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WINTER WORK by Dan Fesperman

The Berlin wall has just come down, and former East German intelligence officials are either destroying documents or trying to sell them to the CIA.  This novel opens with the death of one such Stasi officer who was apparently in the “sell” camp and possibly murdered by a competitor.  Emil Grimm, who was friends with the dead officer, now seeks to make his own deal with the Americans.  His wife is dying of ALS and is playing matchmaker to Emil and her caretaker, Karola.  Emil just wants money and passports to get all three of them out of Germany.  Claire, his CIA contact, begins to sympathize with Emil and his desperation and puts her own life at risk to cut a deal with him.  The Russian KGB operatives, stereotypically burly and violent, serve as the main villains here.  This novel is basically an imagined story behind the acquisition of the Rosenholz files, which gave the U.S. a trove of information regarding alleged East German spies.  The writing in this book is perfunctory, but the pacing is decent, and the historical context is fascinating.  I have not read much, if anything, about the immediate aftereffects of Cold War and the reunification of Germany.  Certainly I never considered how so many people lost their jobs, and I don’t mean just the Stasi employees.  Granted, they were engaged in efforts to infiltrate and undermine U.S. and European government entities, but their custodial staff, for example, were not.  I think it’s a bit risky for the author to paint Emil as someone deserving of a bailout, but it works.


This post first appeared on Patti's Pages, please read the originial post: here

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WINTER WORK by Dan Fesperman

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