Conspiracies, conflicts collide in Cold War Berlin

By Shaun O'Connell, 9/14/2003

Secret Father, By James Carroll, Houghton Mifflin, 352 pp., $25

Berlin. Spring, 1961. Ashes still hung in the air, ashes Berliners could smell when it rained, ashes that stirred memories of wartime air raids and raised fears of nuclear annihilation. Berlin, the Cold War ``flash point,'' was then divided into East and West, but not yet separated by the Wall that soon would run 104 miles through the city, damming the flood of refugees (some 5,000 a week) behind the Iron Curtain for 28 years.

It was a city of surreptitious spies, open sex, common betrayal, and rare courage. Berliners, says a character in James Carroll's splendid new novel, ``Secret Father,'' lived in a world of ``moral anarchy, which came with life lived on the edge of an abyss.''

Carroll returns to fiction after a nine-year break, during which he wrote significant books on war and religion. ``An American Requiem,'' a memoir that won the National Book Award, explores the painful divisions both in his own and in the larger American family during Vietnam. ``Constantine's Sword'' is a best-selling, critically praised study of the Catholic Church's history of embedded anti-Semitism. Carroll also writes Boston Globe columns that fuse his passionate political and moral convictions.

But fiction, as Carroll once told Publishers Weekly, has long been his ``imaginative North Star.'' ``Secret Father,'' his 10th novel, shows he is on course, his hand steady, deftly guiding readers through the shadows of Cold War conspiracies and toward enlightenment.

This novel recalls the postwar tensions in Graham Greene's ``The Third Man'' and the personal-political divisions in John le Carre's ``The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.'' That is, ``Secret Father'' is a subtle, dramatically staged political thriller. Set in a plausible historical context, this is a novel driven by Carroll's vision of the world's looming threats of destruction set against faint promises of reconciliation.

Three American high school students decide to take the military train from Wiesbaden to Berlin to witness the May Day parade of Soviet and East German military might. Their trip sets in motion a series of events that permanently alters their lives, strains their families, and causes a face-down between Soviet and American forces.

Michael, lame from polio, is the son of an American banker; Kit, daughter of an Army sergeant, aspires to be a writer; Ulrich, stepson of an Army general, wants to rediscover the Berlin he knew as a child when his German mother survived by picking up the city's postwar rubble. Ulrich, inspired by Herbert Marcuse, seeks the new face of Communism and leads his naive friends into this anti-Oz, where ``nothing is what it seems to be,'' Michael tells Kit.

But Kit, who has read William Faulkner, already knows ``the hateful duplicity of all that we experience. '' These innocents abroad rashly risk their lives for independence and adventure. They get more than they bargained for but emerge with a richer sense of political and personal complexities.

In wicked, wunderbar Berlin, they are taken in hand by a con man who turns out to work for Stasi, the East German secret police. They are quickly drawn into a tangle of intrigue that links them to the Nazi-led murders of Communists between Hitler's suicide on May 1, 1945, and the Russian invasion of Berlin the next day. Other plot lines tie them to Cold War espionage intrigues. As Ulrich's mother, Charlotte, puts it, `` Tied in this knot were threads of the secret of secrets, twisted into the rope of the noose around the neck of her only son, and therefore around the neck of mine.''

Carroll also explores the tensions between fathers and sons, amplified and dramatized by international political conflicts, and he articulates both perspectives. The assured, overly protective view of elders who helped win World War II is illustrated through the voice of Paul Montgomery, Michael's worried father. Michael epitomizes the callow and bold views of the postwar youth who questioned the ways of their fathers. These alternating narrations embody the separations of 1961, ``as if the Manichean division of the world into East and West, bad and good, gave shape also to our most intimate relationships,'' writes Paul.

Finally, this counterpoint of conflicting voices coheres in forgiving retrospection, since this tale is told three decades later, after the Berlin Wall is penetrated and tensions, political and personal, have begun to heal. This collaborative narrative recounts and redeems the real and metaphorical divisions, ideological and generational, symbolized by the Wall.

The East-West Berlin border was sealed on Aug. 13, 1961, but the events of early May, writes Michael, were ``my personal Berlin Wall, which, brick by brick, I have been dismantling here.''

Carroll's most revealing theme is his suggestion that the Wall was necessary to preserve the peace. If ``Berlin was the pin of the grenade that Khrushchev was waving in Kennedy's face,'' the Wall defused tensions. The Wall stopped the refugee drain from the East and allowed the West to use it as a symbol of Communist repression. Divisions between the ``greatest generation'' and their baby-boomer children were similarly deep, as the novel's familial conflicts illustrate. Still, three decades later, the participants reunite to tear down walls by telling this tale as a legacy to the next generation of united Berliners.

In this, his best novel, James Carroll dramatizes the dreadful days of Cold War tensions and shows how real love and lasting reconciliation rose from the ashes of Berlin.

Shaun O'Connell, who teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, is the author of books on literary Boston and New York City.