Absolute friends

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Absolute Freunde (English original title: Absolute Friends ) is a spy novel by the British writer John le Carré from 2003. The German translation by Sabine Roth was published the following year. The focus of the novel is on two lifelong friends, a naive Briton and a radical German, who operated at the interface between Eastern and Western intelligence services during the Cold War and experienced the aftermath of the war on terror after the terrorist attacks on September 11th .

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There is one constant constant in Edward “Ted” Mundy's changeable curriculum vitae: the lifelong friendship with a German named Sascha. Ted Sascha grew up in Pakistan as the son of an old style British officer and a half-orphan after his mother's death . He met Sascha in the student movement in Berlin in the 1960s . The lanky, well-behaved Briton and the small, fiery German contrast both outwardly and in their personality. Yet they feel attracted to each other from the first moment. Sascha, who can cast a spell over people with his eloquence and revolutionary convictions, is one of the ringleaders of the student unrest. During a demonstration, Ted stands in front of his friend, gets into police custody with severe wounds and comes into contact for the first time with Nicholas Amory from the British embassy , who is actually an agent of the British secret service .

Years later, Ted and Sascha meet again in East Germany. Ted, a failed writer and a poorly gifted spouse, is now earning a living as a cultural agent for the British Council . Sascha, who went to the GDR as a staunch communist, has regretted this decision since he fell into the clutches of the state security and was forced to spy. He offers himself to the British secret service as a double agent . Ted plays the liaison man. In addition to Amory, he soon comes into contact with Jay O'Rourke from the American CIA . With the turnaround and the end of the East-West conflict, Sasha's espionage activities became superfluous. Ted opened a language school in Heidelberg , failed with this venture and, meanwhile married to a Turkish ex-prostitute for the second time, hired himself as a tour guide at Linderhof Palace .

Sascha steps into Ted's life again and is inflamed by a new idealism. An ominous businessman by the name of Dimitri wants to put large sums of his fortune, which he has acquired in a less legal way, into the plan of a "counter-university", a training facility for young people that does not subordinate their idealistic educational goals to the influence of the economy and is specifically directed against oppression and exploitation . Ted also offers Dimitri half a million from the wrist for the reopening of his language school. To the skeptical British, this all sounds too good to be true. When he examines Dimitri's alleged property near Heidelberg, everything turns out to be a backdrop. However, weapons, bombs and other terrorist materials in numerous unopened boxes are real. Before Ted can figure it out, he witnesses Sascha being killed with numerous volleys of automatic rifles by an army of uniformed men, among whom he can make out Jay O'Rourke. When he tries to rush to the friend's aid, he too is shot.

The press later called the events the "Heidelberg Access". Why, by whom and on what legal basis took a back seat to the rampant fear of terrorism. In both Sasha's and Ted's past, details are quickly being unearthed that will turn them into dangerous assassins that only a heroic deployment of international security forces could have stopped. Above all, the staged action had the desired political effect: The protest against the Iraq war in Europe was contained. The British government stands loyally at the side of its American friends, and the federal government can no longer shut itself off from the “ coalition of the willing ” under American leadership.

background

At the center of his novel Absolute Friends , le Carré settled a naive young man who was drawn into revolutionary activities in Berlin in the 1960s and later caught up with his radical past in middle age by the appearance of a childhood friend with a terrorist background. He started from his own experiences in France in May 1968 . Many of the radical students at the time later led an adapted, middle-class existence. Because of his affinity to Germany and the particular radicalization of the protests there, including terrorist actions by the Red Army faction , le Carré set the plot in the Federal Republic. He justified in a letter: "I really want to give my large, English-speaking audience a sensitive understanding of Germany."

Le Carré gave his protagonist Ted Mundy elements of his own biography: like Mundy, le Carré was only raised by his father, like him he spent his youth in a boarding school, like Mundy he felt particularly attracted to German culture and how it became he got caught up in the business of espionage until he could barely distinguish his own identity from all the false identities as a spy. The last piece of the puzzle was a tall tourist guide whom le Carré got to know from Ludwig II on a tour of the “fairytale castle” Linderhof , and who tried to entertain his group of visitors with a repertoire of tired jokes. With his own past he slipped into the personality of this tour guide and had the character of his hero.

While working on his novel, the 2001 terrorist attacks occurred on September 11th . In an initial reaction, le Carré wanted to stop work because he found a terrorist thriller plot inappropriate against this background. But under the impression of the subsequent " War on Terror " by George W. Bush , he found a renewed justification for the novel. Le Carré's own attitude changed with American activity. If he had hesitantly agreed to the war in Afghanistan , the Iraq war and the Guantanamo prison camp made him bitter opponents of American foreign policy. Le Carré took part in peace marches and published a commentary in the Times in January 2003 under the title The United States of America has gone mad . Various reviewers have pointed out that in the novel Absolute Friends there is a sudden change in tone at chapter 11, in which Mundy becomes the direct mouthpiece of le Carrés, and which is temporally related to the invasion of Iraq. Le Carré also adapted the original plot in such a way that Ted and Sasha are denounced innocently as terrorists and shot down by American special forces.

The political scientist Hans-Peter Schwarz identifies in le Carré's late work an “age radicalism” and an increasing anti-Americanism : “His aversion to America is at best exceeded by his contempt for the British governments, which, as he sees it, take the whistle Washington's dance. ”In the novel Absolute Friends, not only British Prime Minister Tony Blair and former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder are pilloried because their states end up making pacts with the Americans. In general, Schwarz sees the author "after the Iraq war of 2003 in the hatred of the right-wing conservative George W. Bush, the CIA, the Pentagon and Tony Blair downright consumed".

reception

The critical reception of Absolute Freunde in the English-language press was directed more towards the person of the author le Carré and his anger at global political developments than towards the actual novel. Lev Grossmann, for example, judged in Time with a reference to George Orwell that the novel was "a work of fist-shaking Orwellian indignation". Daniel Johnson headlined in the Daily Telegraph : "John le Carré is Mister Furious now that Smiley's days are over". As Robert McCrum wrote in the Observer : "If he was cooking when he wrote The Eternal Gardener , he is now incandescent." However, many critics agreed with Stephen Amidon, who wrote in the Sunday Times that le Carré's anger was "too raw." In order to function as fiction, it is rhetorically more in line with a column by Harold Pinter than a novel by Graham Greene . ”In the Guardian , Steven Poole particularly criticized the implausible ending, which as a deus ex machina only serves the political To illustrate the author's theses.

American reviews came up against the supposed anti-Americanism in le Carré's novel. Geoffrey Wheatcroft took the appearance of the novel in the New York Times as the occasion for a general essay on anti-Americanism. Michiko Kakutani harshly condemned Absolute Freunde as "an awkward, intimidating, conspiracy-theoretical embassy novel that wants to make it unmistakably clear that American imperialism is a serious threat to the new world order." The book is said to be "grossly simplifying where his earlier novels are." were thought out, dogmatic, where these books were skeptical. ”Ironically, le Carré uses the same black and white painting as the Busch administration he criticized. The book, which had entered the New York Times bestseller lists as usual , only stayed there for a month.

The reception in the German-language feature sections was friendlier. Ruth Klüger, for example, judged in her review of an “amusing and stimulating entertainment novel” in Die Welt , the American objections were irrelevant for German readers, who could instead appreciate the setting better: “Le Carré's excellent knowledge of German culture and literature make the text special Whistle". During the time, Tobias Gohlis read “LeCarré at it's best, a great dream about Germany, black romance born of the longing of a rootless Brit”, Lorenz Jäger in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung “a furious, often extremely funny account of the war party of the previous one Year ”and“ a grandiose justification of old Europe ”. For Kolja Mensing in the daily newspaper was Absolute Friends but "rather a reasonably interesting chronology as a really exciting novel." Thomas Wörtche moved in Friday concludes, le Carré was "the most underrated of all the important writers of our time. Radical, vicious, analytical, funny, intelligent and beautiful long since meta-cynical. "

expenditure

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "I want terribly to bring a sensitive understanding of Germany to my large, anglophone audience." Quoted from: Adam Sisman: John le Carré. The biography. Bloomsbury, London 2015, ISBN 978-1-4088-4944-6 , Chapter 24: "Mr Angry" .
  2. ↑ a b c Adam Sisman: John le Carré. The biography. Bloomsbury, London 2015, ISBN 978-1-4088-4944-6 , Chapter 24: "Mr Angry" .
  3. ^ John le Carré: Opinion: The United States of America has gone mad . In: The Times of January 15, 2003 ( full text from Common Dreams).
  4. ↑ Hans-Peter Schwarz : Fantastic Reality. The 20th century as reflected in the political thriller . DVA, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 3-421-05875-X , pp. 175-176.
  5. ↑ "a work of fist-shaking, Orwellian outrage." Quotation from: Lev Grossmann: The Spy In Winter . In: Time from January 3, 2004.
  6. ↑ "John le Carré is Mr Angry now that Smiley's Day has gone." Quoted from: Adam Sisman: John le Carré. The biography. Bloomsbury, London 2015, ISBN 978-1-4088-4944-6 , Chapter 24: "Mr Angry" .
  7. ^ "If he was seething when he wrote The Constant Gardener, he is now incandescent." Quotation from: Robert McCrum: A master's voice . In: The Observer of December 7, 2003.
  8. ↑ “le Carré's anger comes across as a bit too raw to work as fiction, its rhetoric more in line with a Harold Pinter column than a Graham Greene novel” Quotation from: Stephen Amidon: Dispatches from an angry old man . In: The Sunday Times, December 14, 2003.
  9. ↑ Steven Poole: Spies and lies . In: The Guardian, December 20, 2003.
  10. ^ Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Ideas & Trends: Dickens to Le Carré; Smiley's (Anti-American) People . In: The New York Times, January 11, 2004.
  11. ↑ "a clumsy, hectoring, conspiracy-minded message-novel meant to drive home the argument that American imperialism poses a grave danger to the new world order", "It is simplistic where his earlier novels were sophisticated; dogmatic where those books were skeptical. ”Quotes from: Michiko Kakutani  : Book of the Times: Adding Reality's Worries to a Thriller . In: The New York Times, January 7, 2004.
  12. ↑ Ruth Klüger : What use is conscience . In: Die Welt from March 13, 2004.
  13. ↑ Tobias Gohlis : Black Romanticism, wg. Longing . In: Die Zeit of March 4, 2004.
  14. ↑ Lorenz Jäger : Mata Hari smirks . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of March 12, 2004.
  15. ^ Kolja Mensing: The new Le Carré . In: The daily newspaper of March 20, 2004.
  16. ↑ Thomas Wörtche : Wörtches Crime Watch No. 83 . In: The Friday of April 2nd, 2004.