Fear of Mirrors
Encyclopedia
Fear of Mirrors is a novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by Tariq Ali
Tariq Ali
Tariq Ali , , is a British Pakistani military historian, novelist, journalist, filmmaker, public intellectual, political campaigner, activist, and commentator...

 published in 1998.

The story is set in Germany after 1990 German reunification
German reunification
German reunification was the process in 1990 in which the German Democratic Republic joined the Federal Republic of Germany , and when Berlin reunited into a single city, as provided by its then Grundgesetz constitution Article 23. The start of this process is commonly referred by Germans as die...

. While Germany may be reunited, the life of former East German dissident
Dissident
A dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. When dissidents unite for a common cause they often effect a dissident movement....

 Vladimir Meyer has fallen apart.

His wife has deserted him. He has been fired from his university for being a Marxist. His son, Karl
Karl
-Royalty:* Karl of Austria - last Austrian Emperor-Karl as first name:*Karl , the ancestor of the peasants according to Norse mythology, see Ríg *Karl Auerbach, computer scientistKarl Walter,German car enthusiast...

, is now a moderate, up-and-coming Social Democrat. In the pages of this political meditation, Vladimir tries to discover whether his father was really Ludwik, the famous Communist spy purged at the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. The question has gained urgency since Vladimir learned that his mother was an informer for the Russians for years and spied even on him. Ali folds his drama around the tight, cult-like atmosphere of Communist Party
Communist party
A political party described as a Communist party includes those that advocate the application of the social principles of communism through a communist form of government...

 life, peopled by idealists who find their lives encumbered by betrayals, power grabs and corruption and who, in the post-communist era, must come to terms with their complicity with Stalinism
Stalinism
Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...

.
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