Leaving Berlin by Joseph Kanon

Leaving Berlin does some things very well.  Notably, it paints an indelible portrait of post-War Berlin 4 years after the defeat of the Nazis. The city is divided between the American, British, French, and Soviet zones.  The city is in ruins, the Berlin airlift is in progress, and the stunned survivors of the war are trying to navigate an uncertain and ever-shifting present.

We see Berlin through the eyes of the prominent novelist Alex Meier.  Alex is a German Jew who fled the Nazis before the war, and who is now returning to the East as an honoured guest to help build his homeland's socialist future.  But Meier is also a refugee again:  this time from the House Un-American Activities Committee.  When asked to name names he had a fit of temper and told them to go fuck themselves.  As a result, he was exiled from America and from his 10 year old American son.

In Berlin Alex encounters places and people that he knew before the war, but everything has changed.  The city is little more than piles of burnt rubble.  The younger brother of a socialist friend is now an ambitious East German apparatchik who is helping build what will become the Stasi.  One daughter of the man who saved him from the camps lives in West Berlin and is the self-justifying wife of a (former?) Nazi doctor. Her sister, his first love, is the mistress of a Soviet general in charge of slave labour camps. 

Everything is painfully familiar but painfully different, and Alex cannot bridge the gap.  He did not experience the war as they did, and can no longer truly understand the city or the people he left behind.

I think Leaving Berlin would have been a more interesting book if that summary of the book were  complete.  But Leaving Berlin is a thriller.  Alex is actually an American spy.   After his encounter with HUAC he was offered a deal by the CIA: if he gathers enough useful information in the East he may be allowed to return to America and be reunited with his son.

The tropes follow thick and fast:  Alex is, of course, also recruited as an East German informer almost as soon as he arrives, doubling the opportunities for intrigue.  No one is quite as they seem, Alex is quickly pulled between old and new loyalties, and soon Alex doesn't know where to turn or whom to trust.  The plot is driven by constant action.  Alex becomes embroiled in deception, murder, and betrayal the morning after his arrival, and transforms from a naive observer of events to a polished undercover operative over the course of  a single week.

Leaving Berlin is an effective thriller.  I raced to the end even though I'm not entirely sure that I followed all of the plot convolutions.

But Kanon did too good of a job evoking post-War Berlin and its inhabitants.  I wanted to spend more time with Bertolt Brecht, who, as Alex observes, is nostalgic not for pre-War Berlin, but for the 1920s.  I wanted to understand the idealism of the socialist returnees, and to see their struggles and compromises as their hope for a new society fades in the face of Soviet totalitarianism.  And I wanted the portrayal of the vindictive 'bad guy' Russians to be moderated by an understanding of how their attitudes towards Germans and Germany were formed by the 20 to 40 million Russian casualties of World War 2.

It's not entirely fair to critique a novel because it's not a different type of book.  Perhaps it's a tribute to the quality of Kanon's writing?  It left me wanting more from the novel than action and intrigue.