THE STANDARDIZATION OF DEMORALIZATION PROCEDURES

In 1989, an older Stasi operative in East Berlin ponders the disappearance of a young woman and recalls a torture victim in this fine debut.

Bernd Zeiger boosted his early career with the East German secret service in the 1960s by writing a manual on how to demoralize those suspected of veering from the party line. Now he is 60 and has been shunted aside to minor surveillance duties. His days usually proceed according to a regular schedule and predictable meals (the German word Zeiger can refer to the hand of a clock). But during much of the novel’s single day he’s preoccupied with Lara, a young waitress at his local cafe who vanished a month ago, and a physicist named Johannes Held, whom Stasi operatives tortured years earlier after he returned from a fellowship to Arizona. Hofmann, who was born in the U.S. but grew up in Germany, writes in assured prose of carefully chosen details that mark the best period fiction. It can be a while before it’s clear that this is not a Cold War spy thriller. As Zeiger’s day proceeds, interrupted by long flashbacks, Hofmann conjures up dark comedy in an understated, quirky satire of the Stasi’s bureaucracy and cruelty and the paranoia that permeated East Germany. It’s more smiles than George Smileys, but the author also finds tension in mysteries other than a lady vanishing: Why do boys go missing in the Arizona desert? Were the Americans working on teleportation? Why is his blind, womanizing neighbor visiting the same Meissen shop as Zeiger when he buys a porcelain dog for Lara? At the end of this day in 1989, Zeiger and his ilk are left to contemplate the biggest disappearance ever in a city with a wall built to prevent departures.

A remarkable first novel that reads like the work of a seasoned pro.