100 Books Like Stasiland

Often overlooked by today's readers, this fine novel of 1940 Berlin by an author who never left Nazi Germany offers a realistic and touching portrayal of ordinary working citizens. A married couple whose life is upended by the loss of a soldier son encounters persistent Nazi propaganda discrediting their sacrifice. Inspired by actual historical figures, the protagonists courageously turn to modest acts of resistance, drawing the unrelenting focus of a Gestapo inspector determined to solve the case to further his career. Fallada's masterful storytelling and unforgettable characters will put you inside a righteous struggle to resist the oppressive state. This is a classic from an author who lived the place and time, and it shouldn't be missed. 

Though not thought of as an espionage writer, McEwan uncorks a fine, suspenseful novel based on two true stories of Cold War intrigue. Set in mid-1950s Berlin, it speaks, as the title implies, of a loss of innocence, both professionally and personally, of a British engineer caught up in a dangerous web of uncertain loyalties and unexpected violence. (Why are the best espionage novels set in WWII or the Cold War? Most spying is done now through satellites and electronic eavesdropping. It’s hard to write a good book with a satellite as the main character.)

This is a memoir written by a young man who grew up in East Germany. I picked this one up for research but found myself completely enthralled by the story. His attention to detail is excellent. If you ever want to know what it was like to grow up in East Germany on a day-to-day basis, this is a great source of information. When the author finally goes to West Berlin for the first time in his life, it made me cry. 

This is a police procedural set in the 1970s in East Berlin. The author successfully evokes an atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion, as the main character, a female detective, must try to solve the murder of a young girl who seems to have been killed fleeing from West to East Germany (not the usual direction). The feeling that everyone is watching, everyone is a potential informer, everything is potentially corrupt, corresponds to all the research I did on East Germany. Plus, it’s a great story that’s hard to put down.

The author of this non-fiction book interviews eight people who were born and raised in East Germany’s totalitarian regime and have had to adjust to a new life after the Wall comes down. I liked this book because it gave me a different perspective on East Germany and how people felt about the regime. Turns out it was a little more complicated than simply thinking everything was bad. And once the Wall came down, many things became difficult for easterners, particularly the higher cost of living and the scorn they experienced from westerners. 

Memoirs from WWII abound, but this one is a stand-out. In 2015, I attended a talk by Marthe Cohn, a Holocaust survivor and French spy. A diminutive woman in her mid-90s, Marthe perched on a high chair, her husband by her side, and recounted her experiences of living in German-occupied France and serving as a spy for the French Army. 

I was totally captivated by her personality, and later, I was thrilled to find her memoir as engaging as she had been in person. The story of her war years is both exciting and authentic. A pleasure to read due to the masterful writing of Cohn’s co-author, a renowned biographer, this should be on the reading list of anyone interested in Jewish heroes during World War II.

Published in 1976, this book has aged well. We are still spying on Russia, and Russia is still spying on us. Spy stories are often travelogues. This book starts in New York and Washington but then goes to France, not far from Monaco and Nice. That interested me since I've been to all of those places. The plot involves the theft of sensitive documents engineered by a Russian spy who is the agent in place of the title. People get killed, but most of the violence is off-screen. One of the interesting facets of the book is descriptions of tradecraft--showing how spies preserve their covers and prevent their enemies from unmasking them. There is also a detailed description of planning and executing a caper designed to fool the enemy.  

Dusko Popov may or may not have been a model for James Bond, but he did know Ian Fleming. He was also one of the most effective double agents in World War II. His greatest accomplishment was helping to fool the Germans about the location of the D-Day landing. Popov had conclusive evidence that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor months before it happened. He told FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, because the US didn't have an effective spy system yet, but Hoover wasn’t interested. After the war ended, Popov searched for his best friend who had been captured by the Germans, with surprising results. Good for history junkies like me, it contains facts not present in other histories of the War.

This is a good book to read if you want to know what it felt like to be in France or other European countries in 1938 before the start of World War II when my father was saying how bad Hitler was but people didn’t believe it. Bad things were already happening and much worse things were to come. In some places you couldn't trust anybody because everybody could be a spy. People who lived in France and didn't want to leave had to face the fact that if they didn't they might lose their freedom and their lives. Franco was leading a revolution to take over Spain, and he had help from the Axis powers. This is an excellent spy novel with an accurate historical setting.

In Berlin Stories, the book that inspired the movie Cabaret, comprising two linked novellas by Christopher Isherwood loosely based on his first-hand experience as an expat in Berlin in the Twenties, the British novelist evokes the anything-goes atmosphere that reigned in the capital of the Weimar Republic immediately prior to the Nazi take-over. That free-wheeling, raucous spirit survived the Third Reich and still thrives in Berlin today.