JOHN LE CARRÉ
A Small Town in Germany
with an Introduction by Hari Kunzru
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Introduction
Prologue
1: Mr Meadowes and Mr Cork
2: ‘I Could Hear their Screaming on the Telephone …’
3: Alan Turner
4: Decembers of Renewal
5: John Gaunt
6: The Memory Man
7: De Lisle
8: Jenny Pargiter
9: Guilty Thursday
10: Kultur at the Bradfields
11: Königswinter
12: ‘And There was Leo. In the Second Class’
13: The Strain of Being a Pig
14: Thursday’s Child
15: The Glory Hole
16: ‘It’s All a Fake’
17: Praschko
Epilogue
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
A SMALL TOWN IN GERMANY
John le Carré was born in 1931. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, secured him a worldwide reputation, which was consolidated by the acclaim for his trilogy Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People. His later novels include The Constant Gardener, Absolute Friends, The Mission Song and A Most Wanted Man. Our Kind of Traitor is his most recent novel.
Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions and Gods Without Men, and the story collection Noise. He lives in New York.
Introduction
In 1961, a young German columnist published a scathing article in konkret, a popular left-wing magazine. ‘The attempt to turn twelve years of German history into a taboo subject has failed’, she wrote, in a piece provocatively headlined ‘Hitler in Euch’ (‘Hitler Within You’). ‘The narrowing gap between the fronts of history and politics, between the accusers, the accused, and the victims, haunts the younger generation.’ That same year a young British SIS officer, posted under diplomatic cover to the embassy in Bonn, published his first novel.
As observers of (and participants in) the danse macabre of German cold war politics, Ulrike Meinhof and John le Carré could hardly have been more different. She was a member of the banned Communist Party of Germany (KPD); he was a British spy. As the sixties progressed, Meinhof’s journalism grew more polemic and confrontational, until she abandoned it altogether to join the urban guerrillas of the Red Army Faction. Le Carré’s disabused, melancholy fiction, meanwhile, portrays men and women for whom romantic political commitment and ethical simplicity are distant dreams. Yet both shared at least one thing – an acute sense of Germany as a nation haunted by historical crimes.
As the Soviet Union advanced at the end of the war, de-Nazification had taken second place to anti-Communism, and many public figures in the young Federal Republic of Germany had held senior positions during the Third Reich. There was a widespread feeling that the Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle that was putting televisions in front rooms and cars on the roads, was tainted by a creeping neo-Fascism, as former Nazis reasserted themselves behind the spectacular façade of the new consumer society. By October 1968, when le Carré, now a celebrated author, published his fifth novel, A Small Town in Germany, leftists of the APO (the Ausserparlamentarische or ‘Extra-parliamentary’ opposition) had rejected the compromised institutions of the state and were taking to the streets, while a resurgent far right seethed and plotted in numerous nationalist and Fascist groupuscules, fertile ground (or so it seemed) for any new would-be Führer.
1968 had been a tumultuous year across Europe. In May, student protests had rocked France, and a general strike had come close to toppling the government of Charles de Gaulle. In August, Soviet tanks had rolled into Prague. The atmosphere in the Federal Republic was febrile. The Chancellor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, had worked on propaganda for the Third Reich’s foreign ministry, but was never convicted of war crimes. During the convention of the ruling Christian Democrat party, he was slapped in the face by a young activist, who shouted ‘Kiesinger! Nazi! Abreten!’ (Kiesinger! Nazi! Step down!). Incredibly, the woman, Beate Klarsfeld, was arrested, tried the same day, and sentenced to a year in prison. In April, Rudi Dutschke, the charismatic leader of the SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, the Socialist Student’s League) and the most prominent figure in the APO, was shot in the head by a would-be assassin, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to speak. When Meinhof wrote, in an incendiary column, that ‘protest is when I say I don’t like this, resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like’, she was articulating the increasingly militant view of many young left-wing Germans, who felt that the attack on Dutschke proved the FRG was becoming a crypto-Fascist state, and the ‘generation of Auschwitz’ would stop at nothing to retain power. The right feared that instability would lead to the FRG’s absorption by the communist German Democratic Republic (which was indeed covertly financing some leftist organisations, including the magazine which published Meinhof’s column) and saw the APO as no more than a Trojan horse for an East German takeover.
Against this extraordinarily volatile background, le Carré chose to set a story that is among his quietest and most compressed. The ‘small town’ of the title is Bonn, a sleepy provincial place elevated to the status of national capital by the Cold War. A new suburb of modernist federal government buildings and foreign missions has risen up outside the walls of the old city. For le Carré it is ‘the unnatural capital village of this island state, which lacks both political identity and social hinterland, and is permanently committed to the condition of impermanence.’ The Federal Republic was indeed ‘committed to impermanence’, as was the GDR, its mirror on the other side of the border. The FRG did not recognise the GDR politically. Each side maintained that it was the only legitimate German state. Le Carré had titled his fourth novel The Looking Glass War. The metaphor is precise: the two Germanies peered over their mutual border and saw themselves reflected back. Each state presented to the other an uncanny alternate reality, utterly alien and disturbingly familiar.
So Bonn is no more than an encampment, its political life destined to move back to Berlin, if and when reunification can be achieved:
One day, perhaps, the whole grey mountain will slip down the Autobahn and silently take its place in the wet car parks of the gutted Reichstag; until that happens, these concrete tents will remain, discreetly temporary in deference to the dream, discreetly permanent in deference to the reality; they will remain, multiply, and grow; for in Bonn, movement has replaced progress, and whatever will not grow must die.
An ‘inseparable part’ of this joyless place is the British embassy. A bleak concrete construction, it stands ‘on its brown heathland like a makeshift hospital in the twilight of battle.’ Embassy staff live and socialize in ‘a modest piece of suburban Surrey’ recreated in the nearby spa of Bad Godesberg, complete with privet hedges, an English church, and ‘comfortable stockbrokers’ houses, with open fireplaces and long corridors for servants they no longer have.’ The consciousness of national decline is particularly acute among this caste of British officials, battered by post-war austerity and the humiliations of Suez. Once servants of Empire, they are downtrodden but dutiful, putting out the ‘small flags of the Commonwealth, creased by storage and diminished by secession’ for a rain-lashed children’s sports day.
In this atmosphere of quiet desperation, security has become lax and a junior embassy official named Leo Harting has disappeared, taking with him a number of secret files. Alan Turner, the man sent to investigate, is a typical le Carré anti-hero, an insider who is also an outsider. He is Oxford-educated, but a ‘former Fellow of St Anthony’s College … which takes all kinds o
f people.’ His ‘stained tropical suit’ is immediately contrasted with the ‘Brigade of Guards jacket’ worn by a colleague, an eight-buttoned sign of belonging. Turner is a blunt instrument, a man whose ‘heavy brown brogues’ are not made to tread delicately on diplomatic eggshells. ‘His voice was awfully quiet, but it carried a long way; a Yorkshire voice, and common as a mongrel.’
Turner’s investigations at the embassy take place in a milieu governed, to a degree unimaginable today, by English class snobbery. A car club is described by a member as ‘UK and Commonwealth … mainly, but decent.’ It is understood that junior employees do not socialize with ‘the dips’. Turner is described to his face as a ‘Bevin boy’, a sneering reference to the wartime government programme (initiated by Ernest Bevin) which conscripted young men to work in the coalmines. In a diplomatic service which had previously been the exclusive preserve of Oxbridge graduates, ex-guards officers and former pupils of the major public schools, the phrase became slang for entrants who came in between 1945–51, while Bevin was foreign secretary and the post-war Labour administration was trying to widen access to government service.
The novel takes the form of a series of antagonistic encounters between Turner and various embassy denizens. Despite the seriousness of the situation, many are uncooperative. Almost all of them try to make it clear to him in subtle ways that he is not welcome and does not belong. The missing man, Harting, is discovered to have had access to some of the embassy’s most sensitive secrets, but was never vetted. With a refugee background and an ‘accent … neither wholly English nor wholly German’, he didn’t fit into any of the usual social categories, and accordingly was kept at arm’s length by his colleagues. As the embassy’s head of security, Rawley Bradfield, remarks sourly, ‘he wasn’t quite dinner-party material.’
Both Turner and Harting contain aspects of their creator. In a short text that appears on the back flap of the first American edition, le Carré makes this explicit:
For two and a half years in the early sixties, I served in the British embassy in Bonn … Like Leo Harting … I held the rank of Second Secretary and worked in the political section. Externally then, Leo and I have this much in common: we lived in the same house, worked in the same building, ate in the same canteen, drank at the same parties, and we felt perhaps, for different but related reasons, the same intense alienation from the environment of which we were a part. There the analogy ends. Perhaps I have more in common with Alan Turner than with Leo, and have set one part of my nature in pursuit of another.
Le Carré’s identification with the composite Turner–Harting outsider, expected to do the bidding of his superiors while never quite being accepted as ‘one of us’, produces some of his angriest condemnations of the complacency and arrogance of the British ruling class. Railing at de Lisle, a dandyish sports-car-driving ‘dip.’, Turner’s contempt is evident:
‘Christ forgive me: who do you represent out here? Yourselves or the poor bloody taxpayer? I’ll tell you who: the club. Your club. The bloody Foreign Office [ … ] You make me puke. All of you. The whole sodding circus.’
At stake in Harting’s apparent defection is not just the total collapse of Anglo-German relations, but the future of its position in Europe. The security chief Bradfield explains to Turner that he will be expected to tread very carefully in the murky world of Bonn politics:
‘[ … ] if it were possible to prove that by virtue of Harting’s activities in this Embassy, our inmost secrets had been betrayed to the Russians over many years – secrets which to a great extent we share with the Germans – then that shock [ … ] could sever the last thread by which our credit here hangs [ … ] There is something here that does not exist in England. It is called the anti-Soviet alliance. The Germans take it very seriously, and we deride it at our peril: it is still our ticket to Brussels. For twenty years or more, we have dressed ourselves in the shining armour of the defender. We may be bankrupt, we may beg for loans, currency and trade; we may occasionally … reinterpret … our NATO commitments; when the guns sound, we may even bury our heads under the blankets; our leaders may be as futile as theirs [ … ] For all that [ … ] it is the one great unspoken strength we have: that when the Barbarians come from the East, the Germans may count on our support.’
Entry into the European Economic Community (Bradfield’s ‘ticket to Brussels’) was a central British foreign policy goal in the late sixties. Britain had refused to sign the 1957 Treaty of Rome, as most of its trade was with its former colonies and membership of the EEC (the forerunner of today’s European Union) appeared to conflict with its role in the Commonwealth. As the EEC became more powerful, and the limitations of unilateral power were revealed in the aftermath of the Suez crisis, Britain reversed its position, only to have its application humiliatingly vetoed by France under Charles de Gaulle in 1963. De Gaulle, who saw the UK as an American proxy and wished to limit its influence in Europe, vetoed a second application in 1967. Britain was only to be granted membership in 1973, after de Gaulle had been replaced as president by Georges Pompidou.
Britain’s most powerful ally in the project to secure EEC membership was Germany, and the main plank of that alliance was Britain’s military commitment to NATO. In le Carré’s fictional world, where Harting may have passed secrets to the East, the effects of a loss of German trust would be devastating. In reality, the political ground was rapidly shifting under Britain’s feet, and there was a well-founded fear that the Germans would no longer support Britain against France in EEC negotiations. Since the mid 1950s, the FRG’s foreign policy had been governed by the so-called Hallstein doctrine, which stated that it would not establish or maintain diplomatic relations with any state that recognised the GDR. Yet, as early as 1955, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had visited Moscow and elsewhere the doctrine was only patchily applied: while the FRG had severed ties with Yugoslavia in 1957, when the GDR opened an embassy in Cairo in the same year, it did not withdraw its ambassador. By the mid sixties it was understood in West German policy circles that there would be advantages to normalizing relations with the East. This position of rapprochement was known as the Neue Ostpolitik (‘New Eastern policy’) and came to fruition in 1972 under the chancellorship of Willy Brandt, when the two Germanies signed the so-called Basic Treaty, recognising each other for the first time. Britain feared that as West German ties with the Eastern bloc strengthened, its commitment to its anti-Soviet ally would fade. French diplomats, keen to prevent British entry into the EEC, were working hard to undermine UK–German relations. German leftists resented the presence of British military bases on their soil, particularly given the British government’s support for the Vietnam war. It seemed to many people in the Foreign Office that Britain was increasingly isolated.
A Small Town in Germany is remarkably faithful to this precise historical context, introducing only one fictional element, what le Carré calls ‘an amorphous movement of popular resentments, popular protest and occasional violence’ led by a demagogic politician named Karfeld. The ‘Movement’ seems to fuse elements of the APO and right-wing populist nationalism, though le Carré insists that ‘the policies are immaterial’. Grumbling British diplomats get stuck in a traffic jam behind a Movement protest: ‘The West has deceived us; Germans can look East Without shame.’ ‘End the Coca-Cola culture now!’ To them, the protestors are ‘scum’, the long-haired students in the crowd just ‘Beatles’. They liken it (topically, for a book published only a few months after they happened) to the violent Vietnam protests in London’s Grosvenor square in March 1968. ‘They ought to bring in the National Service’, says one, blithely ignoring Germany’s past experience of militarizing its population. ‘That would sort them out.’
Karfeld himself is a protean figure. One British diplomat characterises him as ‘The German Poujade’, a reference to a French stationer who led a small business-owners’ anti-tax movement in the 1950’s. He is ‘isolationist, chauvinist, pacifist, revanchist. And he wants a trade alliance with
Russia. He’s progressive, which appeals to the German old; he’s reactionary, which appeals to the German young.’ He has welded together the Movement from a band of ‘cranks’ and ‘gypsies’. Capable of appealing to socialist students and nationalist housewives alike, his rootless politics appear to herald something new and disturbing for Europe. The British diplomat de Lisle cynically looks on it as the dawn of a post-democratic age:
‘Both we and the Germans have been through democracy and no one’s given us credit for it. Like shaving. No one thanks you for shaving, no one thanks you for democracy. Now we’ve come out the other side. Democracy was only possible under a class system [ … ] it was an indulgence granted by the privileged. We haven’t time for it anymore: a flash of light between feudalism and automation [ … ] Government by silence, that’s the slogan. Government by alienation. I don’t need to tell you about that; it’s a very British product.’
This is le Carré at his most acidic and satirical, yet there is an element of prescience to de Lisle’s speech. Since the end of the cold war, the fantasy of an ‘automated’ post-ideological politics – a politics of efficient management, pragmatic and unbeholden to theory – has become dominant in both Britain and Germany, where figures like Tony Blair and Angela Merkel have associated themselves with the notion of a ‘third way’, beyond the old polarities. Back in 1968 the ideological and geographical division of Europe seemed both sclerotically fixed and dangerously fluid; post cold-war politics might have taken any number of shapes, including Fascism. Turner’s investigation into Harting’s disappearance has the power to shape the future.
In history-haunted Germany, the question of the future is inevitably bound up with that of the past: what is to be remembered, and what can be forgotten? It is not a question that can be answered definitively. It must be posed again and again: it is in the work of posing the question that it is answered. As Turner digs into the archives of the Embassy, trying to understand what Harting intends to do with the strange collection of files he has absconded with, he encounters the possibility that his search may be endless:
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