Berlin Station, Part 1

A short time ago, I wrote about an old German TV miniseries, Der Illegale. At the beginning, I mentioned that I was posted to West Berlin as an Army counterintel officer in the early ‘70s. About four years ago, I put together a somewhat haphazard--that is, stream-of-consciousness--memoir of the two-and-a-half years I spent as a Military Intelligence officer in Berlin at the height of the Cold War. Here is an account of one incident at the center of which I found myself.

First, a little background.

Berlin in the 1970’s was the hub of every espionage enterprise in the Cold War world. In Berlin, like Lisbon in the World War II movies, everyone was spying on everyone else. There were easily thousands of espionage operatives of one kind or another in the city, on either side of the Wall; the U.S. alone probably had 2000 people posted there in some intel capacity. Assigned to the Military Intelligence station in Berlin as a counterespionage officer, I knew of incidents in which the Bulgarians were caught spying on the Czechs in East Berlin. (The Warsaw Pact wasn’t alone in this activity: we spied on our allies, too, and they on us. All those spies had to do something with their time!) Even the Chinese--the Chinese, for Pete’s sake--had agents in Berlin! It was like living in Casablanca. Not the city--the movie.

Joking aside, there was real danger. Fighting the Cold War could sometimes be as scary as the hot one going on in Vietnam. The ’70s was the height of the U.S.-Soviet antagonism, with Brezhnev and Nixon eying each other suspiciously over the border dividing the two Germanys. Minor incidents, especially along the Berlin Wall or at Checkpoint Charlie, the official military crossing point between the two halves of the city, were frequent, and minor incidents could escalate--an appropriate term liberated from the shootin’ war in Southeast Asia--into major ones with Kafkaesque suddenness. GI’s touring East Berlin--a practice encouraged by the Army as a way of “showing the flag” in the still-occupied city--could be arrested for supposed infractions and whisked off to Potsdam, the Soviet military headquarters, just to provoke a response. Supply trains crossing East Germany to provision the military stores of West Berlin, which many people never realized was an island 110 miles inside the German Democratic Republic, were arbitrarily stopped and held for anywhere from hours to days. Shots were fired at or near Checkpoints Charlie or Bravo (the crossing point between West Berlin and the GDR, on the city’s western border) several times a month.

At the same time, this was a period of fierce anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism all over Western Europe. Anarchists like “Red” Rudi Dutschke and the infamous Baader-Meinhof gang, formally known as the Red Army Faction (or, ironically, the RAF), were planting bombs and kidnapping German businessmen at an alarming rate. A man I had met, a U.S. Army captain stationed in Frankfurt, was killed by one of these bombs, leaving behind a wife and two pre-teen daughters. Paranoia was so high that all cars entering the Berlin Brigade headquarters compound, a former facility of the Luftwaffe on Clayallee, were thoroughly searched, with huge wheeled mirrors shoved under the chassis to examine the undercarriage for explosives. During one surveillance operation to which I was assigned, I pulled the graveyard shift--midnight to 8 a.m. The place we were watching was in Kreutzberg, a remote borough of Berlin, and we had to drive there from Dahlem, the section surrounding the headquarters compound and most of the living quarters. Because American cars were easy to spot on Berlin streets--I owned a candy-apple red, 1970 Ford Torino fastback, my college graduation present from my parents--we had to use “spy cars.” These were “indigenous” vehicles, usually VW’s or German Fords, with interchangeable license plates: green “USA” plates with black numerals that looked like those on the private cars (POV’s) of GI’s stationed in Germany, and long, thin, black-lettered white plates of Germany. (Official Army vehicles--GOV’s--such as staff cars, bore yellow plates; miltary vehicles, like trucks and jeeps, did not have plates as such; they had painted registration numbers instead.) These cars were parked in a lot in the rear of the headquarters compound, but we had to go to our office at the front of the compound to sign them out and pick up the keys, so we never drove back there in our own cars. We parked across the street from the front entrance, in an extra PX lot. After the PX complex closed, around 9 p.m., this lot was vacant, so we left our POV’s there, walked over to the office, signed out the GOV, got the keys and the appropriate plates, walked back to the GOV lot, installed the plates, and drove out the rear exit of the compound. No problem. We did this all the time when we used a GOV. But this time, while I was off at the surveillance location, sometime during the early morning, the MP’s patrolling the headquarters area got suspicious. What was this car doing abandoned in the PX lot so long after the shopping complex had closed? Maybe it’s wired with explosives? Better check it out!

Well, of course, as a Military Intelligence officer, my POV registration was classified, so no trace of the owner could be found in local records. (First of all, this was in the days before computers. Second, POV’s of MI personnel were registered out of Munich--the headquarters of MI in Germany--and, third, their identifications were buried under layers of classification. A registration check by local MP’s in Berlin leads to a series of dead ends. The same was true of our private phone numbers at home.) Obviously, a car with no ID, left in the parking lot late, with no one around to claim it, must be a bomb. If the commotion that ensued had not been noticed by a colleague in my unit (located right at the front of the compound, with a view of the PX grounds across the street), my car would have been, at best, towed off to an impound lot and stripped down or, worse scenario, blown up on the spot. Of course, no one could tell me all this while I was on surveillance--radio traffic was restricted to operational use--so I never heard about this near-loss until I got back to sign out sometime after 8 the next morning. By then, it was all a joke, but it almost wasn’t. Paranoia--it’s a wondrous thing!

Besides politics, there was also just plain old crime. Berlin, like most big cities, had a crime problem in the ’70s, but it was complicated by a number of aspects. Because it was a relatively easy place to get to from Western Europe, and only slightly less easy to get to from the East, and access back and forth could be arranged with a little know-how, resourcefulness, and cash, smuggling was a big deal in Berlin. Now, I’m not just talking about some dope or a few sparkling baubles or rare artworks--though these crossed back and forth pretty often, too. No, Berlin’s smuggling trade included guns, explosives, hot money, documents--and women. Believe it or not, white slavery was still going on through Berlin in the ‘70s. And the people most in control of all this smuggling were Turks. Berlin’s organized crime, the equivalent then of its Mafia (although more comparable to the Colombian drug gangs of the ‘80s), was predominantly Turkish. And these guys could be vicious. Just before I arrived in Berlin in July 1971 there had been a pitched battle on the streets of downtown West Berlin between the police and one Turkish gang. The gang had been armed with machine guns and military weapons--the same stuff they were transshipping back and forth across the East-West border. Now, nothing like that happened again after I got there, but the possibility kept everyone a little on edge, especially when we had to hang around in a low-rent part of town like Kreutzberg (which, as it happens, was also a largely Turkish district). MI agents were not generally armed, despite what you see in the movies. I had my heart in my throat more than once when out on an operation.

So, that was Berlin in the early ’70s when I was assigned there to Berlin Station of the 66th MI Group. The trade-off was that Berlin was still officially under military occupation, so GI’s, as well as our French and British counterparts, had some perks. Uniformed soldiers (which didn’t include MI personnel--we wore civvies) could ride the buses and subways for free. Part of the occupation agreement with the Germans after the war required them to supply housing for the occupying troops, but since much of the city had been destroyed by bombings, most of this housing was newly built. Whereas bachelor officers in, say, Frankfurt or Munich might get quarters with a bedroom and a sitting room, a shared bathroom, and a small refrigerator (but no kitchen--they ate in the mess or at the O-club), single officers assigned to Berlin lived in one-bedroom garden apartments. Married enlisted men and woman got modern apartments in highrises, and more senior officers with families had houses in little suburb-like developments. All fully furnished, equipped--and free. Berlin had the best PX, the commissary got the best supplies, and our officers’ club was the finest anywhere in NATO. The NCO club was as good as most O-clubs elsewhere, and better than many. The recreation facilities, including the Wannsee resort, drew generals and high-ranking civilians from all over Europe, and it was all free. It didn’t hurt, of course, that we had two generals in Berlin, a one-star who was commander of the Berlin Brigade--the fighting troops--and a two-star who was the U. S. Commander of Berlin (USCOB), the military governor of the American sector. (The Brits and the French had generals, too, of course. Berlin probably had the highest concentration of general officers anywhere outside the Pentagon or maybe Brussels.) One irony of my service there was that I was entitled to wear the same Germany Occupation Medal that my dad, an artillery battery commander when the Allies were fighting their way across Western Europe after D-Day, got for serving in Germany after VE Day twenty-five years earlier. There was something time-warpish in that.

Yep, life in West Berlin could be good, if you ignored the fact that you were encircled by a wall and prohibited from leaving just whenever you wanted to. A GI in Frankfurt could get leave, hop in his car, and drive off in any direction for a few days’ outing. He could get on a train and visit Munich, Hanover, Hamburg, even Vienna or Rome or Paris. In Berlin, you couldn’t leave the city without advanced planning and special orders (called Flag Orders) for crossing the borders. People with high security clearances like me were restricted from traveling by any means other than the military trains (including the British and French ones, but not the German civilian Bundesbahn), military planes, or Pan Am. The reason for this last restriction was that Pan Am was the only civilian airline to agree never to land in East Germany or any Soviet Bloc country, no matter what. Air France and BOAC, which both flew to Berlin in those days along with Lufthansa, would not--rather sensibly, it seemed to me--make such a pledge, so we were prohibited from flying them into or out of Berlin. We were not even allowed to drive to West Germany for more than a year after I arrived in Berlin when those restrictions were eased a little. (By the time I went to Bad Ems in 1972 for the MAD-Schule, we could drive out, with a few restrictions.)

This struck all of us as something of a bleak joke, of course. Much like the game we played on “alerts,” those little exercises military units go through regularly to practice for emergencies (read: “war”). Like elsewhere, each unit in Berlin had an assigned task “in the event of hostilities.” Ours was to secure certain important people and get them to evacuation points, then round up “undesirables” for internment. Now, think about this. West Berlin, a city of some two-and-a-half million people, with an American military force amounting to an oversized brigade with maybe a score of tanks (an enhanced company), a smaller contingent of British and French soldiers, no German troops (except for the police, who received infantry training), surrounded by a Soviet tank army. Not a brigade or even a corps--an army. And that doesn’t count the East German forces, or any other Warsaw Pact troops stationed in the GDR. What the hell were we going to do if the Soviets decided to launch the balloon? Fight? Whom? All the Russians would have to do, we reminded ourselves, was roll up to Checkpoints Charlie and Bravo, post a few guards--we were already surrounded by a wall--and put up a sign, “Berlin POW Camp,” and then go around the city without firing a shot. You had to laugh, otherwise . . . .

Well, that was the situation I entered when I got to Berlin as a first lieutenant in July 1971--my first actual duty assignment. I had an ROTC commission (a good way to stay in school in those days), a couple of months of training as an armor officer at Ft. Knox; a year of Russian language classes at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California--I spoke German and French from having lived in Europe during high school; and three or four months of MI officers’ school at Ft. Holabird in Baltimore. (A hole if there ever was one; after the army abandoned it right after my class graduated, it was used as a prison for the Watergate crew. They were well and truly punished, believe me.) Anyway, now I arrived in Berlin days before the tenth anniversary of the erection of the Berlin Wall, Friday, 13 August. As an initiation to Berlin in the Cold War, my first job at Berlin Station was to be part of the unit’s surveillance of the protests planned for the anniversary. We called this “demo coverage,” and we just observed to see who came out and who said what. This one was a big deal, of course, given Berlin’s political status at the time. Not only would there be one march, but there were going to be two, one by the rightists protesting the wall (Die Mauer muß weg!) and one by the leftists supporting it and the Workers’ Paradise to the east (Besser rot als tot!). The two marches started in different parts of the city, but they were aiming for the same spot, the saddest place in the city: the Peter Fechter Memorial. Peter Fechter was an 18-year-old kid who was shot trying to flee East Berlin sometime shortly after the wall went up (17 August 1962). He wasn’t killed outright, but he lay wounded in the no-man’s land controlled by the machine guns of the Vopos in their towers. (The Wall was really two walls about 100 yards or so apart, creating an empty strip of terrain between them--the so-called death strip.) The boy bled to death within sight of the East German guards and the West Berliners who witnessed the attempted escape but couldn’t reach him because of the guards’ guns. After Fechter’s death, a memorial was built on the Western side of the Wall at the site of his attempt. This had become a focal point for all demonstrations relating to the Wall, and on this day, both marches were on their way to the memorial at the same time. It didn’t take military intelligence to guess what was going to happen when the two groups met there. And we knew one thing for sure: if violence did erupt, do not get caught between the leftists and the rightists, or between either group and the police.

Here I was, then, what we called “a civilian TDY to the Army.” (TDY was the military abbreviation for temporary duty, but it was often used in conversation to mean “on temporary assignment.”) Furthermore, my only contact with cops had been traffic officers and the highway patrol. But, let me tell you, these Berlin police were impressive. Remember, I had just come from the States where police departments and national guard units had fired on demonstrators. Kent State hadn’t been too long before my arrival in Berlin (4 May 1970). And here I was in the land that invented militarism. But these guys were superb--controlled and professional. (Because the occupation agreement prohibited German military in Berlin, the police received basic military training.) At the first sign of violence--one guy from one of the marches took a swing at someone in the other group with the wooden post from his protest sign, and some bottles and rocks started to fly--the cops closed ranks with their huge plexiglass shields in front of them, like a moving wall, and simply cleared the street. (They also had the biggest dogs I ever saw.) They just swept everyone into the subway entrances. The protesters had two choices: stay underground in the subway station, or get on a train and go somewhere else. No overreaction, no clubs, no guns, no cursing. Just swoosh, and the streets were clear. They only moved when violence became imminent, after the opposing groups met near the memorial, and they treated both sides the same.

Of course, we dashed behind the police lines as soon as this all started. We had a special password we shouted as we ran toward the cops, and they let us through to safety before things got too hot. That was my introduction to West Berlin. (And if I didn’t like that, there was always ’Nam waiting, usually the next stop for officers assigned to Europe at that time. Most of my predecessors had stayed for 18 months or two years, got home leave for a couple of months, then shipped out to Vietnam. In those days, the life expectancy of an MI lieutenant in Vietnam was estimated at 5 minutes after he hit the tarmac in Saigon.)

So that’s where my head was at when I started out on the events that resulted in the Army closing down the city of West Berlin. But it wasn’t my fault. Really. As they used to say in the old television show, the following story is true. None of the names have been changed, however, innocent or not. The initiating incident was “exfiltration,” a problem unique to West Berlin. This was the process of helping Easterners escape into West Berlin or West Germany and it was a sensitive situation involving both military and diplomatic actions, not to mention involvement of our French and British counterparts and several German agencies. In the years immediately following the war and the partition of Germany, exfiltration was an official, if clandestine, project of the U.S. government to bring out scientists, engineers, and other useful and high-profile people. By my day, most of those kinds of people who wanted to leave had been brought out, so the U.S. disbanded the operation. In the vacuum, private entrepreneurs assumed the task--for a fee, of course. The folks connected with this process were the same bad guys who controlled the smuggling.

By happenstance, I had become the Station expert in exfiltration and was called in whenever a case seemed to touch on it, hence my involvement in the story you’re about to read. Because of reports that I wrote on exfiltration, including ultimately a large book with illustrations, charts, and diagrams which was in demand by agencies both American and foreign (we had to make up a sanitized version for them) all over Berlin and the Federal Republic, my CO, Lt. Col. Pat Collins, took to calling me “Collins’ Commando” whenever he saw me around the Station. (Yes, I was embarrassed, but he was a light colonel and I was only a first looie--and the new boy in town as well--so what was I going to do, tell him to stop?) Most cases were small matters, investigated quickly and disposed of without much effort. One time, however, I hooked a big one.

[I’ll leave off here for the time being and pick up with the incident itself in Part 2. Tune back in on Wednesday, 22 July 2009 for all the excitement and derring-do. (Fade-out as “Secret Agent Man” plays over the credits.)]

'Les Éphémères' (Lincoln Center Festival 2009)

Like Katona’s Ivanov, the Théâtre du Soleil’s two-part, seven-hour Les Éphémères at the Park Avenue Armory also opened on 7 July, the first day of the Lincoln Center Festival. Scheduling conflicts meant that my theater companion, Diana, and I couldn’t attend Part I, so we elected to see Part II alone; according to the company’s publicity, each part could be viewed by itself, and that turned out to be true. So, on Wednesday, 8 July, Diana, her sister, and I met at the Armory entrance at 67th and Park and took in the nearly three-and-a-half hour performance directed by the company’s founder, Ariane Mnouchkine. The performance took place in the Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall, a vast open space (200 by 300 feet and one of the largest unobstructed interiors in New York City) with a very high ceiling (69 feet). The playing area had been narrowed to a broad runway by the steep, narrow seating risers the company had built on two sides of the hall. Charles Isherwood of the Times characterized the resulting space as “circus-like"--Joe Dziemianowicz of the Daily News saw an operating theater and church pews--but my impression was that it resembled a bullring. (Ironically, in the middle of Part II there is a scene in which an old man is teaching what appears to be his grandson some toreador techniques with a bull’s head on wheels while the boy wields the sword and red muleta. This was probably a coincidence, but the scene may have been the inspiration for the configuration.) At either end of the runway were wide openings covered by double drapes through which the chariots, the large wheeled platforms on which the individual scenes were mounted, entered and exited the playing arena. Above each entrance was a small balcony: the one over the east entrance was home to the lighting technician and his laptop-controller; the one over the west housed the musical ensemble. Jean-Jacques Lemêtre’s music, some live and some taped, in styles reminiscent now of Eastern, now of Western music, underscored the varying moods, though I sometimes found it distracting.

I have to say a few words about the chariots and the moving of the scenes because it was a remarkable achievement in its own right. It was very low-tech, since the means of locomotion was human--members of the ensemble pushed the chariots across the runway and rotated them to make all angles visible to all spectators. The platforms were square or round and some were quite large, say 10 feet across, and others relatively small, for one- or two-character scenes. Each was a complete set, designed by Everest Canto de Montserrat, from floor coverings to furniture to set dressing and props. (Some were quite crowded, like an over-furnished or messy room. Variety reported that some objects were contributed by members of the troupe.) The sets ranged from rooms in houses or apartments to entrance ways to offices and doctors’ examining rooms to outdoor scenes of various locations. In effect, they worked like a spotlight that has isolated a small section of a realistic place. I don’t know how many of the platforms there were backstage, or how many technicians and stage hands were back there setting them up for each new entrance, but they each had to be completely reset within minutes of the end of one scene, which often ended as one platform was moved off the opposite end of the runway as the new one entered at the other end. (From what I could tell at intermission, the two end areas, the off-stage spaces, weren’t large enough to house more than a couple of chariots each, so they must have had to be reset pretty continuously to keep the production moving smoothly--which it did beautifully. The logistics alone were impressive.) In most cases, the actors in the scene moved on in place on the chariots (though a few entered or exited on foot and stepped into the scene). Scenes were played almost entirely within the confines of the chariot, though a few scenes that moved from one chariot to another--a doctor exiting her office and entering a patient’s room, for instance--required an actor to step off the platform, walk across a short section of the runway floor, and step up onto a new platform.

This was all what you might expect from a company that’s worked on this kind of set-up before. (Le Dernier Caravansérail used similar moving platforms four years ago in Damrosch Park.) It just takes practice and concentration. More impressive to me was the technique of moving the platforms around the playing area. The company members who manipulated them, the “actor-pushers,” have to be especially agile, strong, and steady, and they have to have excellent control over their own bodies--and exceptional stamina. Dressed in dark work clothes and black sneakers, they worked a little like Kabuki stage assistants: you could see them perfectly well, but you treated them as invisible as they went about their task. As they rolled the platforms on stage, they almost crawled, though I noticed that their knees didn’t really touch the floor so they were pushing from a low crouch. When they reached the center (or, occasionally, some other spot on the runway) where the scene was to be performed, they nearly lay down on the floor on their sides, sometimes with their upper bodies raised and used their legs to propel the chariot around in a slow spin so that it could be viewed from all perspectives. (This is all very hard on the back and legs, I’d imagine--and there’s a physiotherapist on the production staff.) Isherwood compared this to a camera circling above the actors in a film. All of this was accomplished absolutely fluidly and silently--neither the actor-pushers nor the platforms made a sound of any kind. (Another thing I don’t know, of course, is the technology for constructing the chariots, especially the wheels. High tech or low, they are minor engineering feats.) While the acting and conception of Les Éphémères was a total joy, this part of the production was a small, fascinating theatrical accomplishment as well. I can’t quantify the contributions it made, but I will say that it enhanced the overall impact of the production.

The title Les Éphémères means “The Ephemerals” or “Ephemera.” It refers to the moments in life that are there briefly and then gone, lost to memory. Mnouchkine says that the ephemerals are “Human beings! We are the ephemeral.” According to company publicity, the original idea was to contemplate what you would do if the end of the world were imminent. That idea morphed into something much more general as the company worked on it. While Mnouchkine and her troupe used oral histories and records of immigrants, migrants, and refugees to compile the text for Le Dernier Caravansérail, the company’s last trip to LCF in 2005, this script seems to have been assembled in-house by the company members and Mnouchkine through improvisation and discussion--“and perhaps an old photo album.” I haven’t found anything that says so or not, but I imagine that a lot of the material was drawn from the memories, family lore, and experiences of the cast. Mnouchkine says in an interview excerpted in the program that there is no written text, so the script, too, is ephemeral. (This must be a metaphorical statement to an extent, since there were projected supertitles--not so hard to negotiate as recently with Ivanov--so a spoken text must have been set at some point in order for there to have been a translation rendered. Unless, of course, there were simultaneous translators backstage typing away furiously. Two “translators” are listed in the program.) What Mnouchkine, whose vision guides not only the whole Théâtre du Soleil but obviously steered the création collective for Les Éphémères, says the performance depicts “the present which is no longer the present when I say the word ‘present’ to you. . . . The play is made of the moments that have made us.”

The play, performed in French with English supertitles, takes place in France in the present--now--though many of the scenes--memories, really--go back to different parts of the past, from World War II to as recently as 15 year ago. Some of the scenes were connected, episodes in a longer narrative--the WWII scenes, for instance--and others were only one snapshot long. Some of the characters were younger and older incarnations of the same person. All the tales were personal--though some, like the ones that took place during the Nazi occupation, had larger implications. Some of the moments were one person’s memory, triggered by some stimulus like Proust’s madeleines; others were the collected recollections of participants or observers who pieced them together bit by bit. Some of the chain scenes did continue from Part I to Part II, but they were structured so that each part was, indeed, independently comprehensible. Only after I read some of the reviews, which covered both halves of the program, did I see how some of the stories I watched in Part II, which seemed self-contained, were continuations of stories begun the night before in Part I. The poignancy and greater implications of the scenes, whether continuations or one-offs, were not harmed by seeing only one part of Les Éphémères.

In fact, the length of the program--three hours and twenty minutes with an intermission during which cookies and water are served on stage by the cast--and the uncomfortable seating made me quite glad to have attended only half the production, even though what I saw on stage was exquisite. Too much of a good thing, you understand . . . . One reason for this response was that the stories themselves, whether long or short, were not so important, and more of them wouldn’t have made a difference in the impact of Les Éphémères overall, I don’t think. What impressed was the treatment of memories, reminiscences, passing moments, forgotten histories, and that was communicated brilliantly in one three-hour performance. (Caravansérail was much the same: it told stories, some small and some extended, of displaced people. The point was made just as strongly in Part I as in Part II; repeating it didn’t make it truer.) In fact, not all the stories were themselves very interesting dramatically; the arc of the whole evening was. (I come back to the presentation, which enhanced the theatrical success of the program by being so damn well conceived and executed. It was partly a case of the medium being the message.) The longest story, the search by a woman for the story of her grandparents and her mother’s childhood in the 1940s, was possibly the least engrossing. This was partly because we’ve all heard and seen this story told and retold many times. In Part II, the tale opened when the woman came to the state archives looking for some information on her grandparents, whom she knew only by name and a few scattered facts, and spoke to an archivist who eventually found some documents pertaining to their occupation before the war, their deportation when the Germans occupied France--they were Jewish--and their fate. I could have guessed what was going to be revealed, and many of the subsequent scenes of this history, which was threaded through the whole evening, were predictable as well. As an example of how this kind of background is pieced together one detail at a time and how one step can lead to another source of information, the arc was interesting, and the performances of the people in the story and the small moments of contact and memory were gorgeous--as was the acting all through the piece. There were 15 scenes in Part II (and another 14 in Part I), winnowed down from about 400; the company included 23 adult actors and 9 children (who rotated performances) playing nearly 80 roles in the two halves.

The most charming vignette, a single snapshot, was “You Live in My House,” in which a young woman, Claire (Delphine Cottu), is found hanging around the garden entrance to a house where she used to live as a child. The son (Sébastien Brottet-Michel) of the woman who lives there waves her away, but she stays until the daughter (Camille Grandville) arrives and lets her in. Claire wants to visit her old room and film the house. When she enters the sitting room and sees the current owner, an older woman who has suffered a breakdown (Juliana Carneiro da Cunha), Claire recognizes her as her second-grade teacher, Madame Dubris. We learn that Mme. Dubris has been incommunicative and agoraphobic since one of her students had been beaten to death by classmates in front of her. She never recovered from the shock and the inability to prevent the attack. For the first time since her breakdown, the old teacher becomes animated as she shows Claire around the house and Claire tells some of the stories about evidence of her old life left behind. It was a tiny little story, but a gem among the semi-precious stones. Like the other scenes, the acting was low-key, naturalistic, and stunning.

Another scene, one of the episodes in the tale of the search by Jeanne (Cottu) for her family’s history, shows a woman, Nora (Carneiro da Cunha), who is caring for the little Aline, Jeanne’s mother as a child, after the girl’s parents have been transported by the Germans. Nora asks Aline if she knows any prayers, and Aline recites a broche, but confesses she doesn’t know the meaning of the words. Nora teaches the girl the Lord’s Prayer in French, explaining each unfamiliar word and phrase so the child won’t just understand them as meaningless sounds. (Later, in an eerie echo, a Nazi occupier utters the Lord’s Prayer in German.) It’s clear that Aline and her family had been assimilated Jews, more French than Jewish. Maman probably lit the Sabbath candles and said the Friday prayers, so little Aline learned the sounds, but not the meaning of her religious heritage. That would hardly have been uncommon; but what it made me think of was a subject that has fascinated me for years. Not too many years ago there were reports of people in New Mexico, descendents of the Conquistadors who settled in New Spain in the 16th century, who discovered that they were also descended from Marranos, secret Jews who had fled the Inquisition. Their Jewish faith had long been lost to them; they all grew up considering themselves Catholic. Years before this series of self-discoveries, however, my father told a story of a colleague in the Bonn embassy who had taken a bicycle trip trough Spain. Forced to spend the night on the road after one leg of his journey, he stopped at a farmhouse. Before the evening meal, he watched as the woman of the house lit candles and mumbled some unintelligible words before the family sat down to eat. Realizing that it was Friday night, the traveler asked what the woman was saying. She admitted that she had no idea what the words meant, but that her mother and grandmother had always performed the ritual on Fridays, so she continued the practice. The family was Catholic, of course--this was the time of Franco when all other religions were outlawed--so the visitor didn’t say anything, but he understood that he was in the home of the descendents of Marranos whose real heritage had been lost to history. Ephemeral, indeed!

Once again, I was impressed with the ensemble playing of a company that has been together--the 70 members of Théâtre du Soleil practically live together--for decades. Ivanov called for some fireworks, but Les Éphémères was quiet and truthful, without flash or force. Even the children--especially the children--were controlled and solid, the whole ensemble like people you might have been eavesdropping on. Which, in fact, was what we were doing, wasn’t it? (Steppenwolf, for example, might be able to do this kind of work here, and I would like to have seen how the original cast of August: Osage County worked together before some of them were replaced. Les Éphémères does share something with AOC: both plays were created by actors--AOC by actor-dramatist Tracy Letts and Les Éphémères by a company of actors. This may well account for the nature of the roles in Les Éphémères and why they worked so well with a style that was almost what we used to call “studio acting”: real, honest, unfrilly, but small, intimate, quiet.)

'Ivanov' (Lincoln Center Festival 2009)

The Katona József Theatre’s rendition of Chekhov’s first full-length play, Ivanov, opened on Tuesday, 7 July, opening day of the 2009 Lincoln Center Festival of international performances. It was presented at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College, 10th Avenue and 58th Street. Directed in Hungarian by Tamás Ascher, the production is reset in the Hungary of the 1960s and ‘70s--post-uprising, but decidedly within the grim, grey period of Soviet domination of not only Eastern Europe’s politics but its culture as well. To my eye, this resetting had several repercussions, mostly beneficial to this difficult play, which Chekhov saw as a bleak comedy. (As I mentioned to my friend Diana as we were reading through the program before the curtain, this kind of dark, ironic humor is a societal characteristic of the Russian character--the Russian soul, if you will. When I was studying Russian, especially at the Defense language school where our teachers were all native-born Russians, I learned several Russian jokes and read some literary humor. Both before and during the Communist era, Russian humor was rife with this bleak, dour, pessimistic sense of resignation.) The Katona’s production ramped up the comedy--there was copious laughter from the audience--without really losing the bleakness of the world of the play.

First, let me utter a discouraging word. I hate supertitles. I think I’ve complained about this technique before, and my attitude hasn’t changed with further exposure. I understand that it’s cheaper and more portable than the former practice of having actors reading the English translation over a PA system transmitted to earphones. And there were certainly drawbacks to that method of providing translations for foreign-language productions, the chief one of which was probably that the spectator can’t hear what the actors on stage are actually saying, but that was a partially soluble problem and the earphones allowed me to keep my eyes on the stage full time. (I learned to lower the volume of the earphones so I could just hear the readers while I could still listen to the tone and expression of the voices of actors on stage.) Supertitles, almost always high above the actors’ heads, force me to shuttle back and forth between the text and the stage, usually missing one or the other at a crucial moment. In addition, sometimes, too often for my wishes, the translation disappears too quickly for me to catch it and, if I’m seated far enough back, the writing is too small for me to read at all. It drives me batty and sometimes really ruins what might otherwise be a nice theater experience. I really do hate this technology. (I’ve mentioned a production I saw back in ’86 at the Theatre of Nations, a Russian play performed in Bulgarian, that didn’t provide a translation at all, just a synopsis of the plot. The company, the Ivan Vasov National Theatre of Sofia, were such excellent practitioners of Stanislavsky Realism that the truthfulness of the performances and the consistency of the characterizations managed to come through clearly enough to obviate the need for a translation. That’s extremely rare, I would image though.) I've suffered with my supertitle problem in many productions, though because of the set-up, the Ivanov was toughest for me at the LCF shows I've seen so far this year. I can’t be sure how much I missed--though I know I missed several of the laugh lines.

One thing the transposition of the production from 19th-century Russia to mid-20th-century Hungary accomplished was to allow the set designer (Zsolt Khell, for those of you who follow international theater tech) and director Ascher to convey the dismal, depressing world Nikolai Ivanov inhabits very vividly (if that’s not oxymoronic) without stressing it in the acting, which could sabotage the comedy Ascher obviously wanted to bring forth. “Chekhov viewed the world with a certain black humor, even if the most important characteristic of his protagonist is self-pity,” wrote Ascher in a program note. “I think that the performance cannot aim at the enlargement of this self-pity, but on the contrary, it should show this self-pity in a sarcastic way.” The director further explains, “With this production I am trying to create a very strong atmosphere which has nothing to do with the traditional, nostalgic Chekhovian atmosphere that we are used to seeing. My Ivanov is played in a cold, depressing world, very familiar to” audiences who experienced the era. Anyone who’s been to any of the Eastern Bloc countries in the ‘60s or ‘70s--and I visited Poland, Russia, and the Ukraine in 1965 and lived in West Berlin, a stone’s throw from the GDR, in the early ‘70s--knows how grey and cheerless much of that world was. Anything built after the end of World War II was characterless; it gave new meaning to the term “classless society”! (For those who never saw even a representation of the Stalinist/Socialist decor, take any institutional facility--a public school, a government office, a union meeting hall--and take away all the remaining grace notes and personality.) Nikolai is depressed--but if he weren’t already, this existence would make him so.

It may not have been part of Ascher’s plan, but one element of this atmosphere is derived not from anything he put on the stage but from associations spectators with some recollection of world history might add. First, the period of the Katona’s Ivanov is only a relatively short time after the abortive anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary in 1956. All but the youngest characters in the play would have remembered that short-lived reach for freedom that was so brutally put down by Russian tanks. Further back in history, though, was another world entirely. As part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Budapest was one of the sophisticated, glittering capitals of Europe; Hungary was a cultural power producing theater (Molnar), music (Lehar), and cuisine (Sachertorte, strudel) all of Europe sought out. World War I ended the empire and Hungary became an independent nation and its significance in the world receded between the wars, but the residual panache, the fading luster, hung around for a generation. What was left after World War II was erased by the Soviet Union. As disheartening as life in mid-century Hungary must have been, the contrast to what it had been and what it might have regained in 1956 made the play’s present time all the more joyless. (I have no evidence that Ascher even considered any of this, but I thought of it while I was watching the play. I didn’t bring it up to Diana, so I also have no idea if anyone else in the audience flashed on it. I may have been the only one. Wouldn’t be the first time!)

Another result of the temporal relocation was a reinforcement of the spareness of the lives of Nikolai and the other characters. In a traditional setting for a Chekhov play of the late 19th century--Ivanov was written in 1887 and revised two years later--there are all kinds of objects on the set, objects actors can use to occupy themselves and anchor themselves and their characters to the place. There are samovars, glasses of tea, liquor decanters, books, and chotchkes of all kinds that provide actors with activities and business. In the spartan world of the socialist ‘60s and ‘70s, there’s almost nothing around but bare walls. Now, it may well have been that Ascher didn’t want his characters busy, and even in a czarist setting he may have denied his cast any objects--but the lack of any decor not only looked empty, but enhanced the sense that the lives of these people are themselves empty. These people have nothing to do with themselves because there’s nothing to do it with.

The difficulty with these effects, though, is that they do leave the actors bereft of activity. As someone or other once said of Chekhov’s plays, You can write a play about boredom, but it can’t be boring. Plays about having nothing to do (actually, Ivanov isn’t exactly about having nothing to do--that’s just what’s going on in this world) are in danger if there’s actually nothing to do on stage. Okay, I’m exaggerating a little--there are objects on stage, but only the bare minimum for what Ascher wants his characters to do; they play with the tacky furniture a lot. But the danger is there, and as I remarked with Mary Stuart recently, a play with no action or even activity becomes all about the words. (Remember, I have a difficulty here with the text, so this problem would be exacerbated.) Thanks to Ascher, however, and the excellence of his company’s acting--like those Bulgarians, these folks are masters--whenever I could watch them, they filled the stage with animation, even if it was only inner animation. (That’s not a backhanded compliment: some actors can do with stillness what others can only accomplish through behavior. Their bodies become animated because of what’s happening inside.)

I guess I’ve been talking around this production an awful lot; I sort of started in the middle somewhat. Let me back up a few steps. Ivanov isn’t as well known as Chekhov’s four major plays. (Only Platonov and The Wood Demon are probably less familiar. Ivanov does get played more often than those two.) The play tells the story of Nikolai Ivanov, a landowner who farms a large estate. For the past five years, he has been married to Anna Petrovna who is suffering from tuberculosis. Nikolai's estate is run by a distant relative, Misha Borkin, who constantly advises people on how he can help them make money. Doctor Lvov, an honest man as he frequently reminds everyone, informs Nikolai that Anna needs rest in the Crimea. Unfortunately, Nikolai is unable to afford that, since he owes Lebedev's wife, Zhinaida, 9000 rubles. Nikolai’s friends admonish him for spending time at Pasha Lebedev's house instead of being with his sick wife. At the end of Act One, Nikolai departs to visit Lebedev and is followed by Anna and Lvov. Act Two opens with a party at Lebedev's where many of the guests gossip about Nikolai. According to them, Nikolai’s only motive for marrying Anna was the large dowry; however when Anna married him, she converted from Judaism to Russian Orthodoxy and her father disowned her. The Lebedevs have a daughter, Sasha, with whom Nikolai seems to be flirting. The act concludes with the two kissing. Anna sees them and faints. Act Three features a number of conversations between Nikolai and other characters, including talks with Lebedev about money and Lvov about the way Nikolai treats Anna. The scene ends with Anna bursting in on Nikolai and Sasha, who are simply talking, resulting in Nikolai's telling Anna she is dying, a fact she previously has not known. The last act takes place a year later. Anna has died and Nikolai and Sasha are preparing to marry. As the wedding is about to begin, Lvov appears and exposes Nikolai's intentions simply to marry Sasha for her dowry. Nikolai draws a gun, but Sasha intervenes. Nikolai shoots himself in front of the wedding guests. (In the original version, the suicide takes place off stage. This is really the only major change in the script Ascher made.)

The acting, as I have already hinted, was superb. Nikolai (Ernö Fekete) is clearly the lead character in the play because he’s the focus of not only the plot, but the theme. As we dramaturgs like to put it: the play happens to him. But the production was a fine example of ensemble playing. Fekete got more stage time than anyone else, but each of the others forged not just a character that belonged in this milieu, but a person who rubbed up against Nikolai in just the right way to add to the oppression that drives him. Even the gang of acquaintances, as opposed to the close friends and associates like Pasha (Zoltán Bezerédi), Misha (Ervin Nagy), or Lvov (Zoltán Rajkai), formed a very specific group, a kind of malevolent chorus or a pack of malicious Eumenides who created the atmosphere of gossip, rumor, and rebuke in which Nikolai must live. In other words, while Nikolai was at its center, the Katona company constituted a world that was self-contained (even, perhaps, hermetically sealed, like a ghastly snow globe).

Ivanov treats several different themes, the main one of which is Nikolai’s loss of taste for life. Most of Chekhov’s plays paint this picture in at least one of their characters, though Ivanov is the only one in which the sufferer is the central figure and the only one who analyzes his own malady. (Remember that Chekhov was trained as a doctor and that such figures as Pavlov, Vladimir Bekhterev, Théodule-Armand Ribot--the inspiration for Stanislavsky--and Freud were making medical history at the time.) The play says, for instance, that Nikolai had “fallen out of love” with Anna, but I think this was just a symptom of the malaise that Chekhov was exploring, the “Russian sickness” that he believed infected the Russian soul. It was a common belief at the end of the 19th century that moral decay was manifested in physical illness; Ibsen demonstrated this in many of his characters, most prominently Oswald Alving in Ghosts and Dr. Rank in Doll House. (It is this medical belief in part which makes Nora leave her children behind: she’s afraid of infecting them with the consequences of her moral lapse.) In Ivanov, Nikolai’s spiritual deficiency, his selfishness, his lack of compassion and empathy, are rewarded with depression, lassitude, and failure to thrive. He isn’t so much out of love with his wife as he is out of love with life altogether. (It’s little wonder, I guess, that, as Jason Zinoman pointed out in his New York Times review of the production, many well-known stage Hamlets have also gone on to play Nikolai: Branagh, Kline, Fiennes. Chekhov even refers to Shakespeare’s character in Ivanov.) At the same time, he’s beset from all sides, by his scheming estate manager, Misha; his idle uncle, Matvei; the self-righteous Lvov; not to mention Anna, Sasha, Zhinaida, and Lebedev.

Not, of course, that he’s an innocent victim. He married Anna, née Sarah Abramson, and then made her leave her faith, thus cutting her off from her family and community. He married her for her dowry--which he didn’t get in the end--and then plans to marry again after Anna’s death for the same reason. Like Nora’s having forged her father’s signature on bank papers, Nikolai’s moral failings have returned to haunt him. He may have even infected Anna. Is Nikaolai the cause of her tuberculosis? (TB, or consumption as it was called in the 19th century, was believed to have a spiritual component. Thomas Mann treats this contention extensively in The Magic Mountain.) But Anna isn’t entirely free of moral weakness herself: she’s suspicious, jealous, and obsessive. Maybe she helped cause her own disease.

There is a wide streak of anti-Semitism in the play. Ivanov’s neighbors gloat over Anna’s rejection by her family and, after he married Anna in the face of his society’s prejudice against Jews, Nikolai abandons her even in illness. When Anna confronts him with Sasha, Nikolai shouts at his fatally-ill wife, “Shut up, you Jew!” (Zinoman makes a small point of this translation, noting that David Hare rendered the line as “dirty Jew.” Another translation has “Jewess,” a slightly archaic-sounding epithet. The original Russian, however, goes further than any of these, calling Anna zhidovka, “you little Yid.” I can’t speak for what the actors said in Magyar.) In other words, as bold a face as he puts on when he marries Anna, he’s really still contaminated with his society’s prejudice. It is part of his moral illness.

(To increase the sense of Anna’s suffering, when she is near death and calls on her father to come see her, he refuses. On the surface, this just seems a cruel additional abandonment, cold-hearted punishment for her conversion to Christianity. Though Chekhov doesn’t say so, audiences familiar with Jewish practice might recognize this as traditional, if harsh, Jewish custom. When a child leaves the faith, most often by marrying a non-Jew, he or she is expelled from the community and ostracized. A son is mourned as if he died; a daughter is simply treated as if she never existed. If you remember Fiddler, this is what happens to Chava when she elopes with Fyedka. When she returns to plead with Tevye, he refuses to speak with her and admonishes the village to shun her. It may be severe, but it’s imposed on the faithful by convention. It is more an indictment of the culture than the man.)

It’s been a long time since I spent so much of a report on the script of a play as opposed to the production--not since Valle-Inclán’s Divine Words two years ago at another Lincoln Center Festival, I don’t think. This is partly because the play is so little known compared to Chekhov’s other main works, but it’s also because the production, as difficult as it was to follow sometimes because of the supertitles and my split focus, brought out much of this very palpably. (Some came to me as I watched or later thought about the play, and probably would have occurred to me no matter what production I saw, or even if I had just read the script. I’m not so good at literary interp, but occasionally things dawn on me.) In the case of the Katona’s Ivanov, the resetting in the Soviet era of the ‘60s and ‘70s and the visual stimulus of the institutional set drove some of this home, and so did the playing style of Ascher’s cast.

One of the repercussions of the resetting was that none of the characters, especially Nikolai, were in any way aristocratic or privileged. They were the most ordinary of ordinary men and women. Their clothes (costumes were by Györgyi Szakács) were pitch-perfect reproductions of what Soviet-bloc Eastern Europeans wore at the time--frumpy, ill-fitting approximations of western dress, no sense of style or taste. The women, especially, were overdressed in bold patterns and colors, with white go-go boots or clunky high heels, too much make-up and badly dyed hair. They looked like some of the people I saw walking the streets in Moscow or Kiev in ’65, and against the drab yellow plaster walls of the single-room set, resembling a sort of community hall in some provincial town somewhere, made them seem all the more garish and sad. The actors, who made their characters all seem desperate to find some respite from the grimness in which they lived, pushed the festiveness of the party scenes or, in Anna’s case, the compulsion for loving contact from her husband to extremes. Not over-the-top, farcical extremes, but the extremes of people in a frenzy for a life they can’t find. Even Lvov’s vaunted honesty was just the wrong side of uncompromising. The vocal and physical fluency of the cast made it possible for them to convey these changing states--they reacted to stimuli the way primitive organisms in petri dishes do: instantly--making my problem with the text often irrelevant (when I could watch what was happening on stage without concerning myself with the dialogue). Fekete, who looks like a man in advancing middle age who was once handsome, and Nagy had several moments of almost mercurial changes of temperament which they managed with complete credibility.

Credible, yes, but funny. These characters, in Ascher’s interpretation, were figures of fun. They were ridiculous and outré (though not far removed from the reality I remember from the same milieu or thereabouts!). One reviewer called Nagy’s Misha a clown, and perhaps he was to an extent. But this wasn’t a clown show. They weren’t Estragon and Vladimir. Clowns are subhuman; these characters were supremely human, just in extremis. That made them funny--as long as they aren’t you! It comes back to that Russian black humor, exacerbated by transposing the play to Soviet-era Hungary. You laugh at how silly and petty these people were, but then you see how shabby and empty their lives were. More than one reviewer compared Ascher’s approach to Ivanov as Chekhov-cum-Beckett; maybe that’s right, though I saw less absurdity as horrific contrast--more Chekhov-cum-Kafka. Consider The Trial, for instance. I think that explains the laughter in the face of all the grimness better.

'The Connection'

[15 July is the 50th anniversary of the opening of the original Living Theatre production of The Connection. The play ran for years in the Living's rep, accumulating 778 performances between 15 July 1959 and 31 March 1963. In view of this historic moment, I’m now posting this report, which I wrote a few days after seeing the revival, in recognition of the importance of the event.]

I took the opportunity of the revival of the Living Theatre’s landmark production of Jack Gelber’s The Connection to go down to Loisaida on 5 February and check out this bit of theater history. Charles Isherwood had given the revival of The Connection, which ran from 8 January to 13 February, a decidedly mixed review in the Times, but it happens that I wrote the entry for the play in The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre (1993), so I wanted to see it myself. It's not often that you get to go back a little in time and check out a theatrical experience that had such an impact, perhaps even changing everything that came afterwards. (No less a figure than Edward Albee, who made his own successful Off-Broadway debut the next year, asserted, "I was so affected and energized by 'The Connection.' It was exciting, dangerous, instructive and terrifying . . . .") You can go back and look at the paintings and sculptures that redirected the Dark Ages into the Renaissance or launched Impressionism. You can read Zola's Thérèse Raquin and see how literary realism began, but you can't go back and witness the time Sophocles stunned Athens by introducing a third actor to the stage or recapture the astonishment in the audiences the first time they saw Hair in the late '60s (despite its popular, Broadway-bound revival just now). Sure, there are revivals of Ibsen’s Doll House and Osborne's Look Back in Anger, but they are usually re-conceptions or modern interpretations. Few directors want to reconstruct their predecessors' results; they want to create their own. But here was the Living attempting to recreate the production that, in its way, defined mid-century American avant-garde theater, and Judith Malina, the original director, was going to stage it again herself. I sure had to take a shot at that.

Of course, no one can really turn the clock back, and the times have gone by: the original actors are dead or retired, Julian Beck (who designed the original set) is gone, and none of us is as theatrically naïve as the spectators were in the summer of '59. The Living Theatre's old building at 6th Avenue and 14th Street is still standing (it's an eyeglass store now), but the company's moved many times since then, including a five-year self-exile in Europe, so the performance space is different and the Lower East Side in the 2009 isn't Greenwich Village at the end of the 1950s. But maybe something of the old atmosphere remains hovering about the city, like that sweet smell New Yorkers experienced last January, when the revival opened, but couldn't identify until a month later. Maybe there's still a little Proustian magic in the madeleine, and a glimpse of that remarkable experience is possible even in 2009. (And it's not like I can't get lost in a theatrical world, either. I still remember seeing Pat Carroll in GS3 back in June 1980 and literally thinking, as I was watching the performance, "Gee, Stein's a fascinating person. I'm so glad I met her.")

Well, as theater history, a so-called museum production, The Connection was fine, and I'm more than glad to have seen it, even half a century after the fact. I'm trusting Malina, who is 82 now, to have recreated the basic theatrical mise-en-sène of the original staging as much as is possible with a new cast (only one of whom could possibly have even been alive in 1959!) and a different performance space. I have enough of an imagination to conjure up in that little theater offering the whopping great experience with the prompting of Malina's backward glance. I think I can also put myself in the mindset of the less-jaded and theatrically less-well-traveled spectator who sat there in 1959 and had never seen anything like it before. (To be honest, I was a little primed before I walked into the theater on Clinton Street. Having read something of the production when I did the research for the CGAT article--and having pretty much grown up with the notion of the famous Connection because it is part of theater lore--I may have been projecting the show in my imagination onto the one at the Living last winter. What can I do?)

I'll assume that most people know the outline of Gelber's Connection, that "it focused on the lives of heroin-addicted musicians listlessly awaiting their 'connection,' Cowboy" (as I wrote for CGAT) and that a jazz ensemble jammed on and off during the play. The audience is an "invited" bunch allowed to eavesdrop on this bit of "real life," which is an improvised play with producer and playwright in attendance, and a film crew on hand to record the experience. (Now it's a video crew.) The Connection, of course, was never actually improvised: Jack Gelber, who died in 2003, wrote it, after all (and it's published), though some of the dialogue might have been spontaneous‑‑or developed from spontaneity during rehearsals. (The Living had never been an improvisatory troupe up till then, though they later did engage in audience-interaction in some of their performances.) The "real life" witnessed by the spectators on 14th Street wasn't real--the characters were actors, not junkies (though, of course, being both wasn't impossible). There were, in fact, rumors that the cast were real addicts and that real smack was shot up on stage; it wouldn't surprise me if Julian Beck had started those rumors himself to keep the curious coming downtown. There were also reports of spectators fleeing the theater, finding the spectacle a bit too real and too hard to take; in London, audiences booed and shouted. Nothing like that happened down on Clinton Street (but, once again, I could imagine it that way 50 years ago).

There's little, if any, plot in The Connection: the characters wait in Leach's loft for Cowboy to arrive; he arrives; they get high. The end. The drama in The Connection is what everyone does while they wait--first for the dealer, then for the high to take hold. (Malina says that everyone's on a "search for the ecstatic," which the musicians look for in their music, Sister Salvation looks for "in the promise of Redemption," and the junkies in "the flash of the heroin.") They bicker, they philosophize, they confess--often to us, since we're "there"--and each character gets a soliloquy, delivered directly to us. I don't think that was a brand-new concept even in '59--the idea of the audience being literally present for the characters--but it wasn't common. And married to the edginess of the jonesing characters, the doping, and the general seamy alienness of the life they're witnessing up close, it's easy to see how a middle-class audience at the end of the Eisenhower era might find this experience exciting, even disturbing--but The Connection became the Living's most successful and, after Paradise Now, its most iconic performance and, as I noted, has gone down in theater history. (It was also filmed in 1962 and the music, composed by Freddie Redd, was recorded in 1960.)

In 1959, some critics rejected it, some embraced it. Louis Calta of the Times called the play "a farrago of dirt, small-time philosophy, empty talk and extended runs of 'cool' music"; and Walter Kerr in the Herald Tribune said that "the evening produced in me a restive feeling that we are at the end of the road, now, and faced with a choice: We must either return to believing in the possibility of art, which was the point we started at, or abandon the pretense to art altogether." Kenneth Tynan of Harper's Bazaar, the New Yorker, and London's Observer called The Connection "the most memorable theatrical experience at present accessible in New York," while Brooks Atkinson declared it "an engrossing piece of theatre in an obsessive style" that "cannot be ignored" in the Sunday Times. (In 2009, the critics were more united in their dismissal.)

Okay, all that's sort of prologue. As a contemporary theater experience, we got problems. Most of them are predictable and probably insurmountable, given the passage of time. As for the script, for example, it's hard to get exercised about junkie artists in our midst. After the '60s, with the deaths of so many from overdoses (Joplin, Hendrix, Morrison) and the celebrity junkies of the ensuing decades (Amy Winehouse, anyone?), it's just not shocking anymore. We've all lived too much since the '50s. The wasted lives, the days spent waiting for a fix or a high--well, even broadcast TV has that story in prime time a couple of times a week. (Hell, there's been a dope-dealing suburban mom on cable once a week for the past four years! Another cable net has a reality show of addiction interventions--though I can't imagine why anyone'd want to watch it!) Nothing anyone says in The Connection is shocking anymore. We've heard it all, sometimes in our own homes. Nothing Malina could have done, short of rewriting Gelber from scratch, could have changed that. (The characters don't shoot up on stage, by the way; it's done off stage, in the bathroom. That kind of mid-century squeamishness has passed, too: even the BBC's Sherlock Holmes series showed the great detective injecting himself with cocaine on screen.)

Then, theatrically: the concept of the "improvised" play, even the fake-improvised play, isn't new anymore, either. Plays with music aren't innovative now; they're commonplace: Sam Shepard did it in 1972 in The Tooth of Crime, for instance. Playing to a real audience is also a technique many companies have used or experimented with (Leo Shapiro, an avant-garde director I’ve written about, made it a hallmark of his work), just like confessional direct-address--on which entire Broadway (and HBO) performances have been based. All of the scary-fascinating new ideas for theater that Malina and Gelber originally incorporated in their production concept have become standard (which, of course, is why The Connection is historically significant). I don't know if you can go home again, but you can't run the clock back for real. The Connection is no longer an experience of unique impact; it is just a tribute. It's a little like comparing the first time I heard The Beatles sing "Hello Goodbye" in 1967 and hearing the current cover of the song by the Jonas Brothers: they sound a lot alike, but the impact isn't there.

Unhappily, though, it's not just the passage of the decades that damaged The Connection. Malina intended the current production to be present-day, not a glimpse into the late '50s. There were references to Starbucks, cell phones, and the current resident of the White House (unnamed, but clearly alluded to), not to mention the appearance of the afore-mentioned digital video camera. So, on top of all the other lost flashpoints, we have some anachronisms that drain the play of its full power. First, in 2009, the drug the junkies are waiting around for probably wouldn't be heroin--or at least not exclusively heroin. My inclination would be crack or meth, considering the demography of the group. (Cocaine would probably be out of their financial reach, as would pharmaceuticals.) Second, the music that would surround a bunch of 20-something dopers would less likely be jazz these days than rock. (The ensemble was a bass, a sax, drums, and a piano. Today there would probably be an electronic keyboard and electric bass in for the piano and strings. And, by the way, I'm not even gonna start wondering where the piano and drum set came from. Okay, maybe Leach has a piano in his pad, but does the drummer carry all his drums with him when he goes to someone's place to wait for his dealer?) Jazz is almost too high-toned now to fit the atmosphere of Gelber's world. The Man with the Golden Arm was 1955; if they made it today, the Sinatra character would be a rocker (and he'd be doing coke, crack, or meth). If you're gonna update, I think you hafta update, man. No half measures.

(Despite the updating, Gary Brackett--variously designated Director of Production and Director of Design--put a hula hoop on the wall of the loft, much to the consternation of the Times's Isherwood, who wondered why no one hula'd. Also, in the one truly absurdist moment--well, two: it was repeated in the second act--an unnamed man strode into the loft carrying a small case. Everyone stopped talking and watched as he opened the case to reveal a Victrola, plugged it into a light socket, and played a jazz 45. It wasn't an iPod, a CD-player, or even a tape-player, but an old-fashioned portable turntable. And a 45, to boot! So, is it real--present day--or is it Memorex--the '50s?)

I don't know if a '50s setting would have worked better--we spectators having been invited up to see an improvised play set a half century ago--but there might have been less time-bending that way. Other problems wouldn't have been so easily solved, and Judith Malina has to take responsibility for these. It's the acting, folks. Now, none of the actors was bad, but none was really more than competent. (I won't single out or name most of the actors because this was an ensemble performance and it was the group as a whole that failed. Isherwood did mention a couple of the cast members specially, but I don't feel that's warranted.) I imagine they'd all have done well enough in a conventional play, even a classic. But the fake improvisation and the audience-engagement didn't come anywhere near off. Everyone was so . . . well, actorly. This was especially so in the soliloquies each character has, when he (there are no women in the gang; the only female character is Sister Salvation, played by Malina herself) addresses us, and we're supposed to feel he's talking to us straight. But nothing in these moments seemed the least spontaneous or organic. The "producer," Jim Dunn (Tom Walker), was perhaps the worst: he seemed exactly like an actor playing a director in a sketch. As the "playwright," Jaybird (as in "naked as a . . ."?), Gelber's stand-in, Eric Olson was awkward and uncomfortable, as if he didn't know his lines or his cues or something. One of the cameramen (Isaac Scranton) kept saying, "That's the way it is. That's the way it really is." It's supposed to be a true expression of realization and bare-faced reaction but it sounded more like the mantra of the painter George Frederick Watts in Virginia Woolf’s Freshwater (which I saw a few weeks earlier last winter by the Women’s Project): "The Utmost for the Highest"--a hollow, meaningless phrase. The musicians were good as a band, but as characters, they were no better than the actors. (Their musical performances were terrific, but that was a problem for me, too. They weren't jamming while hanging around waiting for their fixes; they were performing. I never decided if they were supposed to be just noodling on their instruments because that's what musicians do when they're idle or if the virtuosity of their playing was another of Gelber's absurdist aspects, like the Victrola man and Sister Salvation. To enhance the improvisatory dynamic of the play, I think I'd have gone with the jam-session approach. Although, the absurdist take might "explain" the availability of the piano and the drum set . . . .) I don't know if Malina cast actors who couldn't handle the style of the script, or if she misdirected them. Either way, it's her fault.

The rest of the production went along with the foregoing: The set was too neat, and I don't mean in the sense of cleanliness. Leach says he keeps his place clean, but the walls weren't worn or marred, nothing was especially distressed; a tablecloth he spread on a table to cut up a pineapple looked as if it might have just come from K-Mart. (By the way, aren't pineapples slightly expensive as far as fresh fruit goes? These guys have no money--few of them have jobs.) The costumes were the same. Sam wore open-laced combat boots, but they didn't look like they ever touched pavement. Everyone was suitably sloppy, but more like frat boys than wasted junkies. (They were all clean-shaven, too--an anomaly in these days of the scruffy look even in the chicest of surroundings!) Nary a wrinkle could be detected, much less a tatter or a stain. (Mom may not like her boy's wardrobe, but she keeps it laundered, ironed, and mended!) I've seen pictures of the MAT's production of The Lower Depths that looked grottier than this set and its inhabitants. It all just supported the sense that this Connection was all fake. Whatever the problems inherent in the 50-year-old script, this was unnecessary.

So, as a piece of theater history, okay; as a piece of theater, what a downer. I guess nothing's authentic anymore, not even the Living Theatre.

[There was one line that has been annoying me since I saw the show. I wasn’t sure if it was an author's error, an actor's error, or a character's error. (Later I had a look at the published script, and that’s what Gelber wrote. So it’s either a playwright’s error or a character error.) Solly, the group's philosopher and thinker, played by Anthony Sisco, goes on in two bits about the speed of light. He says several times that it's "186,000 miles per second, per second." Now, I haven't taken physics or anything like it since junior year in high school (don't ask when that was!), but I remember that "per second, per second" (or "per second squared") is not a measure of speed; it's a measure of acceleration. It's not how fast something goes, but how fast it goes faster. Anachronisms are one thing; factual mistakes are something else again.]

'Der Illegale'

A couple of months ago, the New York Times ran a short article reminiscing about Colonel Rudolf Abel, the famous Soviet spy of the 1950s who was caught and then exchanged for Francis Gary Powers (1929-77), the downed U-2 spy pilot. 

When I was in the army back in the early ’70s, I was a counterintelligence officer stationed in West Berlin. Now, I was never involved in a case quite as dramatic or famous as the Colonel Abel capture, but when I attended the Bundeswehr intel school, I did discover something interesting in that line. 

I was a member of MAD Spezial Lehrgruppe “Abwehroperation” für Offiziere (MAD Special Class “Counterintelligence Operations” for Officers), a two-part course from 20 June to 7 July and 26 September to 13 October 1972. (MAD was the Militärischer Abschirmdienst, the military counterintelligence service of the Bundeswehr [the Federal Republic’s armed forces]. Military Intelligence Branch, in which I served, is solely army intel, but MAD was an all-service organization. It is now called the Amt für Sicherheit der Bundeswehr—the office for the security of the Bundeswehr.) 

I had been sent as a guest-officer to the MAD-Schule in the little hot-water spa of Bad Ems, across the Rhine from Koblenz, the town I had lived in ten years before as a teenager. (I got a little nostalgic trip “home” thrown in. I planned my arrival so I could spend the night in Koblenz—at a Pension right by the Deutsches Eck, down the Rheinanlagen from where we used to live—so I could check out the town and then report to the MAD-Schule fresh and in uniform the next morning.) 

I was one of two U.S. Army officers in the class, the other being a captain from Munich, our unit HQ. The rest of the class were German army, navy, and Luftwaffe officers, mostly majors and lieutenant colonels or lieutenant commanders and commanders, and that was an experience. I don’t mean the classes—they were interesting, of course, but purely from a professional perspective, nothing amusing. 

Going to class in German, especially an esoteric class like intel, was a trip, but it was a terrific exercise for me. The German officers—who were all older than both the captain and I—were rather astonished to find that we could get on so well in German. (Germans love the idea of foreigners learning their language. They’re much less jealous of it than the French are of their mother tongue.) And that’s where the revelations started. 

I’m assuming that this bunch was pretty much typical—I don’t see why they wouldn’t be. The school was its own facility in Bad Ems on the banks of the Lahn (Bad means ‘bath’ in German; all towns with that in their names are or were thermal spas)—there was no military base to which it was attached like the Armor School at Ft. Knox or the Intel School at either Holabird or Huachuca. (Even the language school I attended in Monterey, California, was at the Presidio, a satellite of the huge Ft. Ord on the other side of town.) 

So we had a little mess—decent food, by the way—and an O-club. Well, a bar. After classes, we’d all gather there for drinks and conversation—everyone was very gemütlich (an untranslatable word which here is best rendered as ‘convivial’)—and then we’d return after dinner. 

Man, could those German officers drink! My American colleague gave up trying to keep up with them pretty quickly—they kept buying rounds, and you can’t really say no. (Well, you can, but I was in my middle 20's, so I just wasn’t gonna.) 

So I’m drinking mine . . . and his to keep the Germans from feeling slighted. And not only are they buying round after round, but they keep changing liquor. (They even drank some bourbon, in deference to us Americans. I’m surprised they had any in stock. 

They also bought a round of Ratzeputz, a German liqueur I had experienced in my earlier days in the country. The name means something like “cleans out your gut” and it’ll eat the enamel off your teeth. It’s pretty vile.) Okay, so we’re all getting pretty plastered—nothing rude, but loose. We’re comparing backgrounds and home lives and so on, and then the Germans start to sing. 

Now, these guys weren’t all in the same service as I said, or from the same part of the country, but they all knew the same songs. And they knew them all the way through. They asked us to sing some American songs, and do you know that between the two of us, we didn’t know one song together through to the end? 

Germany is a singing society—or it was until that generation, at least. They would sing when they got together. (Russians are like that, too.) We just don’t. (The French don’t either much, but the English do a little and I think the Aussies are singers. And the Irish and the Welsh—well, they sing at the merest suggestion!) 

While I was in Bad Ems, a three-part TV movie, Der Illegale: Biografie eines Spions (the link is in German; use the computer’s translator), aired on German television. Der Illegale was based on a true story and was amazingly accurate in terms of “tradecraft,” as it’s called in most spy novels. The miniseries aired on ZDF—Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen—on Sunday, Wednesday, and Saturday evenings, 1, 4, and 7 October. 

(The title means “The illegal agent: biography of a spy”; spookdom distinguishes between legal agents, those with at least an ostensible reason for being in the host country—trade representatives, exchange students, embassy and consular employees, tourist or airline agents—and illegal agents, those who use false identities, forged documents, and other deceptions to gain entry into the host country.) 

The whole MAD class gathered in the O-club for the three evenings and watched as avidly as if it were a training film. For the German officers, this was the world in which they were working! In fact, since these guys were all senior officers, some of them might well have been active MAD lieutenants or captains when the real case had occurred. 

The story of Der Illegale, written by Henry Kolarz (1927-2001), directed by Günter Gräwert (1930-96), and starring Götz George (1938-2016) and Vera Tschechowa (1940-2024), is of a Russian-born ethnic German, Nikolai Grunwaldt, who is recruited at a very young age by the KGB. Nikolai is rigorously trained and then married to a female agent, Katharina Feldmann. 

He is then inserted into West Germany by one of the commonest means used, even as late as my day. He’s sent across the East-West border as a refugee and upon arriving in West Germany, he merely declares his “right of return”—any ethnic German by law was eligible to become a West German citizen by simply declaring his desire to become one. 

The Soviets and East Germans sent thousands of people across just this way—criminals, prostitutes, various other undesirables, old-age pensioners (so the West would have to pick up the tab) . . . and spies. It was easy—no muss, no fuss. (I encountered this tactic myself many times in the two-and-a-half years I worked in Berlin.) 

Most refugees had no ID documents so they just made up an identity (Nikolai, for example, becomes Kurt Blohm), which became “real” as soon as the West German authorities issued new documents in that name for their new citizen. Voilà: instant cover. 

“Kurt” then gets jobs in the French embassy in Bonn and then at NATO in Cologne and begins copying documents. Here’s the interesting part, from the tradecraft point of view: how Nikolai gets back and forth to meet with his handlers in Moscow. 

He simply gets on a plane and flies to West Berlin. Any German could do that without passport or international travel documents because the West Germans treated travel to and from West Berlin as internal travel—there were no customs controls, and no record. 

Then he goes down into the S-Bahn, the commuter rail service that was controlled by the East (the U-Bahn was the city subway system, controlled by the West; both systems, which predated the war, crossed under the Wall), and rides to Friedrichstrasse in East Berlin. There are no borders to cross so far, and no guards, no controls, and no records. It’s just like flying from D.C. to New York and getting on the subway to Brooklyn. 

The only tricky part is at Friedrichstrasse, because there are guards and gates to control the access in and out of East Berlin—but if you’re a KGB agent, you have a prearranged exit gate with a guard who knows you’re coming, and he lets you through with no questions. 

Then you take a cab to Schönefeld, the East Berlin airport, get on a flight to Moscow—again, no record or documents because you’re under Soviet control now—and make your meeting at KGB HQ. Then reverse the process and you’re back in Cologne and no one’s the wiser; you’ve just been away for the weekend. 

That’s exactly how it really happened—and exactly how easy it was to do. (Now you see why there were so many spies in Berlin, Cold War Europe’s Espionage Central. It was like Grand Central Station for Europe: you could go anywhere, in either direction, east or west, with so little trouble.) 

The plot of the show isn’t really important here—“Kurt” copies documents in both his jobs and carries the copies to Moscow—so I’ll just cut to the chase: Nikolai falls in love with his wife (!) and wants the gig in Moscow he was promised so his son can go to school at home. 

When the KGB reneges and assigns him to some place like South America, Nikolai looks up the CIA station chief in Berlin in the KGB files and makes one of his surreptitious trips to Berlin. But instead of crossing over to East Berlin, he contacts the CIA in West Berlin and defects, with the promise that they’ll also bring his wife and son out. 

The miniseries was a terrific program. Even just as a story, it was a good film: a sort of German Spy Who Came in from the Cold for the ’70s—very in tune with the Cold War times I was witnessing. I don’t think any of the actors became internationally known, but they were excellent. 

The series was, as I said, also very accurate with respect to the tradecraft and I decided that if it could be acquired and properly dubbed or subtitled, it would make an excellent training film for MI agents. 

Everything in the film was either historically true or, at the very least, possible with the technology and methods then in use. (The TV show used several real, even state-of-the-art spy techniques and practices, including a hand-held copier that was a technological innovation we'd only heard about in ’72!) And it was all excellently done for the film. 

One reason for this accuracy, I think, was that, as I said, the film was based on a real case. I knew that when we saw the broadcast in Bad Ems; the series was considered a Dokumentarspiel, a “docudrama.” I even learned, when I got back home to Berlin, that one of our DAC’s (Department of the Army civilian) had been involved in the defection. But I either never learned the name of the defecting spy or I forgot it in the ensuing decades. 

After I wrote up a memoir of the time I spent in Berlin a few years ago, I set about seeing if I could put together enough information to search out the real case and learn the story of the actual espionage adventure that led to the movie. 

(That memoir started as a five-message e-mail series I sent to a friend in 2005.  I reformatted it as an eight-part post, “Berlin Memoir,” that I posted on an irregular schedule in 2016 and 2017.  The first segment was posted on 16 December 2016, and then each part is linked to the next at the bottom of the installment.)

Bit by bit through November and December 2008, adding a small fact or a name each time I discovered it, I was able to gather together the outlines of the story as published in public records, without delving into government agency files or doing primary-source research in old documents. Here’s what I learned, and it’s amazingly similar to the story of Der Illegale, with only the smallest details changed, mostly for obvious dramatic effect. 

On 10 October 1967, just under four years before I arrived in Berlin (and five years to the week before the series aired), the CIA managed the skillful extrication from Moscow of Yevgeny (‘Eugen’ in German) Runge, 39, a KGB lieutenant colonel of German ethnicity who, under the cover identity Willi Gast, had led a spy network in West Germany since 1955. Runge, code-named ‘Max’ (or ‘Maks’ in Russian), defected in Berlin with his wife, Walentina, and his 8-year-old son, Andrei, just as Nikolai had in the TV series. 

After I identified the spy-defector so I had something to search, I tried to track down some of the history of the Runge case. There are scattered references around the ’Net, including some books that cover the period, the field of intel, and the Cold War in Germany. (The New York Times coverage, of course, ends shortly after Runge's defection, so it doesn’t say anything about what happened to him later.) 

The difficulty was that Runge is not an uncommon name in Germany and the man's first name has various spellings depending on how it's transliterated from Russian (Evgeny, Yevgeny, Evgeni, etc.—even Jewgenij, the German spelling of his Russian name), not to mention his German name, Eugen. (Then there’s also the question of whether or not to include his middle initial: Y—for Yevgenyevich.) 

I looked for sites in German, of course, but, as for Runge’s Russian name, as I’ve mentioned before, my computer isn’t equipped to handle Cyrillic well at all. 

(From what I was able to tell in my limited search, the German press didn't have more coverage of the case than the U.S. press did. Runge defected to the CIA and was brought to the U.S. almost immediately. We shared some info with the West Germans, but they didn't have access to Runge before he was brought here.) 

The books I found are fairly recent (late '90's for the most part), but they don't include much detail, or mention Runge's fate after he turned CIA informant in 1967. The rest of his record, however, seems to be thus: 

Runge, a "Volga German," was born on 8 March 1928 in Novo-Solenoye, the Ukraine, but raised in what became East Germany and, like the character in the TV show (who was ethnically German but born and raised in Russia), was spotted early and recruited and trained as an adolescent before being inserted into West Germany. 

Runge went to school in Russia until 1941, he said, the year the Wehrmacht occupied eastern Europe. The Soviet authorities deported his father and sister to Siberia, but the young Runge remained in German-occupied territory. 

The Germans sent Runge to eastern Germany as forced labor near the end of the war. He remained under German control until 1945 when the war front moved west back into Germany and the Soviet army occupied eastern Germany. The 19-year-old worked as an interpreter at the Soviet military headquarters in eastern Germany until he was returned with others from the German territory to a camp in Vologda in northern Russia. 

Runge escaped, however, and went back to eastern Germany, working again as a translator. When the Soviet authorities told him, “You can’t stay here,” he moved to the Soviet-occupied sector of Berlin where he lived under an assumed identity; he retained his actual name, but he asserted that he was born in Germany. 

Runge maintained his false identity until 1948 when he contacted the Soviet embassy to effect his repatriation to Russia and between 1948 and 1949, he began studying at Humboldt University in what became East Berlin (the German Democratic Republic was declared in 1949). 

The young student was recruited there in 1949, when he was all of 21, by the MVD (the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the forerunner of the KGB) on an “unofficial” basis. He finished his studies in 1954 and became a member of the Deutsche Einheitspartei (the German Unity Party, the official name of East Germany’s communist party) and received new identity documents as a Russian citizen. 

The KGB (which took its new name, the Committee for State Security, that same year) helped Runge with school and living expenses and got him a place to live, and after he graduated from Humboldt, formally signed their new agent up as a “junior” (i.e., second) lieutenant. 

Runge trained for five years before he was inserted in the West in 1955. He operated there for 12 years. 

Exactly like the TV character, Runge's first target was the French embassy in Bonn where his main focus had been NATO documents and plans. (France was still a participant in NATO’s military alliance in those years. France withdrew from the military part of NATO in 1966.) 

The spy in the movie was a loner, which was part of the psychology of his character, of course—he was alone except for his small family. Runge, however, ran a ring of spies and penetrated the French embassy through the work of another agent. 

He communicated with the KGB by written reports, on one-time pads and in code, which he mailed to an accommodation address in Vienna. When an agent in Runge’s circle was arrested, Runge’s handlers brought him back to Moscow briefly in 1967 for “operational reasons” in case he had been burned. 

When it was clear he hadn’t been, the KGB reassigned him to Frankfurt, the headquarters of the U.S. Army in Europe. Runge also began to prepare for an assignment in the United States, including a two-year temporary assignment while he learned more English among other new skills. 

Also like the TV character, Runge was married and had a son. Like Nikolai, too, he had married his wife on KGB orders. Walentina was an East German citizen, but had also been recruited by the KGB when she was in school. Furthermore, two of the agents Runge ran (who also became infamous spies and were among five Western sources arrested after his defection) were a couple, the Sütterlins. 

Heinz Sütterlin (1924-2025), who had a reputation as a “ladies’ man” (the United Press International dubbed him a “male Mata Hari”), had also married his wife, Leonore, because the KGB had ordered him to.  

Leonore (1928-67), whose cover name was “Lore” and who became known as “Rote Lore” (“Red Lore”), had gotten NATO documents from her job at the German defense ministry.  She committed suicide in her cell four days after her arrest by hanging herself with her pajamas.  She was reportedly distressed when she learned that Heinz had married her on KGB instructions.

In the TV show, Nikolai wants to go back to Moscow and educate his son in a Russian school and defects when the KGB reneges on its promise to repatriate him. Runge wanted to return with his family to East Germany, but the KGB assigned him to Bulgaria, so he engineered the defection in Berlin. (One report said that the Soviets wanted to make Runge’s son stay in Moscow as a “hostage.”) 

I don’t know if Runge’s still alive now (he’d be over 80), but he was brought to the U.S. within a few days after his defection in Berlin.  Right after he was transported to here, Runge was granted political asylum in the U.S. and he and his family were settled in an undisclosed “safe house” under CIA protection.  

Andrei, the Runge’s young son, who had been using the alias “Gast” provided by Soviet intelligence, found it challenging to adjust to his real name.  He played with the children of CIA employees.

Runge underwent many months of continuous interrogation by Western intelligence officials to gather information on Soviet espionage operations.  He provided a detailed account of his life as a Soviet spy, including his training as an illegal agent and his cover as a vending-machine dealer in West Germany.

After becoming a CIA asset, Runge and his family were expected to live under new identities in an undisclosed location in the United States.  (One report out of London asserted that the Soviet Union had “passed a death sentence” on the defecting KGB lieutenant colonel.)  He had possibly gotten a new appearance as well.  

He had revealed many espionage secrets of the KGB and the eastern bloc.  According to some members of the U.S. intelligence community, Runge’s defection was “the most important catch of a Communist operative since World War II.” 

I haven't found any reference that the miniseries is available on video here anywhere. As I said, I recall that it was really a good show, very well acted and extremely accurate in terms of the tradecraft and technology it displayed (for the day, of course). You know it must have been pretty good if I still remember it, even as poorly as I do, after 37 years. 

I probably wouldn’t have been able to find as much of the real history behind the miniseries as I have had I tried 30 years ago, before the Internet and all the connections it has provided. (The author of one of the books, Battleground Berlin by David E. Murphy, cites several government documents, including CIA memos and so on, to which I wouldn’t have gotten access, so the information, except what I might have found in the New York Times through its index, would have been hard to identify, locate, and access.) 

So, oddly, the fact that this TV series stayed with me for so long and resurfaced in my memory all these years later was a boon: it allowed me to piece together a rudimentary history of the actual subject of the plot of the TV show that had intrigued me for so long.