World Literature Today
Von
Gregory H. Wolf
Many
Detective Stories begin with a murder, and "Die letzte
Vorstellung" does not depart from this topos. Unlike others,
however, Ulrich Woelk's latest novel couples the search for truth
with perspectives and interpretations of history: namely, East and
West German versions that are not only divergent but reveal
competing truths as well. Shortly after an unidentified man was
found brutally murdered in Schleswig-Holstein near the Danish
border, two detectives arrive on the scene: Anton Glauberg, a
forty-year-old local detective from the village, and Paula
Reinhardt, a thirty-year-old rising star from the Bundeskriminalamt
(BKA), who is attractive, career-oriented, and brash.
The
similarities between these two main characters end with their
professions, and their differences are accentuated during the course
of solving the crime. Glauberg is a West German and Reinhardt an
East German, though she was just in her late teens when the Berlin
Wall fell. Glauberg, a product of the 1970s and the failure of the
generation of '68 to enact social change, seems cynical and
questions if evil, injustice, and violence can ever be eradicated
from society. Paula, whose father supposedly fled to West Germany
when she was a baby, spent her formative years in a dictatorship,
appears idealistic, self-assured in her beliefs, and morally
determined to confront corruption, murder, and deception. Their
conflicting personalities and social backgrounds, coupled with the
inherent power differences in their positions, heighten tensions
between the two.
Woelk
demonstrates that he is not just a master of narration, juggling
several episodes simultaneously yet never losing or boring the
reader; he is also well versed in (East-West)German history and
knows exactly where possible tensions, even a dozen years after
unification, may lie. The man found murdered is discovered to be a
former member of RAF, the terrorist group dedicated to overthrowing
West Germany that was also supported by East Germany. While
searching for leads, both Glauberg and Reinhardt undergo a journey,
though quite unbeknownst to them at the time, of self-reflection and
self-discovery of who they are and what they believe in, as Glauberg
comments, "Gegen die Vergangenheit hilft keine Revolution."
"Die letzte Vorstellung" in fact, is an attempt to come to
terms with the differences between East-West German history, and the
more each character reveals about his or her past, the more they and
the reader realize how similar, conflated, and inseparable these
histories are.
When
the two detectives arrive in Berlin to interview people who knew the
murder victim, Glauberg, without Reinhardt, visits an old friend,
Seewald, with whom he had lived in a Wohngemeinschaft (commune) in
the1970s. This leads to the novel's first twist: Glauberg reveals
that the murder victim was his half-brother who also lived with them
in the commune, as did many other lower-echelon members and
sympathizers of the RAF. Glauberg had never told anyone about his
half-brother, not even his estranged wife, and keeps this new
information to himself, but Reinhardt, who specializes in archival
material of the Stasi, already knew this and many other details
about Glauberg's life. Together, Glauberg and Reinhardt speak with
IM (inoffizieller Mitarbeiter) and Stasi officers and investigate
other unsolved crimes supposedly committed by RAF members, but they
find no leads. Almost all the characters withhold information and
rewrite their own history to suppress the past and truth. As
disinterested as Glauberg may appear, the reader recognizes during
the course of the novel how clever and insightful he actually is. He
begins to detect incongruities in witnesses' stories and realizes
that Reinhardt and the BKA withhold valuable information from him
and that he, in fact, was an initial suspect.
"Die
letzte Vorstellung" attracts and keeps the reader's attention
not just because of the "whodunit" storyline or the many
twists and subplots, which are too numerous to list, but because it
reveals the complexity and relativity of truth: characters have
divergent perceptions and interpretations of the truth and what it
means for them. In this regard, Woelk succinctly captures one of the
major stumbling blocks affecting social and cultural integration of
East and West Germans more than ten years after political
unification. Woelk continues to tease the reader until the very end,
which offers one of the more unexpected and exciting endings that
this reader has encountered in some time. At the burial of his
half-brother, Glauberg and Reinhardt reveal their "real"
histories, who they are, and what they have done. Readers will not
only be surprised by the ending, but will thoroughly enjoy every
page of Woelk's highly recommended novel.