Passenger to Frankfurt

Passenger to Frankfurt (original title Passenger to Frankfurt ) is a spy thriller by Agatha Christie , which appeared in Great Britain and the USA in 1970. A German translation was first published in 2008.

The main characters in the novel are Sir Stafford Nye, a nobleman in the United Kingdom's diplomatic service, and a mysterious woman Sir Stafford meets in Frankfurt during a stopover on his flight from Malaysia to London. Later in London, Nye looks for the woman and finally makes contact with her. This initiates him into a circle of influential people who are looking for an organization that is said to be the cause of youth unrest, anarchy, arms trade and drug trafficking worldwide. Together with the woman, who turns out to be Countess Zerkowski and works as a spy for the British secret service, Nye travels through Europe and South America in search of further information. There they track down a global neo-Nazi organization that wants to take over the world under the leadership of a new Aryan superman. Sir Stafford, Countess Zerkowski and their colleagues manage to uncover the conspiracy and eliminate some of the main characters. A scientist is motivated to revive a (dubious) medical project for the pacification of humanity.

action

The diplomat Sir Stafford Nye has to make an unscheduled stopover in Frankfurt on the flight from Malaysia to London due to bad weather . There he meets a mysterious woman who asks him a favor in order to come to London unrecognized: he should give her his passport, plane ticket and coat and let her pretend to stun him. Sir Stafford agrees, and the plan succeeds: Sir Stafford hears from an acquaintance in London, Horsham from the British Security Service, that the woman has managed to enter Great Britain with his papers. Sir Stafford is later given his passport back.

Sir Stafford wants to find out more about this woman and places an encrypted search advertisement in the newspaper, which he signs with "Passenger to Frankfurt". She answers by first announcing a meeting point on a London bridge, where she slips him a ticket for an opera performance of Siegfried by Richard Wagner . The woman does not appear until the second half of the performance, disappears again and leaves Sir Stafford a program booklet, where she has noted the notes of the Siegfried motif of the opera.

While visiting his great-aunt Matilda, Sir Stafford learns that there is supposed to be a worldwide conspiracy that uses a melody from the opera Siegfried as a symbol of identification. Matilda is friends with some high-ranking military and scientists and is therefore an important source of information and advisor to Sir Stafford.

Sir Stafford meets the mysterious woman from the airport under the name Countess Renata Zerkowski at an embassy reception given by the American Ambassador Cortmann and his wife Milly Jean. After the reception, Countess Zerkowski offers Sir Stafford to drive him home. In fact, their driver takes Sir Stafford to a secret meeting at the home of the financier Robinson, where Sir Stafford meets Colonel Pikeaway, the politician Lord Altamount, Sir James Kleek and Horsham, a narrow circle of British intelligence, politicians and financiers. They ask Sir Stafford to help the woman they call Mary Ann in their circle. Mary Ann is active in the secret service and is also the niece of Lord Altamount and members of the German nobility. Sir Stafford and Mary Ann are supposed to go to Germany first to clear up the background of a worldwide conspiracy. Sir Stafford does not get any further details from Mary Ann at first.

The background to the secret service work is a conspiracy by neo-Nazis: The worldwide tendencies towards drug use, anarchy and student unrest are in reality fueled by a secret ring of influential people from politics and business. This ring has a fascist background and wants to bring National Socialists to power worldwide. A young blond man with a swastika tattoo on his foot, the “young Siegfried”, is pushed forward as a leading figure who is supposed to impress the young in particular. This young man is supposed to be a son of Adolf Hitler, who survived World War II, escaped to Argentina and got married there. Mary Ann had managed to gather evidence that young Siegfried was an impostor. When she asked Sir Stafford's help in Frankfurt, the neo-Nazis were on her trail, so she feared that she would not be able to smuggle the evidence into England unscathed.

The first goal of the fascist secret ring is to create anarchy worldwide. An important figure in this context is the rich and powerful industrialist Charlotte von Waldsausen, who runs a secret fascist headquarters in Bavaria. Sir Stafford and Mary Ann therefore initially travel to Bavaria on the pretext of attending music events. There you make contact with Charlotte von Waldsausen and pretend to be followers of her fascist ideology. There you can also see an appearance by Franz Joseph, the alleged son of Hitler, as he speaks rousingly in front of a large crowd. Sir Stafford and Mary Ann then move to America for their research.

As Sir Stafford, Mary Ann, and the rest of the British intelligentsia research the fascist movement, the situation is worsening worldwide. In many countries, especially in South America, anarchist movements have taken power. There is anarchy in France. Conferences in Paris and London speculate about the background. The global movement of weapons is also of concern. The use of chemical or nuclear weapons against insurgents is considered and rejected again. It becomes clear that an organization called "The Ring" is behind the uprisings, with leading figures from finance, armaments, drug trafficking and science. Charlotte von Waldsausen is in charge of the finances, a woman under the code name Juanita is another managerial figure with unknown tasks.

Sir Stafford's great-aunt, Lady Matilda, is an old schoolmate of Countess Charlotte von Waldsausen. She also travels to Bavaria to seek contact with her old and now wealthy schoolmate as an allegedly impoverished English noblewoman. During her visit she finds out that Charlotte wants to lead the fascist movement.

When Matilda returns to England, she is visited by Admiral Blunt. He finds out that Matilda also counts the scientist Robert Shoreham among her many contacts. Some time ago he worked on a project B or Benvo, which is supposed to make people “benevolent”.

The group around Lord Altamount set off for the residence of Professor Shoreham, who has withdrawn from science since a stroke and destroyed all information about Project B. As it turns out, Project Benvo is the invention of a drug that makes people permanently goodwill and altruistic. This looks like a possible solution to the global problems of youth unrest, violence and anarchy. Shoreham successfully developed the drug, but eventually destroyed all records because the drug's effect on people would be permanent. While Shoreham and the group are still discussing the project, it turns out that one of the group is a traitor: James Kleek tries to kill Lord Altamount with poison when he manages to get Shoreham to resume the Benvo project. The poison attack fails, but at that moment the Shoreham nurse enters and attempts to shoot Altamount. She will be disarmed. As it turns out, the nurse is Milly Jean, the wife of the American Ambassador Cortmann, in disguise. She is really "Juanita", a key figure in the fascist "ring". Although the traitors have been exposed, it is too late for Lord Altamount: he dies from the shock of this violent attack.

The incident motivates Shoreham to resume his research to help humanity and to honor the memory of Lord Altamount.

In the epilogue the reader learns of Sir Stafford's imminent marriage to Mary Ann. Sir Stafford's five year old niece Sybil will be the flower girl. The alleged son of Hitler has since been brought to England and will play as an organist in the church during their wedding ceremony. Sir Stafford discovers that he has forgotten a best man. He asks his niece Sybil to bring the plush panda that Sir Stafford bought as a souvenir for her at Frankfurt Airport as a replacement - the panda was part of the story from the start.

shape

A special feature of Passenger to Frankfurt are the female characters on the side of good and bad, who, alongside Stafford Nye, are the protagonists of the novel. You can find the character of Mary Ann, who plays a major role in the plot as a spy, and Charlotte von Waldsausen, who embodies the leading figure of the fascist conspiracy. Lady Matilda is another important character in the novel who serves as an advisor and source of information for other characters. With these characters, Christie goes beyond the usual use of female characters who otherwise act as romantic distractions or sexual partners for the male protagonists. Sir Stafford Nye, the main male character, remains in the second row in his work for the secret service.

With her theme of a fascist movement and neo-Nazism, Christie takes up common themes and fears of her time.

Christie calls her novel an "extravaganza" in the first edition because the story is essentially fantastic. However, Christie says in the foreword to her novel that many of the events described in Europe and South America are either already happening or are at least emerging.

Position in literary history

Passenger to Frankfurt is one of the few spy thrillers that Agatha Christie wrote when she was otherwise extremely successful with detective novels. In addition to the late work Passenger to Frankfurt, there are some earlier spy novels by Christie that she wrote in the 1920s, such as B. The Secret Adversary (1922, Ger. A dangerous enemy ), a novel with the characters Tommy and Tuppence who work for the British secret service. Further examples of thrillers from the pen of Christie are N or M (1941) and Destination Unknown (1954). Passenger to Frankfurt stands out from the earlier thrillers, however, because the locations of the novel leave idyllic England and are spread around the world.

Passenger to Frankfurt follows the tradition of spy thrillers like that of John le Carré , a genre that is traditionally dominated by male authors and male protagonists. Along with Helen MacInnes and Ann Bridge, Agatha Christie is one of the few authors of the “golden age of the detective novel” between the world wars who also wrote espionage thrillers.

reception

The book was a financial success, with a circulation of 58,000 copies, the largest first edition of an Agatha Christie novel.

The reception after the publication of Passenger to Frankfurt was mixed. Francis Iles in The Guardian notes that the book reflects Christie's gloomy outlook on current political events. Iles also criticizes two scenes where the main character Stafford Nye in an unlikely last minute avoids being run over by a car. Maurice Richardson says in The Observer that the book is neither one of her best nor her worst novels. In Great Britain the press generally dismissed Passenger to Frankfurt rather indifferently than embarrassingly, while in the USA Passenger to Frankfurt became a bestseller.

Later reviews were even more negative: for example, the literary scholar Robert Barnard writes about Passenger to Frankfurt that the novel slips from the improbable to the unimaginable and ultimately ends in incomprehensible chaos. Barnard also doubts Christie has a clear understanding of the subjects she is writing about (youth movement in the 1960s, drugs, a new Aryan superman). Overall, Barnard is of the opinion that Christie's attempts at the thriller genre usually ended with disastrous results.

A literary analysis by Phyllis Lassner from 2017, on the other hand, highlights the peculiarities of the novel, because Christie is one of the few female authors who also tries her hand at the espionage thriller genre and introduces heroines who act as spies and not just as decorations for them the mostly male protagonists serve.

Passenger to Frankfurt is one of the few novels by Agatha Christie that was not made into a film. The German first edition was first published in 2008 by Hachette in a translation by Leonie Bubenheim as part of a collection of Agatha Christie novels.

literature

Text output

• Agatha Christie: Passenger to Frankfurt . Collins Crime Club, London 1970, hardcover, 256 pages.
• Agatha Christie: Passenger to Frankfurt . Dodd Mead and Company, New York 1970, hardcover, 272 pages.
• Agatha Christie: Passenger to Frankfurt . Translated by Leonie Bubenheim. Hachette, 2008. (German first edition, it was published as part of a collective edition, with a volume with an additional magazine being published every two weeks. The entire edition comprises 84 titles, Passenger to Frankfurt was published as volume 4.)
• Agatha Christie: Passenger to Frankfurt . New translation by Julian Haefs. Atlantic, Hamburg 2017.

Secondary literature

• Robert Barnard: A Talent to Deceive - an appreciation of Agatha Christie . Collins, London 1980, ISBN 0-00-216190-7 .
• Phyllis Lassner: Double Trouble: Helen MacInnes's and Agatha Christie's Speculative Spy Thrillers . In: Clare Hanson, Susan Watkins (eds.): The History of British Women's Writing, 1945-1975 , Volume 9. Macmillan Publishers, London 2017, ISBN 978-1137477361 , pp. 227-240.

Web links

• Passenger to Frankfurt on the official Agatha Christie website

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Phyllis Lassner: Double Trouble: Helen MacInnes's and Agatha Christie's Speculative Spy Thrillers . In: Clare Hanson, Susan Watkins (eds.): The History of British Women's Writing, 1945-1975 , Volume 9. Macmillan Publishers, London 2017, ISBN 978-1137477361 , pp. 234-235.
2. ↑ Phyllis Lassner: Double Trouble: Helen MacInnes's and Agatha Christie's Speculative Spy Thrillers . In: Clare Hanson, Susan Watkins (Eds.): The History of British Women's Writing, 1945-1975 , Volume 9. Macmillan Publishers, London 2017, ISBN 978-1137477361 , p. 228.
3. ↑ Agatha Christie: Foreword . In: Agatha Christie: Passenger to Frankfurt . Translated by Julian Haefs. Atlantik, Hamburg 2017, p. 15.
4. ^ Robert Barnard: A Talent to Deceive - an appreciation of Agatha Christie . Collins, London 1980, ISBN 0-00-216190-7 , p. 19.
5. ↑ Phyllis Lassner: Double Trouble: Helen MacInnes's and Agatha Christie's Speculative Spy Thrillers . In: Clare Hanson, Susan Watkins (eds.): The History of British Women's Writing, 1945-1975 , Volume 9. Macmillan Publishers, London 2017, ISBN 978-1137477361 , p. 234.
6. ↑ Phyllis Lassner: Double Trouble: Helen MacInnes's and Agatha Christie's Speculative Spy Thrillers . In: Clare Hanson, Susan Watkins (Eds.): The History of British Women's Writing, 1945-1975 , Volume 9. Macmillan Publishers, London 2017, ISBN 978-1137477361 , p. 227.
7. ↑ Passenger to Frankfurt on agathachristie.com, last accessed on 23 August 2019.
8. ^ Francis Iles: Review . In: The Guardian , October 15, 1970, p. 8.
9. ^ Maurice Richardson: Review . In: The Observer , September 13, 1970, p. 28.
10. ^ Robert Barnard: A Talent to Deceive - an appreciation of Agatha Christie . Collins, London 1980, ISBN 0-00-216190-7 , p. 19.
11. ^ Robert Barnard: A Talent to Deceive - an appreciation of Agatha Christie . Collins, London 1980, ISBN 0-00-216190-7 , pp. 19, 193.
12. ↑ Phyllis Lassner: Double Trouble: Helen MacInnes's and Agatha Christie's Speculative Spy Thrillers . In: Clare Hanson, Susan Watkins (eds.): The History of British Women's Writing, 1945-1975 , Volume 9. Macmillan Publishers, London 2017, ISBN 978-1137477361 , pp. 227-240.
13. ↑ Passenger to Frankfurt on agathachristie.com, last accessed on 23 August 2019.
14. ^ Agatha Christie Collection - Hachette Collection ( February 26, 2015 memento in the Internet Archive ), accessed February 25, 2015