Stealing the Future (2015) by Max Hertzberg
GoodReads meta-data is 244 pages, rated 3.58 by 108
Genre: krimi
Verdict: verbose
When the eternal Berlin Wall crumbled in November 1989, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) underwent a transformation for a few short months that are now largely forgotten. From 1989 to October 1990 it remained an independent polity, and this period is stretched for this story. In this book there is sentiment for the DDR to remain independent and go from red to pink, that is to retain many of the benefits of the communist regime without the oppression, while avoiding the myriad evils of capitalism. The benefits include health care, childcare, pensions at fifty-five, convenient public transport, and so on, but not forced labor camps, re-education, endless surveillance, disappearance, murders at the Wall. Of industrial pollution and environmental degradation and the economic distortion nothing is said. Against this opinion is the desire for Unification which is made to seem in these pages a capitalist plot.
In this context Plod is roused from his crappy east Berlin office to go to West Silesia on the eastern border of the DDR with Poland way off his patch to look at a homicide. The order came straight from the Minister’s office, so off he goes. He finds there not only the local cops but others from neighbouring Saxony. Why all the interest he wonders, but not enough to ask anyone. He contributes nothing to the investigation. When he tries to report to the Minister, he is greeted with indifference. Investigation of the homicide was urgent and then unimportant in the space of a few hours. Plod finds that both irritating and suspicious, but his lassitude prevents him from making any backchannel inquiries, yet surely a veteran officer has backchannels.
There are interesting asides about some of the Eastern landen (provinces), like Western Silesia, in the DDR seeking their own separate deals with West Germany. There is also a reference to a referendum in the DDR to unification being defeated but I could find nothing about that. I guess that is part of the fiction. In the Wikipedia account, the only impediment to Unification was the reluctance of the Western Allies, mainly in the person of Margaret Thatcher, to a resurgent Germany.
Instead of investigating anything, Plod spends far too much time arguing with everyone he meets about the virtues of the DDR. His daughter, a British Army officer, a neighbour, they all get the benefit of his explanation of the good points of the corrupt and oppressive regime he served while grizzling about it. Plod seems to be the only one who does not realise the Unification is happening, and its completion is inevitable.
To be sure even now the DDR has its defenders who battle it out in the Wikipedia editing wars everyday. Look at the editing history at the bottom of each page. Oh hum. And that is in the English language version of Wikipedia. The German language version is even more hotly contested from my brief glance with edits coming one after another. There are plenty of films about life in the DDR, but for me the best is the muted, Barbara (2012) discussed elsewhere on this blog. Timothy Garton Ash’s book The File (1997) says it all.
First in a series. I chose it since we are ticketed to go to Berlin 2020. I could not find a photograph of the author but on Twitter he describes himself as the author of crime and hope punk, mostly tales of East Germany. ‘Hope punk?’ Don’t know.