The Radio Operator

THE RADIO OPERATOR
Ulla Lenze
HarperCollins

REVIEWED BY PETER STUPPLES

The ‘hero’ of Lenze’s novel, Josef Klein, is small in stature, modest in achievements and, as the book progresses, tries repeatedly to disappear from his current life. Joseph is born into a working-class family in Neuss, near Dusseldorf. He is regularly beaten by his brutal father. He emigrates to New York in the late 1920s to escape family violence and a country in post-war chaos, only to arrive as the United States sinks into the Great Depression.

Klein experiences the life of the immigrant, without capital, taking temporary work, living in slum apartments, often going hungry, facing prejudice. He settles, with other Germans, in Yorkville, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where he falls into the company of shady characters associated with a wide range of alt-right groups supporting the Fascist turn in their homeland under Hitler’s Nazis.

Klein’s only interest, outside survival, is in the construction of radios and the life of a ham scanning the waves, where he comes across a fellow enthusiast Lauren, who becomes on and off, his female companion and moral compass.

Life changes for Klein in 1939, when he drifts into working for a group of German intelligence gathering and disseminating agents. His radio skills become useful to them. The German-American Bund holds a notorious rally in Madison Square Gardens in New York in February 1939, with swastika banners and heil salutes. Klein is there but realises the dangerous nature of his association with the secret agents and wants out. They beat him up, forcing him to continue his radio work but, under Lauren’s guidance, he hands himself over to the FBI.

As a reward, instead of being executed for treason, Joseph serves time for the rest of the war in jail, followed by deportation, in 1949, back to Germany. He finds life back in Neuss grim. Without papers, he has no job prospects. He feels burdened by his own ambivalent past: He seems to be stepping into shame, to be sinking into it.

With the help of former Fascist colleagues, he makes his way to Argentina on false papers, intent on the impossible mission of returning to New York, the only place he ever found a modicum of happiness. 

Disgusted with the Germans in Argentina - ‘‘cowardly, without remorse’’ - he escapes to Costa Rica, still trying to shake off the dirt of ever present shame for his own behaviour and that of Germans of his generation.

Lenze’s novel conveys a sense of the conflicting loyalties to incompatible ideas that characterised the lives of so many Germans of Joseph Klein’s generation. She makes no judgement, but rather sets out the row of poison chalices from which Joseph tastes and recoils. It is a painful novel, sensitively told and based upon Lenze’s research and her own mother’s memories.

Peter Stupples, now living in Wellington, used to teach at the University of Otago