Back in August 2011, the Hamburg based Simon Urban released Plan D,
his first novel. The reaction of the German Feuilleton – something like
a Grand Central Committee of Literary Taste, housing inside the press –
was so unanimously, screamingly positive, that you might suspect its
unanimity had been argued through in advance; that tactics were at play.
The novel is itself set in 2011, in an East Germany to which
reunification has never happened. In Urban’s alternative future the
collapse of the iron curtain was followed, in 1992 already, by Die Wiederbelebung – The
Resucitation – of the old East Germany, which has slugged on,
stubbornly & monotonously socialist, with as much restriction on
emigration – i.e. almost total – as there was in the GDR up til 1989.
This author combines this gimmick with a whodunnit, airport thriller
genre – the victim found hanging right at the start; both shoes tied
together being the boasty stamp of a Stasi ritual revenge murder – to
milk every West German sterotype about the old East for all it is worth.
And these stereotype’s are worth more than a bit. Hard on the heels of
the Holocaust industry, an ‘Ost’-algia industry – complete with torchlit
tours through the old Stasi interrogation cells – has followed. I had
to wait til February of this year for the paperback to gorge myself on
those sterotypes; and now I’m glad I waited.