Baader-Meinhof Translated: From Die Hard to al-Qaeda

Abstract

Until recently, German history thrillers were more likely to get written abroad than in Germany itself. Cold War spy fiction, although often set in a divided Germany, overwhelmingly was produced by British or American authors. Such novels often confront a compromised individual with a final set of deep moral choices in the midst of a crumbling order. The questions that they address are universal rather than specifically German. Today there is a thriving subgenre of crime fiction set against the background of German twentieth-century history, mainly in the Nazi era but also including the Weimar Republic and the aftermath of World War I. For German novelists, the division of the country was too immediate or painful a subject for it to be turned into entertainment, however thought-provoking and morally engaged much of the English-language fiction might be. In comparison with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (John le Carré, 1963) and The Innocent (Ian McEwan, 1989), German novels which feature the Berlin Wall are ponderous and worthy, when they are not driven by ideology.¹ East German writers faced censure for so much as alluding to “the anti-Fascist protection barrier,” while their West German counterparts were more likely to pretend that it did not exist. The Happy Ones (Zahl, 1979) is typical. Although the book is set in a corner of West Berlin hemmed in by the Wall the characters appear barely to notice it.