Zuflucht DDR. Spione und andere Übersiedler. By Bernd Stöver. Munich: Beck. 2009. Historische Bibliothek der Gerda Henkel Stiftung. Pp. 383. Cloth €24.90. ISBN 978-3-4065-9100-6.

摘要

Feeling suffocated by the circumstances that were dominating his life, Hampelnresolved to flee across the Iron Curtain into the other part of Germany. A knap-nsack on his back, he set out on his dangerous journey and managed to cross thenheavily fortified border near Herleshausen-Wartha in spring 1962. Hampel wasnnow—in East Germany. The opening of Michael Kumpfmüller’snovel ThenAdventures of a Bed Salesman, first published in German as Hampels Fluchten in 2000, played on the then little-known phenomenon ofWest German migrationnto the GDR. For a western readership that had long taken for granted that thensucking sound had come from the other direction, Hampel’s compass wasnobviously malfunctioning, politically as well as geographically.