The Duquesne Ring was a Third Reich spy network that operated in the United States since the late 1930s. Led by agent Fritz Duquesne, a former Afrikaner soldier who went on to work as a hunting advisor to Theodore Roosevelt, the network was dismantled in 1941 by the FBI. Among the thirty-three members of the ring who were arrested was radio operator Josef Klein, great-uncle of the German writer Ulla Lenze.
Lenze did not know his ancestor. He knew that he had emigrated to New York, that he was imprisoned during the war, and then deported to Germany, and that he had traveled to South America, where he was lost. Little more. His parents barely talked to him about him. However, in 2014, his mother gave him some letters: the correspondence that Josef had maintained with his brother, the novelist’s grandfather.
These letters were a revelation for Lenze. He learned that his relative had not been a simple German immigrant turned into an enemy by the vicissitudes of history, but a member of the largest Nazi spy network in the United States. This discovery was the beginning of an investigation that Lenze has captured in novel form.
The radio operator recreates the life of Josef Klein through a vibrant narrative with continuous changes of scenery (Germany, New York, Ellis Island prison, Buenos Aires, Costa Rica) and jumps in time, between 1925 and 1953. Almost three decades that allow the author to reconstruct the social and political climate of the time, both that which was felt in the German colony of New York in the 1930s and in the destroyed Neuss, the Klein family’s hometown, during the postwar period.
The rise of Nazism in Yorkville, the German neighborhood of Manhattan; the pro-Nazi rally held at Madison Square Garden in 1939; the release that same year of Confessions of a Nazi Spy, Hollywood’s first anti-Nazi film, directed by Anatole Litvak; The failed Operation Pastorius (1942), in which eight German agents landed in New York with the mission of carrying out sabotage…, are some of the events and scenarios that are described in the novel. A story of espionage that is also, for the author, an attempt to understand why a humble immigrant fond of radio and jazz (he lived in Harlem), who had never shown any ideological affinity, found himself involved in a criminal plot of such magnitude and gravity.
