A Small Town in Germany

A Small Town in Germany is a 1968 espionage novel by British author John le Carré. It is set in Bonn, the "small town" of the title, against a background of concern that former Nazis were returning to positions of power in West Germany. It is notable for being le Carré's first novel not to feature his recurring protagonist George Smiley or "The Circus," le Carré's fictionalised version of MI6. Setting Bonn, the eponymous small town, was chosen as West Germany's capital after World War II mainly due to the advocacy of Konrad Adenauer, Chancellor of West Germany after World War II. Plot summary The novel is set in the late 1960s, in Bonn, the capital of West Germany. Great Britain is hoping to gain support from the West German government in a bid to enter the European common market. From London, Alan Turner, an official from the British Foreign Office, arrives to investigate the disappearance of Leo Harting, a minor British Embassy officer; moreover, secret files have disappeared with him. The embassy's head of Chancery, Rawley Bradfield, is hostile to Turner's investigation. Despite that, he is dinner party host to Turner and Ludwig Siebkron, head of the German Interior Ministry; the latter is close to industrialist Klaus Karfeld, who is successfully building a new nationalist political movement which is anti-British and anti-Western European, and which seeks to turn West Germany away from Western Europe and bring it closer to Communist Eastern Europe. Great Britain's diplomatic mission perceives growing support for Karfeld's movement as a threat to obtaining support for Britain's entry into the Common Market. Initially, Turner suspects Harting is a spy, probably working for a Communist government. He comes to discover that Harting had once been a war crime investigator in Germany and he has been secretly using Chancery resources to continue investigating Karfeld's career as the war-time administrator of a Nazi laboratory that poisoned 31 half-Jews, crimes for which Karfeld had been investigated but for which he escaped responsibility. Harting is, in fact, hiding from Siebkron, who is aware of Karfeld's crimes and seeks to protect him from being exposed. To Turner's chagrin, Bradfield is unsympathetic to Harting's circumstances and uninterested in protecting him because he considers him a criminal and a political embarrassment.