When Hannah Arendt introduced the word totalitarianism into the English language in 1951, she had in mind the Stalinist and Nazi regimes in the USSR and Germany. But, as later scholars have made clear. neither government had achieved a level of control over its citizenry that could be described as total. Both came close. But neither could match the hold that the Ministry of State Security of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) had over the eighteen million people of East Germany from the 1950s through the 1980s. Their plight as prisoners of body and mind alike comes vividly to light in novelist Katherine Reay’s revealing story of East Berlin during the long years of the Cold War, The Berlin Letters.
The story of one family, divided by the Berlin Wall
The construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and its “fall” in 1989 bookend Reay’s tale. It’s the story of a single East German family, the Voeklers. In 1961, Haris Voekler is the top reporter for the official newspaper of the Socialist Unity Party, the Communists. He’s favored with the best assignments and access to the highest officials.
Then the Wall goes up overnight, closing off the last escape hatch for the desperate people of the DDR. And Haris’s wife, Monica, terrified that her infant daughter will be doomed to a lifetime of imprisonment, throws her over an incomplete section of the Wall into the arms of her parents, who recently fled to West Berlin. And now in 1989 the daughter, Luisa, is an analyst for the CIA engaged in a top-secret inquiry into the hidden history of East Germany—and she stumbles across a batch of twenty letters written by her own father from 1964 until mere months ago in 1989.
The Berlin Letters by Katherine Reay (2024) 368 pages ★★★★☆
Letters under a floorboard tell a grim story of East Berlin
Luisa Voekler finds those letters under a floorboard in her family home. Her father had written them over the years to her grandfather, who had recently died. And the old man had hidden them in her room, intending for her alone to have them. He had insisted since she was a little child that both her parents were dead, victims of a car crash in 1961. But her father had been alive all along. That’s shock enough. But even more shocking, the letters make clear that not only is he alive but he’s now locked up in a notorious East German prison.
Assessing the novel’s historical accuracy
Midway through World War II the precursor to the National Security Agency (NSA) launched a small project later codenamed VENONA to ferret out and decrypt wartime Soviet diplomatic correspondence. The war was almost over when they finally succeeded, and the project remained active until 1980. Its most famous success was to turn up documentary evidence of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg‘s ties to Soviet intelligence.
Katherine Reay posits a followup project, VENONA II, not at the NSA but in the Central Intelligence Agency. Since Luisa Voekler and her colleagues’s role was to decrypt East German and Soviet documents, it’s highly unlikely that they would not have worked for the CIA. Codebreaking is the NSA’s job. But the dynamics of Reay’s story demand that she can call upon the resources of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The other glaring flaw in The Berlin Letters is the contrived timetable. By placing the two pivotal events in her story in August 1961, when the Wall went up, and November 1989, when it fell, Reay smooths her way to a powerful—and convenient—conclusion. Of course, life doesn’t work this way. And the contrivance weakens what otherwise is a suspenseful and ultimately exciting story about a long-running episode in world history little known to most Americans.
About the author
Katherine Reay is the author of ten historical, mystery, and espionage novels. She holds a BA and MS from Northwestern University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and has lived across the country with a few years in England and Ireland as well. A full-time author and mother of three children, Katherine and her husband currently live outside Chicago, IL.
For related reading
I’ve reviewed several other spy novels set in East Berlin:
- The Berlin Exchange by Joseph Kanon (An ingenious tale about a spy swap in East Berlin)
- Brandenburg Gate by Henry Porter (When Communism lost its grip on East Germany)
- The Matchmaker: A Spy in Berlin by Paul Vidich (A dangerous spy game in Berlin before the fall of the Wall)
You’ll find other great reading at:
- The 15 best espionage novels
- Good nonfiction books about espionage
- Best books about the CIA
- The best spy novelists writing today
And you can always find my most popular reviews, and the most recent ones, on the Home Page.
