Autoren-Bilder
11 Werke 68 Mitglieder 4 Rezensionen

Reihen

Werke von Max Hertzberg

Getagged

Wissenswertes

Für diesen Autor liegen noch keine Einträge mit "Wissenswertem" vor. Sie können helfen.

Mitglieder

Rezensionen

Enjoyed it, didn't love it, would read others from the series.

A random find, so I didn't start with the first book of the series. It's your classic Cold War spy tale though, set in the world of the East German cousins, poorer but more 'human faced'. Smiley would feel at home, although the minutiae feel a bit more Prussian and heel-clicking than le Carré's concern for the right schools and cricket. The details do make this an interesting read and worth their wiki-digressions: Kaffeemix isn't just a bad ersatz coffee, it's also a major economic near-collapse for the whole state. Fascinating.

It lost a star for the ending. Yes, I expected everyone to have been double-crossing everyone else, that's how it goes. But when I have to find a Stasi organisational chart just to work out what the ending meant, that's a weakness. And what did happen to Sanderling?
… (mehr)
 
Gekennzeichnet
Andy_Dingley | Oct 21, 2021 |
In most spy novels, involves a Western Operative infiltrating an oppressive regime. Hertzberg's East German spy novels flips this giving us insights into life as a spy working for the oppressor spying on the West.
In this case, the spy is Hans-Peter Reim, Second Lieutenant, ZAIG/II at Berlin Centre, GDR. Reim has few of the admirable qualities of a Western Operative: he is an alcoholic, cold-blooded, opportunistic, self-centered cynic. Reim and his colleagues are in constant fear from the regime and from their superiors whom they know will take all the credit for their subordinates successes and lay any failure to their feet.
Reim's task in this novel is to discover a turncoat who is leaking secrets to the West. The man he suspects, First Lieutenant Gerhard Sachse, has been responsible for the deaths of several of his friends including that of code name, Sanderling, Ruth Gericke whose death has incited the action of the first of the five (to date) novels of the series. Reim will be assisted in this novel by West German agent, Anna Webber, whom he betrayed in the previous novel.
Hertzberg's novel are well written, filled with detailed information about life in the East and exciting to read.
… (mehr)
 
Gekennzeichnet
RonWelton | Aug 21, 2021 |
This is an East German murder mystery with a difference - it is set in an alternative 1993 where the GDR still exists, but not as a communist state. They still overthrew communist rule and the Wall still fell, but as a result of minor differences in the sequence of events, a referendum resulted in East Germans voting not to reunite with West Germany. In this scenario, the East Germans are, at least in the view of the main characters in this novel, trying to construct a democratic, independent socialist alternative to both their predecessor Soviet bloc state and the West. While a fascinating idea, it struck me as unrealistic both from the narrative of the novel, and from my own memories as a young man in 1989-90 when these events happened. The murder mystery here surrounds the gruesome slaying of a politician from West Silesia, which is threatening to secede from the GDR, taking it with many sources of raw materials and energy. It's also linked to events in the USSR, which still exists and is still led by Mikhail Gorbachev, but which no longer holds sway over the GDR. Some fascinating ideas for anyone interested in the geopolitics of the end of the Cold War, but the main problem is the author seemed to me to be clearly not terribly interested in the murder mystery, but much more interested in the political speculation; which is fair enough, but I can't help feeling the author would have been better writing a non-fictional "what if" work, rather than a whodunit. I didn't find the main characters particularly appealing either. So I doubt whether I will bother with the rest of the trilogy.… (mehr)
 
Gekennzeichnet
john257hopper | 1 weitere Rezension | Dec 12, 2020 |
Insights in East German spy story overshadowed by didactic passages and convoluted conspiracy

It's 1993 and East Germany (GDR), recently free from the grip of the Soviet Union, is experimenting with a socialist style of direct democracy. The country is struggling - economically, politically, even psychologically and it's citizens are doing their best to cope.

Martin Grobe is sort of a cop, but without much authority. His job is to keep the new republic on course. How he and his colleagues do this is by attending a lot of meaningless meetings and talking philosophy.

A minor official is found murdered. Why Grobe is sent to investigate is never clear. In fact quite a bit of Max Hertzberg's, Stealing the Future, An East German Spy Story is vague including the conspiracy theory behind the murder.

However, if you're interested in the landmarks of East Berlin this story reads like a guidebook and there's some interesting history of what it was like to live in the German Democratic Republic while controlled by the Soviets and the difficulty it's citizens had in changing from a totalitarian regime, where you were told what to do and how to think, to democratic system where you must take control of your own destiny.

There's some good characterization with realistic relationships and dialogue but overall the plot is plagued by didactic passages and the conspiracy that drives the narrative was beyond this reader's comprehension.
… (mehr)
 
Gekennzeichnet
RodRaglin | 1 weitere Rezension | Aug 10, 2016 |

Dir gefällt vielleicht auch

Nahestehende Autoren

Statistikseite

Werke
11
Mitglieder
68
Beliebtheit
#253,411
Bewertung
3.2
Rezensionen
4
ISBNs
10

Diagramme & Grafiken