L to R, Maria Schrader and Jonas Nay – in the SundanceTV original series “Deutschland 83” – Photo Credit: Nik Konietzny
Deutschland 83 (SundanceTV, Tuesdays, 11/10C) is a clever little espionage tale set during the Cold War. Martin Rauch, a young East German army officer finds himself shanghaied by the Stasi (East Germany’s equivalent of the KGB) and coerced/bribed to become an undercover operative in order to steal top secret NATO military intelligence.
It’s the first German language series to be run by an American network and SundanceTV has picked a good one to go with its critically acclaimed original shows.
Martin (Jonas Nay) is a Border Guard – we meet him giving a couple of university students a rough time for buying Shakespeare plays on the black market. We follow him to his family, where there’s a party for his mother, Ingrid’s (Carina N. Wiese) birthday and meet his Aunt Lenora (Maria Schrader), whom we saw in the teaser – a highly placed member of the Stasi – as well as his girlfriend, Annet (Sonja Gerhardt).
We learn that his mother is on dialysis and will soon need a transplant, but since there’s ‘special’ about her, she’ll never get it – unless Martin agrees to take on the guise of Moritz Stamm, a junior officer in the West German army who has been assigned to a General Wolfgang Edel (Ulrich Noethen). Edel is a key officer who has access to top secret information and will be part of a NATO conference on nuclear armament.
Martin wants no part of any of this, but is drugged and wakes up in Bonn – the West – and finds himself stuck in the unenviable position of having to become a spy or watch his mother die. There’s also the problem of Annet, who only knows that Martin has disappeared and, being young and naïve, asks too many questions.
Other complications include sharing a barracks room with Edel’s peacenik son, Alex (Ludwig Trepte), a fellow first lieutenant; the general’s songbird daughter, Yvonne (Lisa Tomaschewsky), and the general’s sister-in-law, Renate Werner (Beate Mays) – who witnesses him making a rookie mistake.
Jonas Nay – in the SundanceTV original series “Deutschland 83” – Photo Credit: Laura Deschner
The series was created by Anna Winger and Joerg Winger and could be seen as a German version of The Americans, with its hide-in-plain-sight spies and Cold War setting.
More than that, though, it’s a coming of age tale about a very conflicted young man who is forced/bribed into working for a clandestine organization and having to adjust to a different way of life – in a whole new identity. He has to leave his family and girlfriend with no explanation and deal with events that could become literally earth-shaking.
SundanceTV made the first two episodes of Deutschland 83 available to critics and they are fairly mesmerizing stuff.
Martin goes from being a bit of a martinet in his first scene to being a loving son and boyfriend in his second and then is tossed into a situation where he is continually off balance and working hard just to survive the emotional (and soon, physical) rollercoaster he’s on. Despite so many things happening to him so quickly, Nay plays his emotions deftly – catching Martin’s tendency to abuse the little power he has; the grounding he feels at home and precariousness of his new assignment in such a way that what might have seemed like a very sketchy bit of character building feels organic and real.
Schrader’s Lenora is the iron fist in the velvet glove – she can seem all sleek and elegant, but her eyes always show her to be carefully calculating everything she does for maximum impact. Her power may be great but she chooses where and when to show it to others.
Deutschland 83 doesn’t quite rival The Americans for its production values, but it does match its intensity and comes close to equaling its cleverness. The cast is terrific at under playing until the exact split second that something explosive is required and director Edward Berger keeps the pacing under strict control.
The result is a taut thriller with moments of character gold that keep it from being just another espionage tale.
Final Grade: A-Photos courtesy of SundanceTV