Brandenburg Gate [Paperback]

Henry Porter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 10, 2007

In this brilliant, multilayered, espionage thriller, the 2005 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award winner Henry Porter captures the tense final moments before the fall of the Berlin Wall. September 1989. The Communist government in East Germany is on the brink of collapse. Even the Stasi, one of the most formidable intelligence agencies of all time, can’t stop the rebellion that ends in the fall of the Berlin Wall. Dr. Rudi Rosenharte, formerly a Stasi foreign agent, is sent to Trieste to rendezvous with his old lover and agent, Annalise Schering, who the Stasi believe Annalise has vital intelligence. The problem: Rudi knows she’s dead. He saw her lying in her own bloodied bathwater, and then kept her suicide a secret. As collateral for this mission, the Stasi have imprisoned Rosenharte's family. But the Stasi is not the only intelligence agency using Rosenharte. Soon the British and Americans encircle him, forcing him to choose between abandoning his beloved brother to a torturous death and returning to East Germany as a double agent. As the political pressures against the East German government rise, Rudi must face his own crises.Brandenburg Gateshows Henry Porter at the top of his game.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Set in East Germany during the bleak, waning days of 1989, this stand-alone thriller from British author Porter (A Spy's Life) combines impeccable research with compelling characters caught up in the broad sweep of fascinating historical events. The Stasi want art scholar Dr. Rudi Rosenharte to take part in a dangerous mission involving a former lover Rudi knows is dead, but who the Stasi thinks is not only alive but also harboring vital state secrets. Rudi has little choice, since the Stasi are holding Rudi's brother, Konrad, and his family hostage. Rudi, an ex-Stasi agent himself, clandestinely enlists the aid of the British SIS, the CIA and even the KGB as he pits all of these agencies against one another in an effort to smuggle Konrad and family across the border to the safety of the West. Readers will know that in a few weeks the Wall will be torn down, but at the time, as Porter makes clear, this was not a foregone conclusion, and death and disaster, as in Tiananmen Square, was a real possibility. It's easy to see why this riveting read won the CWA's Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Strangers meet under the guise of old lovers in the streets of Trieste, while enemies watch from the shadows, and a mysterious Pole utters a garbled name as he plunges into the harbor, dead. Ah, the paranoiac embrace of espionage! Porter pushes all the right buttons in this solid spy novel set in the months before German reunification. Art historian and aging roue Rudi Rosenharte becomes a pawn in an unpredictable endgame between the increasingly desperate Stasi, who hold his twin brother hostage, and Western intelligence agencies seeking to uncover Islamic terrorist cells harbored by East Germany. Hindsight tells us that momentous changes are in the offing, but will the fall of the Wall save our hero, or crush him? Although a mite overstuffed, the novel's engrossing plot, convincing tradecraft, and vivid depiction of a ruthless totalitarian regime losing its stranglehold all place Porter (A Spy's Life, 2001) in company with Gerald Seymour, Robert Littell, and other top-notch writers who are proving that the golden age of spy fiction isn't over yet. David Wright
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (May 10, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802143148
• ISBN-13: 978-0802143143
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #513,399 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating historical thriller, June 15, 2006

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Brandenburg Gate (Hardcover)

Middle-aged Dr. Rudi Rosenharte is about to see his former life as a Stasi foreign agent turn his present life as a renowned art historian upside down. The scene is set in East Germany in September 1989. Rosenharte's passion at this stage is to set aside the decadent alcoholic lifestyle he's lived for many years in order to free his twin brother, Konrad, from a GDR prison. Konrad has been mistreated by the Stasi and is in need of dental, physical and mental treatment for his declining health. Rosenharte's energy is to cooperate with the Stasi to ensure that Konrad lives and is reunited with his wife Else and two young boys.

Rosenharte has become an authority in the art world and travels frequently between cities to lecture. During trips to Trieste, he's become acquainted with a person of interest to the Stasi officials concerned with treason to the German Democratic Republic. Stasi officials use information in ruthless fashion in order to intimidate citizens to inform upon one another. Rudi's former life as a secret agent comes to bear when he comes face to face with a woman he believes to have died, a former love who possessed important information against enemies of East Germany.

Believing that his cooperation with the Stasi will free his brother, Rosenharte sets in motion a series of actions that conflict with his chief goal, that of freeing Konrad. He possesses the means to gain vital information not only for the Stasi but for American, British and Russian agents as well. The game plays out with his former lover, Annalise Schering, holding the key to intelligence the Stasi must have. Rosenharte has to abandon his former lover (or a reasonable facsimile of her) or become a turncoat agent and cooperate with foreign agencies. He cannot jeopardize Konrad's state in the process.

Henry Porter has written this spy novel in the fashion of a John le Carre thriller and brings the reader along for a first-rate ride back in time. The GDR experiences the tumult of a people long oppressed by a police state, harassed with unemployment and suppression of intellectual freedoms. The wall between East and West Germany is a scene of protests, both silent and proactive. Porter writes the times with political accuracy and develops the characters with passion for their beliefs.

Stasi inquisitors are truly villainous. Western agents want information and are willing to cross barriers to obtain it. A surprising Russian presence solidifies the murky political waters at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Timing is crucial to Rosenharte's success and coincides with the barriers broken between East and West in Berlin. Characters are fictitious with the exception of the Russian agent Vladimir, later known to the world as Vladimir Putin.

At times, multiple plot layers make for tedious sleuth work on the part of the reader. Difficult Germanic names and associations with Nazi history take concentration to understand. When the tangles unfurl into an understandable reality at the finale, one applauds the author for a novel well done. Though fictionalized, one can feel the climate of the historical date when Berlin became a free city. BRANDENBURG GATE is a testament to those who sought freedom from oppression. Espionage in the finest tradition.

--- Reviewed by Judy Gigstad

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Complex thriller unrolls in the last days of the GDR, May 15, 2007

By 

Blue in Washington "Barry Ballow" (Washington, DC United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Brandenburg Gate (Paperback)

Excellent spy potboiler set in the waning days of European communism. Author Henry Porter interweaves the East German secret police (STASI), British intelligence, the CIA and the KGB into this story of a world-weary East German academic who is blackmailed into serving the GDR in a dubious espionage plot. That first caper, lasting no more than the first several pages of this lengthy book, opens the door to what is the vast rat's nest of the main story line here. The best part of this novel, in my opinion, is its detailed description of the gradual public uprising against the GDR regime as the Soviet Block begins to visibly disintegrate. The author conveys a highly credible understanding of how the citizens of East Germany finally reached the end of their patience with the desperate living that was inflicted on them by their government through the STASI.
As good as this book is, it could have used some adept editing in places to tighten it up some. For example, there are a number of oft-repeated lines coming from the antagonist about his imprisoned brother that become tiresome by the middle of the book.
Despite a few flaws, this is an excellent read that reaches its best and most credible moments at the end of the book.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars mixes the Cold War and the war on terrorism [plus the WWW!], May 23, 2006

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Brandenburg Gate (Hardcover)

Porter makes an interesting linkage between the closing of the Cold War and the current war on terrorism. En route, he also supplies us with an indepth view of what life was like in East Germany, under the scrutiny of the Stasi.

The book is fairly mild, as far as its depictions of mayhem. Also piquant is how the Soviet Union and the KGB come off as relatively benign, compared to the Stasi. Vladimir Putin makes a fictional cameo appearance as a KGB representative in East Germany in 1989, and is portrayed as a decent bloke.

Porter also reminds us of how innovative the Web really is. Something too easily taken for granted now. But in 1989, it was cutting edge stuff, that really did presage a cultural revolution. He found a neat way to tie the political events of 1989 with the murmurings coming out of CERN about a global hyperlinked network.