Cat and Mouse, Where Everyone's a Mouse, (and a Cat)

This is the sort of book that tempts you to overanalyze and overdescribe. At bottom, though, it seems to me that our hero, Zeiger, and East Germany, should just be viewed as interchangeable. Zeiger embodies and manifests all of that country's weaknesses and contradictions, and Zeiger's status as a Stasi agent means he embodies especially all of the darkest aspects and instincts of East Germany. The book is set on one day, November 9, 1989, which is the day the Berlin Wall came down and East Germany began to disappear. As you might expect, that was also the day when Zeiger's mental walls finally cracked and came down and he began to disappear.

We follow Zeiger through his day, with flashbacks, betrayals, mysteries, absurd events, cryptic conversations, and so on. All of the incidents of that day - real, imagined, magical, mystical, and inexplicable - mirror what is happening on the ground in East Germany. As everything falls apart, and as all of the rottenness is exposed - so it is with East Germany and with Zeiger. There are some remarkable and impressive set pieces, and memorable asides and passing descriptions and observations, but it is the irresistible tide of collapse that will stay with you.

Of course there are lots of ways for an author to approach this sort of thing. Here, we start out grim and bleak and hyper-realistic. The day slowly deteriorates and Zeiger slowly deteriorates, and as this happens the writing becomes more disjointed and fabulous. What was especially interesting, at least to me, is that the grim and bleak grayness and despair of everyone and everything carried through the entire book, and even informed the end. Bleak magical realism is hard to write, and sometimes hard to read, but this was so well and memorably done that you'll feel like you have to warm your hands when you set this book down.

So, this is one of those books that is fun to read, rewarding to think about, and challenging to talk and write about. But tell no one else unless you're absolutely sure you can trust them.

(Please note that I received a free ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

I was very much looking forward to reading Jennifer Hofmann's The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures. It sounded like a Kafka-esque story of a bureaucrat caught in the cogs of his own bureaucratic system. That is true of the story; it definitely hearkens to Kafka, especially in the early going. Bernd Zeiger established his place in the Stasi with his manual "The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures," but now at the end of his career, his relevance is tenuous.



Zieger uses his resources to try to track down Lara, a young lady with whom he crossed paths and became obsessed with. Like many East Berliners, she is missing. The government doesn't want to admit that East Germans are fleeing the country, but the allure of the West is too strong for many living under communism. The story of his search becomes flashbacks, and flashbacks during flashbacks, building a twisted chain of events that eventually will turn Zeiger's methods back on him.



In the same vein as Kafka's fiction, Hofmann's story give a glimpse into life in East Berlin in the post WW2 era, right up to the fall of the Berlin wall. The story itself didn't grip me, and the cultural and historical material took a back seat to the story. There were some interesting twists, but ultimately I was disappointed.





Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!

On the surface, the absurd and the surreal seem self-indulgent. Works in this group are highly self-referential. They only make sense if you forget everything outside of the work. You have to forget reality to understand them. Jennifer Hofmann’s haunting novel, The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures, is a good example of why we need surrealism. As Kafka, Magritte, and the rest knew, sometimes the only way to communicate the insanity of daily modern life is to create something just as insane.

Bernd Zeiger is a very ordinary man living in a very insane country. His entire adult life, Bernd has worked for Management—an organization that is clearly the Stasi. The Stasi, along with the East German government, created what I’ve heard called the most surveilled nation in world history. Zeiger’s first major assignment was to work with a psychiatrist to create a manual that would utterly demoralize and disorient targets of the state government. As the novel opens, Zeiger is at a press conference watching another agent give an announcement all according to the manual. The other agent dresses dully, speaks dully, and uses deeply dull bureaucratic language even as he talks about increasing demonstrations around the country. We have the benefit of knowing that East Germany is in its final days. Zeiger, however, and the rest of his comrades believe that the state will march on into the foreseeable future.

The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures quickly evolves from this relatively comprehensible beginning into layers of strange adventures. Zeiger roves East Berlin, searching for a lost girl who caught his fancy, only to fall prey to memories of the worst thing Zeiger ever did and to the machinations of other Management agents who are caught up in their own existential death spirals. Evens grow increasingly bizarre as Zeiger finds out that he’s being spied on by his colleagues, who want to find out what Zeiger knows about a man Zeiger helped incarcerate around the time he finished the infamous manual.

In other hands, this novel might have been a story about a man realizing that he’d hurt people in service to a country that didn’t deserve his loyalty. (If you’d like to see that story, I strongly recommend The Lives of Others.) Instead, it’s a story about a group of men who go down with the ship. They’ve been so warped by Management (using Zeiger’s manual) that they can’t imagine a world without the state. They can’t conceive of it ever ending. Fittingly enough, The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures concludes in a mental hospital.

This novel is a deeply unsettling read, full of paranoia and weirdness. Readers who like to shake off sanity for a little while and dive into surrealism to see what they can learn should enjoy this one. I’d also recommend it to readers who are curious about what life was like just on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

The tone of this novel captures the isolation and alienation of life in the surveillance state of East Germany. It’s (mostly) set just before the Berlin Wall fell, so you do see cracks in the tight controls over the populace. People are heading in droves for Hungary and Czechoslovakia, which allows them to seek asylum in consulates of western countries, or to slip over the border into Austria. Criticism of the state is heard more, which is saying something considering that Zeiger, the main character, is an agent for the Stasi, the state security bureau, and that’s not exactly a big secret among his neighbors and the places he frequents.

I picked this book because I’ve always been fascinated by East Germany, and East Berlin in particular. It’s such a strange situation, to go from a totalitarian Nazi regime to communist rule, especially communist rule dominated by the Russians. And to live right next to other Germans in the west, who live completely differently. It had to do a number on people’s heads.

And Zeiger does seem like a head case, more and more as the novel goes on. The author of the eponymous manual for the Stasi (which the novel calls Management) to use to break down subjects, he is breaking down himself, and especially so on the one day that takes up nearly all of the novel’s action. His thoughts are focused on Lara, a young waitress at his regular lunch spot. Lara has been missing for awhile. At around the book’s halfway mark, there is a long story about a young physicist named Held, who was imprisoned and tortured by the Stasi after he returned from a research trip to the US, in Arizona. This occurred early in Zeiger’s career and has had a profound effect on his psyche. Though the Held history is key to later plot developments, the description of Held’s time in Arizona seems too long. Held’s whole Arizona experience seems so bizarre, too, that it doesn’t feel realistic. I suppose that’s part of the absurdist tone of the novel, but it didn’t impress me favorably.

I’m concerned that this novel will not make much sense to anyone who isn’t fairly knowledgeable about East Germany, the Stasi and, in particular, the events leading up to the end of the Berlin Wall in November, 1989. The word Stasi isn’t even specifically mentioned until well over halfway through the book, despite the fact that Zeiger is a Stasi agent. There are oblique references to the increasing numbers leaving East Germany via neighboring Iron Curtain neighbors, and there are also references to people like Schabowski, long before you get to the part where he is unwittingly instrumental in causing the Wall to come down.

I thought the book was an interesting study of the toll on the main character’s mental state his service to totalitarianism caused. However, it was too obscure much of the time and I think it will have difficulty finding an audience.

Thanks to NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for an egalley in exchange for an honest review.

Well, this summer read will certainly stand out for its ability to go in a direction that I didn't see coming. We are introduced to Bernrd Zeiger, a Stasi officer who seems to be in ailing health and is fixated on the disappearance of a coffee shop waitress named Lara. Who is Lara? What does Zeiger want with her? What exactly was Zeiger involved in?

Although the story seems like it will be a straight forward cold war spy thriller, it veered off in a direction that encourages readers to use their imaginations. It certainly leads to a memorable debut for Jennifer Hofmann and there is a quirkiness to the characters and the writing that makes even the darkest moments seem light.


Goodreads review published 21/07/20






#TheStandardizationofDemoralizationProcedures #NetGalley

Okay this was not even remotely what the blurb led me to expect it would be... There is some snark and witticism here, I will give Hofmann that. But the references in the blurb to secrets and lies and fast pacing and child war spy classics and paranormal investigations and flashbacks all got subsumed by a mind-numbing attention to detail that made me feel like I myself was reading the eponymous demoralization principles... This one just was not for me.