Geheimagent Lennet unter Verdacht by Leutnant X is Just Plain Fun

This is another wonderful gift from Professor Demleitner. Thank you so much for your compassion and generosity!


Growing up in America, I thought I had a pretty solid idea of what a kids’ mystery series was like—Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys and The Boxcar Children come to mind. So when my mother’s friend, Professor Demleitner, was kind enough to send my family some German-language mysteries, I had the opportunity to learn a little about how other countries perceive espionage and other mysterious topics. Thanks to Geheimagent Lennet Unter Verdacht by Leutnant X, I had fun doing so!


The Geheimagent Lennet series is a German translation of a book series about a young French spy and his international adventures. Originally published under the French title Langelot in the 1960s and ‘70s, they offer an interesting insight into the portrayal of Cold War espionage by countries that aren’t the USA or the USSR. British and American fiction—particularly the works of John le Carré—tend to dominate the English-language perception of the Cold War. Since the Langelot books are made for kids (the copy I received is labeled for “11-14”), the topics are not very dark, but its themes are interesting nevertheless. An emphasis on French honor and distrust for foreign agencies runs through the story, and I get the impression that France was especially anxious about holding its own in the world of international espionage during this period. But other topics like class disparities and political asylum are also important to the plot. Lennet himself embodies an amicable, welcoming cultural standard who just happens to be a deadly agent of the French Secret Service (FND). Unlike the child-heroes of American mystery series or the mature protagonists of British and American spy fiction, Lennet is 18 years old and one of the youngest officers of the FND. He reacts to dangerous situations with wit, resilience, and occasional violence. His enemies are a little vague, which is probably for the best; the narrative prefers to focus on how Lennet outsmarts them.


There are around 40 books in the Langelot series. Several characters, specifically Hauptmann Montferrand, Lennet’s boss, and Professor Marais, seem like they’re part of a consistent cast that appears in multiple books. I’m not sure where this book falls in that series, but I’m definitely interested in reading more of Leutnant X’s works.


Geheimagent Lennet unter Verdacht was a joy to read. I’m trying to improve my comprehension by reading German-language books, and this one was written with just the right amount of complexity to make it fun to read. I enjoyed looking up words I didn’t recognize and reading amusing sentences aloud to my mother (on page 78: “Walzertanzen war nicht gerade die Stärke des Geheimagenten” or “Waltzing wasn’t exactly the secret agent’s strong suit”). The frequency of the latter is probably a result of the lighthearted narrative perspective, which spends a lot of time in Lennet’s head. Sometimes I considered how to translate his quips into English, since, as far as I know, there is no English translation available.


As my German progresses and I’m able to read the more complex books Professor Demleitner has gifted to me, I will be deeply grateful for the important lessons Leutnant X has taught me. I hope I’ll have as much fun with new discoveries as I did while reading Geheimagent Lennet unter Verdacht.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Three Summers by Margarita Liberaki is a Nostalgic Goldmine

Image
“Perhaps…we will long for the time when we all lay around in the hay and our desires were so fluid and uncertain that they were no longer our own. They became the air we breathed; a thought of Maria’s became mine and mine Infanta’s — a kind of unearthly communion.” (135) From the opposite shore of the last century, Margarita Liberaki’s coming-of-age novel reconjures a lost world. When Three Summers was published in 1946, its idyllic Attic landscape and quiet affairs had been swept away by half a decade of fascist occupation. But Liberaki is not interested in a sweeping commentary or a gripping plot. Instead, she seeks to rescue a handful of moments from the Lethe. Her narrator, Katerina, proves a suitable vessel for memories. Neither as boy-crazy as her eldest sister Maria nor as isolated as the artistic Infanta, she observes the quiet drama of her rural milieu with adolescent curiosity. The novel follows her as she and her family discover love, heartbreak, and their own troubled hist...
Read more

Wissen für Kinder: die Erde is a Fun Little Science Book

This book is a wonderful gift from my mother’s friend, Professor Demleiter. Thank you again for your generosity! Over the long, pleasant winter vacation, I felt my mind beginning to atrophy. The absence of deadlines and grades didn’t remove the desire to learn entirely, but my inclination to study subjects that I didn’t love—everything but English, German and history—had dramatically decreased. With the new year (and my high school midterms) fast approaching, I elected to review two subjects at once and picked up Wissen für Kinder: die Erde , a German-language children’s book of scientific information about the Earth. Wissen für Kinder is divided into different subjects like “Atmosphere and Weather,” or “Countries and People.” and arranged in a question-and-answer format. Examples of questions “How old is our drinking water?” “Could dinosaurs live in the arctic?” and “What are Petrochemicals?” The answers usually take up a short paragraph and are easy to understand. As someone who is ...
Read more

The Light of Truth by Ida B. Wells is not for the Faint of Heart

  This is a very good book and I don’t recommend it. The average reader is unlikely to pick up The Light of Truth because most people don’t find accounts of lynching, massacres and other racial violence particularly amusing. But such is the journalism of Ida B. Wells, anti-lynching crusader of the late 19th- and early 20th century. People interested in this collection of her writings should be aware that The Light of Truth ’s contents tend toward the gruesome. Nevertheless, they are fascinating insights into American history between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Great Migration. During that time, millions of “Afro-Americans”—Wells’ preferred term—in the newly-liberated American South lived under the threat of violence from their white neighbors. In 1892 alone, 241 people, mostly black men, were hung, shot, or burned alive by extra-legal mobs. Southern authorities tended to ignore or condone these crimes because they belived lynching was an appropriate response ...
Read more