Leaving Berlin was published by Atria Books in 2015. The novel is set in East Berlin in 1949 — the early days of the German Democratic Republic, when idealistic left-wing intellectuals from around the world gathered in the Soviet zone, believing they were building a new society free from fascism and capitalism.
Alex Meier is an American writer (loosely inspired by figures like Lion Feuchtwanger and Thomas Mann’s circle) who was blacklisted during the Red Scare and deported to East Germany. The CIA offers him a deal: spy for them in East Berlin, and they will allow him to return to America. Alex accepts — but his assignment is complicated by genuine sympathy for the intellectual community he’s infiltrating, by a former lover who is now committed to the Communist project, and by the growing awareness that both sides are using him.
Kanon’s Berlin is rendered with extraordinary atmospheric precision: the rubble still uncleared, the paranoia of a new police state being assembled, the surveillance that turns every friendship into a potential trap, and the particular tragedy of intellectuals who chose ideology and discovered too late that the ideology had no use for intellectuals except as instruments and examples.
The novel’s deepest question is whether any political commitment justifies espionage — whether the intellectual who spies (for either side) betrays something more fundamental than national loyalty: the commitment to truth that is supposed to define the life of the mind.
Collecting Leaving Berlin
First edition (Atria Books, New York, 2015): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $10–$25
- Signed first edition: $25–$60