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Spying for the GDR: a woman’s perspective
JENNY FARRELL welcomes the first memoir to be published in English from a woman’s point of view, giving the perspective of a GDR spy
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The Shadow in the Shadow
Beatrice Altman-Schevitz, Verlag Das Freie Buch, £23.99
SPY thrillers about and accounts of East-West spying during the cold war abound, always written from a particular Western political standpoint. Autobiographies relating the stories of former “agents for peace” on the other hand are rare. Beatrice Altman-Schevitz’s The Shadow in the Shadow is the only such memoir to be published in English from a woman’s point of view, giving the perspective of a GDR spy.
Beatrice’s newly published autobiography tells the extraordinary life-story of two left-wing US-Americans.
Jeffrey, a graduate of the elite Princeton University, was an activist in the free speech movement and very active in the anti-Vietnam war movement. Beatrice’s political awakening occurred in Buffalo and the Attica Prison uprising in 1971 and the court case that followed it. “The injustice was too much for me to remain silent,” she writes.
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