The firewall
The fire wall (original title: Brandvägg ) is the eighth part of the twelve-part Kurt Wallander series by the Swedish writer Henning Mankell . It was published in Swedish in 1998 and in German in 2001. The original title Brandvägg describes the computer security system Firewall in Swedish . This level of meaning is lost in the German translation.
content
The plot of the very complex crime novel begins in October 1997; the story arc spans two weeks. Kurt Wallander comes back to the Ystad police headquarters after a seminar . There he learns that on Saturday two young women hit a taxi driver with a hammer and then stabbed him. The man suffered such severe injuries that he succumbed to his injuries a few days later. During the police interrogation, the two women stated that they had committed the murder for lack of money - a motive that Wallander doubts from the start. In fact, it will later turn out that one of the two, Sonja Hökberg, sought revenge on the man on behalf of her previously unpunished rape by his son.
Parallel to the "taxi case" and apparently without any connection to this process, the criminal police had to deal with a body found. Single computer specialist Tynnes Falk was found lifeless in front of an ATM in the city early on Monday morning . An act of violence can already be ruled out soon, especially as the coroner assume a natural death Falk. Wallander doubts, however, when both the family doctor and the divorced wife of the deceased object that the late forties had been in extremely robust health until the end.
Sonja Hökberg has now managed to escape from police custody . Not only did the young woman shortly afterwards killed and completely charred in a substation is found, the police are puzzling, but also the fact that someone stole the remains of Tynnes Falk from the morgue of Forensic Medicine and instead a power relay from that same substation on the stretcher. For Wallander it is clear that both cases are related to each other. Only a few days later the corpse, which for some inexplicable reason had two fingers cut off, was found again.
Eventually Wallander found a powerful computer in Tynnes Falk's second home. After a few more incidents that were initially inexplicable - including an unsuccessful murder attempt on Wallander - a young gray-hat hacker succeeded in breaking into the highly encrypted computer system. Although Wallander's approach is problematic , especially since the young man has a relevant criminal record for a recent hacker attack on the servers of the United States Department of Defense , this alone shows that the previous murders (including Sonja Hökberg's ex-boyfriend has since been killed) only served the purpose of covering up a much more violent and global crime in the making.
In fact, Falk - in complicity with a stranger known as "C" - prepared black hat hacking programs solely for the purpose of collapsing the entire financial world in the western world. In his thirty years as head of the World Bank branch in Angola , "C", who is actually called Carter, had to see how the World Bank and the IMF were not giving aid to the former colonial countries, but rather asserting the interests of western industrial and financial capital . Falk and Carter had met by chance in Africa years earlier and quickly got together - one an excellent but solitary computer specialist, the other a former unscrupulous US marine in the Vietnam War and now a banker who is well known. In the meantime, the two accomplices had already pushed the implementation of Carter's idea so far that they would be able to launch a global digital attack on the IT infrastructures of the international banking and financial systems on October 20, 1997 , which would inevitably result in a massive collapse in the global economy . The unexpected death of Falk and the beginning of the police investigation endangered these plans, which is why Carter tries to save the project first through an Asian helper, then by means of a woman who has been assigned to Wallander, and finally even personally through a very brutal approach. With the help of the teenage hacker, Kurt Wallander, who during the investigation also found himself exposed to a complaint for alleged abuse of one of the two accused girls and the intrigues of an ambitious colleague, finally found out how this cyberattack was to be triggered - again at the risk of his life can he avert it at the last moment.
At the end of the novel, Linda Wallander tells her father that she had successfully applied to the police college to become a police officer.
Scoring and analysis
With the novel, which he originally conceived as the end of the whole series, Mankell takes up very big topics. In fact, several basic considerations form the background for the plot of the thriller: On the one hand, the question asked earlier, why the increasing prosperity of Swedish society (and not only this) is changing the nature of people in such a detrimental way. And Mankell points out in this context that the possibilities of the exchange of information, that the greatest possible freedom of movement, as enjoyed by people in western democracies like Sweden, do not necessarily have a beneficial effect on the morals of the members of this society. Last but not least, Mankell wants to draw attention to the fact that the digital networking of the globe and the rapid exchange of information that it enables contain not only advantages, but also great dangers. "Whoever masters electronic communication has the real power," he lets Falk and Carter recognize. And further: “When Falk spoke of the wars of the future, Carter listened with great tension. What the tanks had meant in the First World War and the atomic bomb in the Second World War, that the new information technology would mean for the conflicts that were imminent in the not too distant future ... Electronic impulses would paralyze the stock markets and telecommunications systems of an enemy. "
Again Mankell draws the figure of Wallander, but also that of the other protagonists , to a high degree in a subtle and precise manner. Of course, Wallander's essence and psyche are not always comprehensible to reading here either. But Mankell has already recognized this himself when he added the short story collection “ Wallander's First Case ” to the eighth volume in the series , in order to better shed light on the early development of his hero.
The motives of the others acting in the firewall are also not always visible. In particular, the question arises as to why Carter's criticism of the questionable World Bank system does not trigger considerations as to how real aid could be brought to the developing countries. Instead, the man and his accomplice Falk make it a point to bring about a global economic collapse, which must lead the already battered countries of the so-called Third World into an even worse catastrophe.
Thematically and in terms of structure, “The Fire Wall” has some similarities with the third Kurt Wallander novel “ The White Lioness ”: In both episodes a small group of conspirators, whose control center is in Africa, plans an attack, of which it is a destabilizing one Hope for an effect and which can only be prevented at the last moment. And in both cases Wallander's life is in acute danger and in the end shoots an exponent of the conspiratorial group.
success
The book was number 1 on the Spiegel bestseller list for 2 weeks in 2001 .
Film adaptations
In 2005, the last Wallander novel was filmed as a TV crime thriller in Sweden , with actor Rolf Lassgård again taking on the leading role, and Lisa Siwe directed. The German version was dubbed by ZDF in 2006 and broadcast in January 2007. The DVD version was released in April 2007.
In 2008 the BBC shot a remake of the novel. The film was shown on German television at the end of May 2009; The actors were Kenneth Branagh as Kurt Wallander, Sarah Smart as Anne-Britt Höglund, Sadie Shimmin as Lisa Holgersson, Tom Beard as Svedberg, Tom Hiddleston as Martinsson, Richard McCabe as Nyberg and Jeany Spark as Linda Wallander.
radio play
In 2001 Die Brandmauer was published as a German-language radio play by Hörverlag Munich.
occupation
- Christoph Schobesberger as the narrator
- Heinz Kloss as Kurt Wallander
- Franziska Hayner as Ann-Britt Höglund
- Thomas B. Hoffmann as Martinsson
- Till Hagen as Sven Nyberg
- Brunhilde Hansen as Lisa Holgersson
- Andreas Bisowski as Robert Modin
- Simone Grunert as Marianne Falk
- Gesa Badenhorst as Elvira Lindfeldt
- Daniela Schulz as Eva Persson
- Thomas Schleissing-Niggemann as Erik Hökberg
- Dietrich Burmeister as Hans Alfredsson
- Andreas Neumann as Tynnes Falk
and: Kathrin Freyburg , Ud Joffé , Isabell Pohl, André Sander and Oliver Wullenweber
Reviews
- “A great Mankell - one of the best.” - Michael Kluger, Frankfurter Neue Presse
- "But Mankell still offers a lot of tension and atmosphere - not to mention the gloomy topicality of the plot." - Der Spiegel
- “Applause for an extraordinary novel” (rating: 84%) - Krimi-Couch.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ Henning Mankell: The firewall . Axel Springer Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-942656-15-3 , p. 257