Book Review: Stasi 77 by David Young

I am not always in the mood for a Cold War thriller and even less to feel excited about it. This kind of genre was so much used and abused - for more or less ´soft diplomacy´ reasons - that I can´t refrain from trying to consider the hidden, non-literary reasons that prompted a certain representation or plot. Therefore, the pleasure of reading the thriller is diminished and I feel cheated. Especially the pattern using good vs. evil confrontations bores me to tears. Don´t try to sell me a certain version of an oversimplified reality because it doesn´t work.

Stasi 77 by David Young offers a complex story, with a taste of authenticity as based on the infinite intricacies of historical layers of German history. A young police officer in the communist Berlin, Katrin Müller, is requested to investigate some strange - apparently ritualistic - crimes occuring in the People´s Republic, but soon her inquiries are halted by direct order of the representatives of the communist German secret police, Stasi. What dark histories do they want to cover, at any price? And what is the history behind the crimes? What actually connects the victims?

In parallel with the searches for finding the criminal(s), a diary-like testimony about a massacre of a group of prisoners in the last days of the war, at a barn close to the locations of the crimes, put things into a larger perspective. Because some of the perpetrators are top Stasi officials enjoying the immunity of their position and the power of doing what they consider necessary to clean their traces. Traces that lead to a common denominator of an overwhelming amount of citizens of both Germanies: the Nazi past.

The novel uses smartly the historical contexts for creating a story which makes sense and is captivating. As Stasi 77 is part of a series centered on the cases handled by Karin Müller, I´ve felt more than once that I miss some information from previous installments, which I usually don´t appreciate but in this case it just made me curious to delve a bit more into the other adventures from the Cold. 

Rating: 4 stars