War in the mirror

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War in the Mirror (English original title: The Looking Glass War ) is the fourth novel by John le Carré , published in 1965 . The German translation by Manfred Conta also appeared in 1965.

Krieg im Spiegel is a spy novel about an attempt by a British secret service to smuggle an agent into the GDR .

The novel consists of the three parts "Taylor's mission", "Avery's mission" and "Leiser's mission"

content

Taylor's mission: The British agent Taylor is waiting at a Northern European airfield - later it will turn out that it is Finland - for the landing of a charter flight from Düsseldorf , which is several hours late due to bad weather. The pilot is supposed to give him a film that he shot while flying over the GDR. Taylor gets nervous, drinks in the bar, finally the plane lands, the captain hands over the film, but at the same time informs him that further overflights are no longer possible. Then Taylor is hit by a car on the way to his hotel and dies.

Avery's assignment: John Avery works for 'The Department', a British secret service led by Leclerc. The organization is a relic of the Second World War , attaches great importance to its independence and cultivates jealous dealings with other espionage services, such as the 'Rondell' (' The Circus '), which is run by a certain Control and to which George Smiley belongs. With the exception of Avery, all employees of the organization are old hands, live from their heroic deeds in the war and suffer from the relative inaction in their current function. Avery quickly noted "that they ascribed themselves legendary abilities ... (and) that for their members the organization was almost religious in character. Like monks to their orders, they gave their association a mystical life of its own that had nothing to do with the sluggish one , sin the crowd of men she was made up of. Their belief in the organization burned in its own secluded chapel. They called it patriotism. " Taylor was also part of the organization, and the captain's film was supposed to confirm photos of a GDR refugee that he had taken of Russian Sandal missiles , such as those stationed in Cuba , allegedly in a hall in Kalkstadt, a - fictitious - small town stored south of Rostock. "Whatever was in the hall, they could allow the Americans to chase within hours from West Germany." Despite all the oddities about the acquisition and handover of the photos, the organization decides to act and smuggle an agent into the GDR, but pass the whole thing off as a training exercise. Leclerc sees this as an opportunity for the organization to finally come back to a “mission” and to get rid of the reputation of “contract builders” at the Ministry of Defense in Whitehall . He forms a 'special task force' and has a certain Leiser tracked down who was during the war - twenty years ago! - worked successfully for the organization as an employee in Holland and speaks perfect German. Meanwhile, Avery is commissioned to fly to Finland, "get Taylor's stuff" and, if possible, locate the film. He is issued as Taylor's half-brother, receives appropriate papers and is received by the local consul in Helsinki. It quickly becomes apparent that outrageous mistakes were made during the preparations - for example with the identity of Taylor - which are now causing Avery to get into trouble with the Finnish authorities. He makes desperate attempts to save the situation and finally comes back to London with plucked feathers but no film, where he also finds an angry wife who was questioned by the police about Taylor's corpse at the airport with false papers.

Leiser's mission: Haldane, a member of the organization, visits Fred Leiser, who runs a car repair shop, and convinces him to take on the task with a mixture of financial incentives and allusions to his skills as a spy in the war. They rent a house in Oxford to prepare Leiser for the task and send Haldane and Avery as instructors and command officers. For several weeks, Leiser is trained in the use of firearms and knives, but above all intensively familiarized with radio equipment and Morse code . Finally he gets a new identity - "Your name is Fred Hartbeck. You are an unmarried mechanic from Magdeburg and you have a job offer for the state- owned shipyard in Rostock ." - and the group travels to Northern Germany to prepare the final steps. Quieter crossed the border near Lübeck , but stabbed a GDR guard in the process . Then he steals a motorcycle and drives to Kalkstadt, where he meets a girl whom he carefully questions about the activities of the Russian military . At the agreed time, Leiser transmits his meaningless results and makes a crucial technical mistake. The Russian military locates his position and circles it, while Smiley ordered the whole troop back from northern Germany at the same time and made it clear that they would give up on Leiser and possibly deny it.

Motifs

Le Carré describes here even more pointedly and sharply than in his great hit novel The Spy Who Came Out of the Cold, the almost ridiculous situation of a spy group that draws on the merits of the past and can only inadequately cope with the demands of modern times.

Le Carré disenchants the secret service activity: it is constantly about employment contracts, allowances, civil servant status and expense reports, about jealousies and conflicts over competence between the separately acting services paired with personal animosities and social arrogance. The past, the Second World War , is a historical projection screen and hovers over all activities of the employees as an ideal space for operations; clear insights into the course of things alternate with defeatism and bureaucracy. "The world has changed. Now the game is played by different rules. Back then we were the big makers - rubber dinghy on a moonless night, a hijacked enemy plane, radio and all that. ... But now everything is different. It's a different war, a different kind of struggle. ... We are totally dependent ... the contract farmers. " Misinterpretations of alleged facts and clues, which are maintained out of the self-interest of the respective service, have catastrophic consequences.

The smart, elegant and cosmopolitan type of James Bond agent is also completely demystified by Le Carré: agents who try desperately to burn papers in the washbasin of their hotel room and thereby clog the drain or go to great lengths with hopelessly outdated radios work here only to be discovered because of a single technical error.

The organization's staff constantly emphasize the clandestine nature of their work, telling their wives or secretaries everything at every opportunity - just as the women in this novel are the only down-to-earth people, and Avery's wife Sarah, despite all the desperation at its emotional immobility, is part of the story sums up the term 'loyalty without faith'.

Krieg im Spiegel addresses the issue of the relationship between the individual and the organization more clearly than Le Carré's earlier novels: all employees of the group suffer from - more or less hidden under cynicism - dysfunctional relationships; for all of them the group is a substitute family and real home. "Joining the secret service becomes ... an escape from failed personal relationships. In the male world of the secret service, the agents become so absorbed that relationships with other people, including their own wives, become secondary." As a metaphor for the disturbed relationships, bad temper and emotional coldness, the whole novel is pervaded by persistent bad weather: it rains constantly, the wind blows, it is cool and inhospitable, the sun does not even shine once.

" The Looking Glass War unfolds a topography of the secret service world that separates an inside and an outside: the inside world, the matted sphere of administration, personal competition and animosity, male friendships and public school networks draw their justification from reference an outside, an enemy country and threats that nobody really wants to know whether they are real or a simple misinterpretation of unfortunate coincidences. "

"No Cold War text has unfolded the phantasm of the opaque, dangerous and mysterious enemy country as darkly as Le Carré's The Looking Glass War of 1965."

George Smiley

George Smiley , still a central figure in the first two novels Le Carré , only plays a minor role as a member of the Rondell , as he did in The Spy Who Came From the Cold . Leclerc says of him: "He was once one of their best people. He's in a way typical of the better sort in the Rondell ... He has a remorse ... They say he drinks a lot. He's the department for Northern Europe. " He is later introduced as "a short, absent-minded man with clumsy, plump fingers. He had a somber, evasive manner, as if he were uncomfortable."

expenditure

  • 1965: German first edition, bound. German by Manfred von Conta. Zsolnay, Vienna, Hamburg
  • 1967: paperback; Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg
  • 1983: paperback; Bastei-Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach
  • 1989: paperback; Heyne, Munich ISBN 3-453-03260-8 .
  • 1995: bound; Zsolnay, Vienna ISBN 3-552-04711-5 .
  • 1996: paperback; dtv, Munich ISBN 3-423-12123-8 .
  • 2004: bound (as part of the complete edition); List, Munich ISBN 3-471-78099-8 .
  • 2005: paperback; List, Munich ISBN 3-548-60596-6 .
  • Licensed editions for: Deutscher Bücherbund, Bertelsmann Book Club, European Book and Phono Club

filming

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ All quotations from: War in the mirror. German by Manfred Conta. Zsolnay, Vienna, Hamburg 1965
  2. ^ Jost Hindersmann: John Le Carré. The spy turned writer. Nordpark, Wuppertal 2002, p. 23
  3. ↑ Eva Horn: The secret war. Treason, espionage and modern fiction. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 347
  4. ↑ Eva Horn: The secret war . P. 343