The Fechtner Case: When a mysterious fall from a window in Leipzig in 1986 becomes the subject of a novel about a fruitless search

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How does one tell a story that ultimately cannot be substantiated by documents, because they were destroyed? Or falsified, tailored to ensure that the death of a Bonn civil servant on a business trip to Leipzig was not classified as a murder case? And yet still caused a stir? In *The Fechtner Case*, Katrin Reiser does indeed tell the ‘true story of a fall from a window’ that took place in Leipzig on 23 June 1986. The story of her father, slightly altered. Ultimately, it can only be told as a novel because the files are silent.

Or are full of gaps, as if someone had deliberately made precisely those reports disappear that could have shed light on the mysterious death of Alfons Reiser, who – allegedly heavily intoxicated – fell from a window of the ‘Astoria’ hotel.

Katrin Reiser, a historian with a PhD, has tried to shed light on her father’s death. A life’s work, as she herself notes. Over the years, she has gathered a wealth of circumstantial evidence and witness statements pointing to an unnatural cause of death, if not a Stasi murder. Yet, despite all her research, she must have found herself in a situation very similar to that of Benjamin Fechtner, whom she has embarking on a search for the truth in her novel. Only late in the day, as if the circumstances of his father’s death had not interested him until then.

Not even when his sister Karolin began searching for files on her father’s death as early as the 1990s.

But she couldn’t find much. And the Ministry of Agriculture, for which Hans Fechtner worked, stonewalled anyway, hiding behind official secrecy. Which it still does ten years later, when Benjamin – startled by a phone call – begins to search for information about his father’s death himself. Little did he realise that in doing so he would also reawaken his own trauma. For although he still remembers how he reacted as an eleven-year-old boy when two unknown men delivered the news to his mother,

The silence

But he had suppressed the fact that the loss of his beloved father had completely derailed him as a young man. Out of necessity. Not least because his mother never wanted to talk about it again. So this is also the story of a trauma that Katrin Reiser tells here. Except that Benjamin can no longer bear the silence and is literally dogged in his search for the truth.

If the Stasi files reveal nothing apart from four ridiculous sheets of paper about his father, then perhaps the forensic reports might help. They, too, are treated as classified information.

We witness how Benjamin keeps coming up against brick walls with officials in Leipzig, Bonn and Berlin, who treat the ‘Fechtner case’ as a sensitive classified matter, only reluctantly handing over documents. And continuing to stonewall. At the Ministry of Agriculture, at the public prosecutor’s office – which, in the end, failed to investigate even after 1990. It is as though the interest in solving this case, even within West German authorities, is conceivably minimal.

As if, even after the ‘Wende’, those in charge were still determined not to touch this old case. As if it were still 1986 and they had to show deference to the hypersensitive rulers in East Berlin. As if the fragile inter-German relationship were at risk should anyone have the nerve to finally shed light on the circumstances of Hans Fechtner’s death.

Incidentally, this is by no means a far-fetched endeavour. For it was precisely this grey area that the Central Investigation Unit for Government and Unification-Related Crime (ZERV) dealt with from 1991 to 2000. The ZERV’s investigative work also covered 50 contract killings carried out by the Stasi.

Nothing but dead ends

But the fact that Benjamin repeatedly hits dead ends in his research also stems from his inability to find any motive whatsoever for his father’s murder. Even the promising lead regarding the environmental crimes that were part of everyday life in the GDR’s industrial agriculture ends in a dead end. Even though Ben meets people who remember his father fondly. Yet this unsettles him rather than comforting him. For the official-looking documents claim otherwise.

Alongside Benjamin, we find ourselves right in the midst of the secret service’s mirror world, whose practices included systematic misdirection, the painting of false (enemy) images, and methods of psychological subversion capable of plunging people into a hell of doubt and mistrust of those around them. And Ben experiences first-hand how this works. For not only does he receive mysterious phone calls, but someone also gains access to his flat whilst he is away, and the severed brake hoses on his car almost cause him to be involved in an accident.

So are the old Stasi networks still at work? Surely these are their methods?

And how does a document classified as ‘secret’ – from his work as an advisor to a Member of the Bundestag – find its way to the press? Who is actually playing dirty games with him behind the scenes and ensuring that he even loses his job?

A murder without a motive

And yet his life was just getting back on track; he’d met the attractive journalist Mariam, who wants to help him with his investigations. Because when the relevant federal authorities stonewall, it’s only the press that can bring the case to public attention. After all, this raises the question of whether there might still be people within the authorities who once spied for the East German secret service. Or is it all just the cowardice of civil servants who hide behind files and official secrets, yet refuse to take personal responsibility for anything?

Even Ben’s former university colleague Christina, who – unlike him – has completed her law degree, helps him. She stands by him as he confronts the people at the Ministry of Agriculture over their flimsy handling of the Fechtner case. Yet even this encounter of the third kind brings home to Ben just how unwilling the West German authorities are, even 14 years after the ‘Wende’, to shed light on the death of one of their own officials.

They even refer to the documents from Leipzig at the time, which claim it was an accident. Except that much of what’s in them is just as inconsistent as the police’s account of the death or the witnesses’ statements. As if the whole thing had been fabricated after the event.

But what lies behind it all? Ben’s father’s former colleagues also confirm that the official statements cannot be true, even if they can only speak in hints because, as civil servants, they are not permitted to disclose official secrets. And little by little, he also learns that suspicion of murder had been in the air from the very beginning. In the end, what choice does he have but to contact a former Stasi major-general? Would the man be willing to talk about what really happened?

In the world of the secretive

Or will he, too, merely put on a show and spin Ben a fairy tale about the successful work of the GDR secret service? It is at this point, at the very latest, that one realises just how murky the world of secret services and those who keep secrets really is. Which, of course, didn’t simply vanish in 1990. On the contrary. It is not entirely without reason that Katrin Reiser’s novel also features the Rosenholz files
, which caused a sensation in 2003 when they were returned to West Germany by the CIA.

The files listed a whole host of people who worked for the Stasi in the West. And who may well have remained active after 1990, their operations now continued by the surviving Russian secret service, the KGB.

You can sense what a hornet’s nest Benjamin has stirred up. And why some people might even have an interest in getting rid of him themselves, or at least intimidating him enough to stop him from investigating further.

The former Stasi general whom Ben contacts even suggests a possible motive for his father’s murder, as obscure as the entire operation of the secret service apparatus, which, in the 1980s – when the economic decline of the GDR had long been impossible to ignore and the country was only staying afloat thanks to the billion-mark loans brokered by Franz Josef Strauß
– began to go its own way. At least in the novel.

But it won’t be that far removed from reality. For no institution in the GDR knew better than this one about the country’s true state of affairs. Wouldn’t one take precautions, as Ben’s interlocutor did?

In the end, Ben realises that, in his search for the truth, he himself has become a pawn, and that not all of his interlocutors were actually who they claimed to be.

The Price of Silence

If this were a crime novel, readers might well be disappointed by now. As intense and nerve-wracking as Ben’s search for the truth proves to be, the actual events remain elusive. Even though much of what Ben uncovers clearly contradicts the accident theory. But the stonewalling and silence of the German federal authorities actually responsible come at a price. Ben has to accept that, after 17 years, he can no longer find any evidence that would prove his father’s murder with such certainty that a public prosecutor would have to reopen the investigation.

What now?

He had even confidently threatened the Stasi officer that he would turn him into a character in a novel. And that must have been more or less how Katrin Reiser felt as well. The actual events remain so elusive that it would have been difficult to present them all coherently in a non-fiction book. So the only option left was the path of artistic licence in a novel, one that also gives space to Ben’s unease at failing so thoroughly due to the unwillingness – particularly on the part of West German authorities – to finally solve the old case.

That can make one feel lonely. And in the end, he himself realises how he has, in fact, alienated all the people who are actually closest to him in life. But he also learns something about himself that he would never have realised without this intense preoccupation with his father’s death.

For such a death – especially when it has been swept aside and buried under years of silence – nevertheless lingers like a shadow in the lives of the children, who are forced to find their own ways of coping with the loss. Strategies that also explain the many upheavals that subsequently shape their lives and their interpersonal relationships.

The result is, in essence, a multi-layered story in which Ben’s dogged search and his failure also reveal just how much he has always missed his father. Partly because he was never really able to say goodbye. And many readers are likely to recognise themselves in this. They will also be able to empathise when Ben becomes utterly obsessed with his search for the truth and, in doing so, clearly pushes himself beyond his limits.

For readers in Leipzig, there is the added aspect that this story sheds light on a dark side of the ‘Astoria’ hotel that is usually overlooked when the hotel and its history are discussed.

Katrin Reiser, *Der Fall Fechtner*, Langen Müller Verlag, Munich 2026, 24 euros.