Reunification: A Monterey Mary Returns to Berlin A Stasi spy on Teufelsberg?
From T.H.E. Hill€" the award-winning author of Voices Under Berlin: The Tale of a Monterey Mary€"on the 50th anniversary (1963-2013) of the first permanent buildings on Teufelsberg, the operational home of Field Station Berlin.
A comparison of Berlin in the 1970's with Berlin in the 2010's, spiced up with the stories of escapades that only ASA-ers could have pulled off.
Reunification was awarded the prestigious Stars and Flags Gold Book Award in the €œGeneral Fiction€ category for 2013.
Reunification was the BerlinBrigade.com Book of the Month for Summer 2013.
The Stasi Musik files on Tberg were shredded when the Berlin Wall fell, but shredding was only secure before today€s computers. Follow along with Mike as he tries to identify the Stasi source covernamed Musik from the reconstructs of the shredded files.
Mike Troyan got to know the divided city of Berlin as a Monterey Mary at the Army Security Agency Field Station there. His peaceful retirement from the CIA is derailed when he returns to post-Wall, reunified Berlin to write a book about the Stasi, and one of the ghosts of his Berlin past sends him to the ER to be stitched together on the evening of his first day back. This does not bode well for his project, because this ghost is Ilse, the mother of the Director of the Stasi Archive where Mike will be working. She used to be Mike€s long-haired dictionary. She is clearly not happy to see him.
The plot thickens when Mike reads his own Stasi file, and discovers that someone was reporting on him to the Stasi while he was at the Field Station. Standard counter-intelligence logic suggests that the Stasi source was Ilse, but Mike does not want that to be the case, because it would mean that he was wrong, and Security was right. He scours the darkened recesses of his memory in search of other suspects for the title of Musik, the covername for the Stasi asset reporting on him. Wearing his case-officer hat, Mike imagines how easy it would have been for him to recruit each of the rogues€ gallery of characters he served with in ASA at Field Station Berlin.
Then add an IRA informant in witness protection who thinks that Mike is a hit man sent to settle an old score. Serve stirred, not shaken in the form of a classic espionage whodunit, garnished with a dash of moral ambiguity provided by the people that Mike meets in his travels around Berlin who force him to compare the Old Berlin to the New, and the CIA to the Stasi.
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German authors and screen-writers have already begun the process of distilling the literary truth of the meaning of reunification from the German perspective. Wolfgang Becker€s Good Bye, Lenin, Thomas Brussig€s Am krzeren Ende der Sonnenallee, and the Oscar-winner for Best Foreign Picture of 2007, Das Leben der Anderen by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck are thought-provoking, poignant literary and cinematographic treatments of German reunification from the German perspective. They are sure to become classics.
The American perspective on the reunification of Berlin, however, was sadly lacking. For almost fifty years€"from 1945 to 1994€"there was a large and vibrant American Community in Berlin. It stood shoulder-to-shoulder beside the Berliners during the Airlift, and through the Wall from rise to fall. It deserved to have a literary resolution to its disappearance. Reunification is that story.
The term "Ostalgie," coined by East German cabaret artist Uwe Steimler in 1992, refers to a nostalgia for the way life was in the GDR. About the end of the first decade following the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the term "Westalgie" began to be seen. Among Berliners, it refers to a nostalgia for the way things were in West Berlin before reunification. Reunification is clearly a "Westalgie" novel.
