenburg Gate by Henry Porter

Occurring in the final months of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), known in the West as East Germany, just before the wall came down, Henry Porter recreates the conditions in a failed, delusional, paranoid police state dominated by the “state within a state” know as the Stasi (the German secret police); that most feared instrument of repression that numbered 81,000 agents and 1.5 million informers, in a country with a population of 17 million. This is a terrific historic novel that shifts between east and west, with a credible and lengthy cast of characters from the Stasi (variously “inspired”), the CIA, MI6, KGB – even a fictional Putin puts in an appearance – the GDR resistance and, inescapably given the historic landscape, the Nazi party. Be prepared to make a list of characters as they make their entrance – I wrote their names and the page number on which they first appear on the back cover, which was a great help in keeping them straight. Not that this is a difficult mystery to follow – far from it; it’s nearly impossible to put down.

Rudi Rosenharte, a 50-year-old unmarried, former Stasi agent who has been teaching art history in a Dresden university, and occasional in Leipzig, is reactivated, under duress, as a Stasi agent after a hiatus of 15 years to meet a former English spy and lover, who now wants to pass NATO’s highly prized secrets to the GDR. The catch is that as far as Rudi knows, she committed suicide in Geneva fifteen years earlier, in 1974. Rudi’s twin brother, Konrad, a filmmaker of subtly subversion movies viewed by virtually no one (Kafka-esk to be sure), has been jailed in a notorious East German prison and “interrogation” center, Konrad’s wife has been jailed, and their two children taken from them; all to insure against Rudi’s defection during a brief assignment in Trieste.

There are too many characters and details to relate here; suffice it to say, you will be convincingly immersed in the paranoid world that was the GDR in the fall of 1989; with all the dissembling, fear and torture (or worse) that accompanied one of most suppressive police states ever to have existed. Although it opens in Trieste, most of the action takes place in the triangle of Dresden, Berlin and Leipzig. If the measure of a successful novel – almost all novels a historic to some degree – is to come away with a more profound understanding of those remarkable events of 1989 and an admiration for the people who survived, Brandenburg Gate succeeds remarkable well. I only wish I had read this before I traveled in the east with my father, in 2005. Reading this now, at the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, made me want to return to view the landscape and people with renewed appreciation and historic perspective.