KRIEMHILD'S REVENGE

About the Book

In the winter of 1986, one of the coldest in Europe in decades, an East German policeman is called to the scene of a murder - the murder of an American Army officer whose body has been found in the ten kilometer wide no-man’s-land which extends the length of the iron curtain between East and West Germany.  The murder investigation quickly involves both the East German and the Soviet security services as well as the CIA.  But behind this murder lies a complicated web of intrigue involving secret groups of East and West German military and intelligence officials who are conspiring to wrest control of Germany - both East and West - from Soviet and American influence and make Germany once again a major and independent power in the world.  The murder investigation leads to the drug and sex party underworld of divided Berlin where an expatriate American singer and his wife are hosts to high ranking officials from both West and East Germany, to a Libyan connection and acts of terrorism in Berlin in the 1980s, and to a bizarre plot by the wife of a high ranking East German security official to exact vengeance on the men who killed her lover, the same men who are engaged in the clandestine effort to effect an independent and neutral German state.

The novel tells of a little known East Germany, a state in which time often seemed frozen, in which older social values were espoused by the Party and, in which contemporary social practices imported from the West were officially rejected while high officials embraced many of the more questionable aspects of the West ardently. It tells  of   people caught up in the conflicts resulting from this strange incorporation of both contemporary and nostalgic ideals .   Above all,  it retells one of the oldest of the Germanic folk epics, The Song of the Nibelungen, the story of a woman’s revenge and the impact of that revenge on the men who made it necessary.

About the Author

Duncan Smith has taught German Language and Literature at Brown University since the late 1960s. He was a frequent visitor to the former East Germany where he lived and taught repeatedly from 1971 until 1990. He is also a clinical social worker and psychotherapist in the Providence, Rhode Island area. He is the father of three children, including a nurse, a Buddhist teacher and monk, and a social service provider to refugees and immigrants to this country. His partner, Lydia Breckon, is an anthropologist specializing in Cambodian Studies and is currently also the director of a branch of a large refugee and immigrant service agency in the greater Boston area. Three dogs and two cats preoccupy them both.