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Brophy looking to the west with The Berlin Crossing

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JUST outside Berlin, in a newly unified Germany, 30-year-old Michael Ritter is struggling with political and personal upheaval. His devotion to the now discredited East Germany makes Michael an exile in his own country. Tainted by his membership of the Socialist Party that ruled the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), Michael’s past costs him his job as an English teacher and prompts the break-up of his marriage. As he tends to his dying mother, Petra, she reveals Michael’s father is not the man he supposed and urges him to search for his roots.
The journey leads him to a buried manuscript that opens, “I was born in Galway, a small town on the west coast of Ireland, on November 19th 1942…”
The Berlin Crossing is a Cold War novel about losing faith and finding redemption that takes the reader through Germany, London and Galway, where its author, Kevin Brophy, now lives. Mainly set against a backdrop of espionage intrigue and Stasi brutality, it shifts between the 1960s and 1990s, between a young couple whose lives are devastated by the Berlin Wall and a man unable to cope with its collapse.
The book was inspired by personal stories. In reunited Germany, Brophy taught English to adults and was fascinated by his students from the old East Germany. Some felt uncomfortable in their new country and, sensing his curiosity, shared their history with him.
“I’ve been teaching English, mainly to Germans, on and off since the early or mid-’90s,” Kevin says. “The kind of teaching I do involves getting them to talk – you keep your mouth shut. Everybody’s most popular subject is themselves. But the East Germans were always a bit reluctant to talk about their past – where they came out of, what Mum and Dad did – in groups. But over a period, a few of them trusted me enough to tell me they had been members of the [Socialist] Party.”
Like Michael in The Berlin Crossing, these students had adjusted to the routines and realities of life in a police state. “They didn’t have anything bad to say about their life in the GDR,” Kevin explains. “They lived ordinary lives. They were married, they had jobs, careers. I had the feeling that if we so-called normal people over here had lived in East Germany, I think we would’ve become part of the system. It didn’t mean you were trying to destroy anybody or take them off to Stasi prison.”
In a plot that alternates between a moving love story and Michael’s attempts to construct his family’s narrative, the novel explores questions of truth, forgiveness and sacrifice. When the action moves to Galway, in 1994, it’s a city in the grip of transition. “I didn’t care much for the place,” Michael Ritter observes. “It seemed…  in a mania, the town went on reproducing itself: the skyline was scarred with the steel of cranes, the air barked with the growl of diggers and drills. Housing estates were mushrooming like a virus.”
“It was before the Celtic Tiger that Michael came here looking for roots,” explains Kevin. “I guess Galway became like that. We were a part of all that wave of greed and grabbing. The whole place was covered in this green sheeting, hanging from the fronts of buildings, almost like a new plant life.”
Although the author was keen to portray the emerging Ireland, his main aim was to use the economic parallels between Galway and Berlin to emphasise Michael’s alienation. “I wanted to show the way that we were before the Celtic Tiger,” says Kevin. “It wasn’t just developers and builders; everybody was looking for a quick buck. I wanted to show it not because I had too much to say about Ireland but because this was the thing that wounded Michael Ritter about East Germany – the idealism that he shared in had been transformed into a grasping consumerism. I wanted to show that he saw the same thing in the Galway he came to visit.”
In a gripping sequence when Michael comes face to face with his lost family, he is met by a mixture of hospitality and suspicion. The warmth of the reuniting is soured by fears that Michael is intent on staking a claim on his inheritance. But as Michael recoils from the aggressive self-interest of Galway, the journey helps illustrate that the country he loved robbed him of his family. 
Kevin Brophy has worked as a publisher and has taught in Ireland, England, Poland and Germany. Born in County Mayo, he grew up in the married quarters of a military barracks in Galway and wrote a memoir, Walking the Line, in 1994 about his childhood, focusing on his relationship with his mother in an environment dominated by men. In the Company of Wolves (1999) is the author’s account of a year in Wolverhampton when his beloved soccer team were relegated from the English Premier League.
In 2009 he was writer-in-residence to the city of Lagenfeld in Germany. “I wasn’t in a college, I was writer-in-residence to the city. They wanted the reaction of an Irish writer to spending a spell in their city.” Recently, he has spent time teaching in a university in the Polish city of Lodz and has just sold the Polish rights to this novel, which is due out in July. He has also completed his next novel, for publication in spring 2013. 
Tucked into The Berlin Crossing is a copy of a letter from the author, introducing the book and sketching its background, suggesting the story is rooted in the failure of a country but noting that “failure is often far more interesting than success”. When asked about this, Brophy thinks about it and goes a little further. “Maybe failure that’s turned into success is even more interesting.”
The Berlin Crossing is published by Headline Review.

 

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