A series with German subtitles seems a curious choice for going head-to-head with 'War and Peace' on BBC1 and ITV's warhorse 'Endeavour' (where tonight's plot is a riff on 'The Great Gatsby' which seems less ingenious than plagiarist). This is a rite-of-passage as well as a spy drama, in which young and ardent East German border guard Martin Rauch (Jonas Nay) is recruited by his fanatical aunt Leonora (Maria Schrader) to go undercover as a top military aide in Bonn. Stranger things probably happened, but the premise feels like a tall tale, since the 24-year-old is virtually blackmailed into his spy role and trained in just 3 weeks, then let loose in the decadent, capitalist West.
Rauch, under his alias Moritz Stamm, proves rather an inept spy and we're guessing that in future episodes he gets disillusioned and begins to question the world and his place in it. The tone is a little uneven, with similarities to the unreal atmosphere of 'The Americans', and there's painstaking musical scene-setting, but whatever your moral stance on Soviet power, Ronald Reagan and European capitalism post-90, this is an interestingly different take on Germany's recent past.
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