The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures

Starred review from May 18, 2020
In this enrapturing debut, Hofmann constructs a beguiling tale of espionage, moral responsibility and the “spooky action” of quantum mechanics. Taking place in 1989 East Berlin before the fall of the wall, the story is structured around a series of entanglements and disappearances. Bernd Zeiger made his name in the secret police by writing a “demoralization” manual detailing how to sow confusion, extract confessions, and “put an entire nation, a world, to sleep.” In the 1960s, Zeiger spied on and elicited the confession of his neighbor Johannes Held, a quantum physicist withholding information about a secret American experiment in teleportation he’d gleaned while on a fellowship in the Arizona desert. In 1989, Zeiger tells Held’s story, and his role in it, to Lara, a young waitress to whom Zeiger is particularly drawn. The guilt-ridden and ailing Zeiger wants to offer Lara “coherence, linkages, the sequence of things”—in other words, the “perfect confession.” Shortly thereafter, Lara herself vanishes, and Zeiger sets about trying to locate her. The plot grows intricate but never convoluted as the connections between Zeiger, Held, and Lara gradually come into focus. In portraying two equally head-scratching phenomena—paranormal vanishings and the absurd, sinister workings of a totalitarian state—the novel hovers between genres like a subatomic particle between states. All the more impressive, Hoffman’s exceptional debut never loses sight of the desires, mysteries, and small acts of rebellion that persist within dehumanizing systems.

Starred review from June 15, 2020
In 1989, an older Stasi operative in East Berlin ponders the disappearance of a young woman and recalls a torture victim in this fine debut. Bernd Zeiger boosted his early career with the East German secret service in the 1960s by writing a manual on how to demoralize those suspected of veering from the party line. Now he is 60 and has been shunted aside to minor surveillance duties. His days usually proceed according to a regular schedule and predictable meals (the German word Zeiger can refer to the hand of a clock). But during much of the novel's single day he's preoccupied with Lara, a young waitress at his local cafe who vanished a month ago, and a physicist named Johannes Held, whom Stasi operatives tortured years earlier after he returned from a fellowship to Arizona. Hofmann, who was born in the U.S. but grew up in Germany, writes in assured prose of carefully chosen details that mark the best period fiction. It can be a while before it's clear that this is not a Cold War spy thriller. As Zeiger's day proceeds, interrupted by long flashbacks, Hofmann conjures up dark comedy in an understated, quirky satire of the Stasi's bureaucracy and cruelty and the paranoia that permeated East Germany. It's more smiles than George Smileys, but the author also finds tension in mysteries other than a lady vanishing: Why do boys go missing in the Arizona desert? Were the Americans working on teleportation? Why is his blind, womanizing neighbor visiting the same Meissen shop as Zeiger when he buys a porcelain dog for Lara? At the end of this day in 1989, Zeiger and his ilk are left to contemplate the biggest disappearance ever in a city with a wall built to prevent departures. A remarkable first novel that reads like the work of a seasoned pro.

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July 1, 2020
A Stasi agent searches for a missing woman only to be ensnared by the secrets of his dubious past in this seriocomic riff on a Cold War spy novel. Bernd Zeiger made a name for himself by authoring a celebrated interrogation-protocol manual. But now that his health is declining, he builds his days around the office cafeteria menu and plots to report his neighbor for suspicious activity. In a moment of tenderness, he unburdens himself to Lara, a young waitress, about his long-ago involvement with a scientist who worked with the Americans on teleportation technologies. Soon after, she disappears. Meanwhile, the German Democratic Republic is crumbling, and the Stasi's Hermeneutics Department bickers over pop-song lyrics. Hofmann's debut narrative progresses to a Berlin mental institution, and into the Arizona desert, where orphaned Mexican children are involved in ominous paranormal experiments. Despite noirish trappings and some clever plot reversals, Hofmann's novel is noteworthy not for its riff on the espionage-thriller genre, but for using a surreal historical moment to explore broader points about the collapse of ideals and the corrosiveness of secrecy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)