Ritchie Girl

After completing the training at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, Paula Bloom returns as an officer with the American occupying forces to a destroyed and broken Germany, a country she had left nine years earlier. As the daughter of an American businessman, she had lived her life in Berlin during the Nazi reign in a gilded cage. A life that was a lie. Now Paula is convinced that she could never forgive. Not the Germans. And not herself.

As prominent war criminals are standing trial in Nuremberg, the U.S. Army has long since begun cooperating with the perpetrators of Nazi Germany in a camp near Frankfurt. In the engine room of the Cold War, pragmatics are in charge and their cynicism brings Paula to the edge of despair. This is where she meets an Austrian Jew who offers his services to the Americans. He claims to be Johann Kupfer, the greatest spy of World War II, and Paula is tasked with finding out whether he is telling the truth about his identity and his past. But those who seek the truth must be able to bear it.

Set against the backdrop of post-war Germany and the beginnings of the Cold War, Andreas Pflüger writes about guilt, forgiveness and the power of love with tremendous narrative force, refinement and visual power in this brilliantly researched novel.

»The novel is teeming with celebrities from Riefenstahl to Kissinger, is meticulously researched and masterfully narrated.« Elmar Krekeler, Welt am Sonntag 

»Pflüger has crafted his own amalgam of fact and fiction. Highly condensed, well-built scenes. Straight into the heart of the action and out again quickly.« Peter Körte, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»Literary skill, poetry, German guilt: a combination of fact and fiction that only Pflüger has mastered.« Gert Scobel

»Pflüger succeeds in presenting contemporary history in a captivating way. With his fast, in some parts ludicrous wordplay, he gives the novel not only breathless suspense but also enormous linguistic force. A great book!« Andreas Wallentin, WDR 5

»The language is poetically charged, unsparing in its description of horror. The novel is so rich in content, offers so many discussions that must be had ... [a] brilliant novel …« Martin Maria Schwarz, hr2 Kultur

Praise for the Jenny Aaron trilogy:
»An impressive feat of writing that combines imagination, empathy and a rock-hard edge« The Sunday Times on Endgültig

»Pflüger writes in a league of his own, violent, with powerful eloquence and great delicacy. Brilliant, addictive.« Rose-Maria Gropp, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»Pflüger creates a world of visual impressions using tiny details, only to have it disappear, taking the deceptive safety it had created with it.« Nicolas Freund, Süddeutsche Zeitung on Niemals