From fact to fiction

After breakfast I walked to St Catherine's to celebrate the Eucharist with six others. After coffee and a chat I collected this week's veggie bag from Chapter then returned home and cooked lunch. I sat down to check the news and fell asleep for an hour, much my surprise, as I wasn't feeling tired. Sleep is a gift, and there's no need to turn it down unless you have to, I suppose. 

I walked in the park for an hour and a half and then spent the rest of the afternoon and the evening after supper watching the remaining episodes of 'The Marnow Murders'. It was even more complex than I had thought, as the revenge story-line hinged around cross-border drug trials between East and West Germany, and cover-up of evidence of fatalities due to illegal experimental treatments in the years running up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. 

For anyone watching who was born since then and wasn't German or  a student of modern German history, this plot would be difficult to follow. Having visited East Germany just a few weeks before the fall of the  Wall and acquainted with the context, it was just about possible to follow the plot, although I wasn't sure if it was plausible. Whether or not such cross border medical collaboration with drugs developed in the West being tested in the East ever happened, I didn't know, so when it was finished I googled the subject and immediately came up with an answer. The German newspaper 'der Spiegel' published an investigation in 2016 into the use of medical patients in East Germany as guinea pids for testing West German produced experimental drugs. So this piece of crime fiction has a basis in historical reality. A surprise discovery.

I was pleased to find how much of the dialogue I could understand. I've not had much opportunity to use the German I learned in school in the thirty years since I needed to brush it up for the Halesowen - Leipzig parish twinning link. The fact that the dialogue reflected the accent of north eastern coastal region was helpful, as it's clear and feels familiar, making it easier to follow. Anyway, it was a good watch as crime mysteries go. And that's enough binge watching or listening for me, for now.