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The writer John le Carré, who discovered the wire of the espionage world in 1947 while studying German in Bern, has died.
John le Carré. This is “The Spy Who Came Out of the Cold”. This is “The Eternal Gardener”, the agent in his own name. David John Moore Cornwell did not have a relaxed childhood. The mother left the family when he was five years old. The father, a notorious cheater and impostor, was repeatedly imprisoned.
John and his brother were sent to boarding school. When he was 16, he decided to run away. That was in 1947. I wanted to learn German. He had taken some courses at a boarding school. He couldn’t go to Germany, the war had just ended. So he decided to go to Switzerland, to Bern.
Bern: for a new language as a second soul
As John le Carré, as he would later be called, said in a 2010 interview with Radio SRF: “I had a good German teacher at my public school in England and I discovered that my language really liked the German language. He also loved German literature if he knew it. Charlemagne said that having a second language is like having a second soul. I wanted a second soul and it should be German for me. “
Legend:
John le Carré with his latest novel “Verräter wie wir” (Our kind of traitor) on September 26, 2010 at the Hotel Bellevue in Bern.
Keystone / Files
John le Carré stayed in Bern for two years, studied German and new languages, wrote his first short stories and poems, and ran small errands for the British embassy. That piqued his interest in the Secret Service. In 1950 he joined the British Army Intelligence Service.
First MI5, then MI6 and finally the literature
He studied, wrote stories, and joined the famous MI5 in 1952. For British domestic intelligence, he spied on far-left groups. Soviet agents were suspected of recruiting spies from Oxford students.
In 1960 he transferred to the international intelligence service MI6. It was during this time that he wrote his first novels, and in 1964 he learned what his life would be like: “And finally I discovered that I was not a spy who later became a writer, but that I am a writer who was for a short time I was a spy.”
Legend:
British writer John le Carré on September 26, 2010 at the Hotel Bellevue in Bern.
Keystone / Files
And I discovered that I am a writer who was a spy for a short time.
From then on, John wrote obsessively under the stage name John le Carré. Until the 1989s, his books were mainly about the Cold War and East-West relations, about men choosing the individual, and against institutions.
With “badminton” until the end
He wrote his famous novel “The Spy Who Came from the Cold” in just one week. It became a bestseller, and of course it was made into a movie. John le Carré was celebrated internationally. He had completed the genre of the sophisticated spy novel.
At 87, John le Carré wanted to stop writing novels. Brexit and Trump made him forget this plan again. In 2019, “Badminton” appeared. It’s about populism, data abuse, and fake news.
