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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.