Katherine Reay’s The Berlin Letters follows Luisa, a young CIA cryptographer, in 1989, when communist regimes are already crumbling across Europe. Breaking the hidden code contained in some letters her grandfather left behind, she discovers that her journalist father, Haris – who had been presumed dead – is actually alive and being held in a Stasi prison in Berlin, East Germany.
A story of codes and a family divided
Escaping from communist Germany to the United States with her grandparents as a young child, Luisa grew up with fun riddles, puzzles, logic challenges, and clue trails invented by her grandfather. She eventually ended up in the CIA, but never worked in the field. Her new discovery urges her to leave the safety of her office and travel to West Berlin to rescue her father by crossing the border into East Berlin days before the Wall’s fall.
The scenes alternate between Luisa’s present and, through the letters, her family’s earlier years in Berlin. The Berlin Wall functions as a divisive symbol, showing how geopolitics and ideology defined choices and changed lives, breaking up families as a result. However, just like Toni Morrison in her books, Katherine Reay memorializes not only how people suffered but also how they survived, presenting their lives with authentic historical details, language, and character development.
Choices
Unless one lived through the Cold War in East Europe, it’s virtually impossible to understand its human side and the choices one was forced to make. For example, Luisa’s mother throwing her baby through the barbed wire hoping for a better life for her, while ruining hers and her husband’s as a consequence. It’s impossible to imagine how a 17-year-old aspiring writer can be coerced by the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, into becoming an informer, as depicted in another story, I must betray you, written by Ruta Sepetys. Unless one lived there in 1988-89, it’s impossible to foresee that in 1989 the fall of the Soviet Union was impending. Fact: I had co-workers in the medical school who joined the communist party that year hoping either for a better life or “trying to reform the system from the inside.”
Most Cold War fiction examines everyday life under these authoritarian systems and the moral costs of pushing back, from the outside, with hindsight. Living under oppression, whether one is aware and admits or not, is glamorous only in Hollywood movies where the ethics of resistance with its clandestine communication (think “Samizdat“) is equally glorified.
Language
In the book, Haris’s letters present a credible personal development as he shifts, slowly, over decades, from a loyal party member, parroting the party line voluntarily in the party’s main media outlet, into a stubborn resistance. The coded language in the letters also ring familiar, like a metaphor for how families and friends communicate under regimes built on misinformation and surveillance. Defined as the language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the real meaning, double-speak in Orwell’s 1984 was influenced by the propaganda techniques of totalitarian regimes during World War II. Polished to perfection, language used to distort reality for political purposes taught generations how to read between the lines without a PhD in linguistics.
The Berlin Wall
Berlin, divided into four parts, during the Cold War (1945-1990)
A Cold War classic that changed the direction of spy fiction, John Le Carré’s The spy who came in from the cold, is known to be his intense personal reaction to seeing the Berlin Wall being built in 1961. Seeing East Berlin’s streets suddenly cut off by a wall, with its “death strip,” was shocking for me in the mid-70s. Although, by that time, I had been familiar with what we called “no man’s land” between the borders of East and West Europe, a sand‑ or gravel‑covered zone monitored by guard towers 24/7.
The Berlin Wall acted as the Iron Curtain within the divided city, designed to expose and stop escapees. For East Germans, West Berlin, nested in East Germany, was a much desired route to flee communism. “Defecting,” i.e., abandoning allegiance to a communist state (such as the Soviet Union, East Germany, or Cuba) to seek refuge in a non-communist, usually Western, nation, was almost always dangerous. Border guards had shoot‑to‑kill orders. Basically, one didn’t have a chance.
Trust and hope
In the novel, Luisa eventually finds supporters and allies, which tips the paranoia versus trust scale towards the latter, offering a poetic counterpoint to the signature cynicism of most Cold War novels. The same applies to the despair versus personal hope scale, it takes longer for her father to believe that the wall did come down on the evening of November 9, as he lived the East European reality.
With its multiple layers, the text is a great choice for book clubs. For example, using East Germany’s Stasi‑run system as an example to discuss what it means to live in a society where ordinary people have little or no control over their own lives, or how assumed identities erode autonomy as in Le Carré’s novel. The Berlin Letters echoes this as Luisa learns how official narratives have obscured her family’s truth. What I would be most interested in is what readers think about how the specific historical moment (Berlin, November 1989) could change resistance and hope for later generations.
Related reading
- Le Carré, J. (1964). The spy who came in from the cold. ([1st American ed.]). Coward-McCann.
- Kundera, M. (1999). The unbearable lightness of being (New ed.). Faber and Faber.
- Sepetys, R. (2022). I must betray you. Philomel Books.
Shorts
- minutes, 50. (2017). The Fall of the Berlin Wall : The End of the Cold War and the Collapse of the Communist Regime. (1st ed.). Lemaitre Publishing. – A brief, 44-page history of the Berlin Wall that goes from bisecting Berlin and Germany to the fall of the wall, German reunification, and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
- Rice, L., & San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. (1987). Leland Rice : illusions & allusions, photographs of the Berlin wall : 14 August-1 November 1987, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The Museum. – Exhibition catalogue, 36 pages.