It is a trick as simple as it is audacious. Instead of his mother fleeing East Germany illegally, all it takes is a forged passport at Prague Airport, recounts Thomas Strässle in “Fluchtnovelle”. An astounding story – the story of his own parents, who met and fell in love in Erfurt in 1965. She was from East Germany, he was Swiss. They wanted to spend the rest of their lives together but were separated by the Iron Curtain. The young couple began to look for a way for her to join him in the West – an illegal undertaking. But Strässle’s fatherto-be had an ingenious idea. He planned everything meticulously, even forging the necessary passport and passport stamp. But when the decisive moment came, the colour of the official border stamp unexpectedly changed from green to red. The plan would have failed without some quick thinking. Proof again that love overcomes everything – even between two people who still barely know each other.
The author Hermann Burger first uncovered this story back in the 1970s. He recorded an interview with both of Strässle’s parents on cassette before writing about this encounter in an unpublished manuscript called “Fluchtliebe”. Strässle was able to use this recording when he found out about the story and began to do his own research.
His book is not a novella in the strictest sense. Its title touches on what was a real-life drama. Strässle repeatedly quotes from legal material in Switzerland (forged passport) and East Germany (defection), combining the human story with more formal passages, which in turn are intertwined with dialogues between Strässle’s parents. A trip to the places where the events played out adds literary weight.
The tension of this short story lies less in whether the plan succeeded – it did; the Swiss-born author is living proof of that – but in how it succeeded, placing it into a larger political context and recalling an era in which Europe was bitterly divided.
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