The Fire above the Mountain

Berlin, October 2012: a woman has gone missing. The detective superintendent in charge of the investigation findsTheresa at her parent’s grave; she’s spent two full days and nights sitting in the snow, telling them her story – a story of the Cold Peace that followed the end of the Cold War and the Reunification.

Theresa is born in East Germany and grows up with foster parents because her real parents have been imprisoned as dissidents. In the 1970s, working as a historian, she ma-nages to obtain access to GDR secret archives, where she is confronted with disturbing, almost implausible documents. Theresa finds herself condemned forever to the sidelines because what she has discovered is extremely dangerous - even after the Fall of the Wall.
In this virtuoso novel, Reinhard Jirgl lifts the lid on an unknown facet of German history: the major bureaucratic re-organisation commonly known as "the turnaround"-a reorganisation that in fact left much intact which was assumed long gone. The old boy networks and nepotism, the cliques, out-dated organisations and deep-seated enmities. Yesterday hasn`t relinquished its hold - the past has become part of the present. Reinhard Jirgl "arguably the most important author in contemporary German literature" (Die Zeit) describes the continuing domination of the past over the present - and the murderers over their victims.