A Small Town in Germany

Bonn, the eponymous small town, was chosen as West Germany's capital after World War II mainly due to the advocacy of Konrad Adenauer, Chancellor of West Germany after World War II.

The novel is set in the late 1960s, in Bonn, the capital of West Germany. Great Britain is hoping to gain support from the West German government in a bid to enter the European Common Market. From London, Alan Turner, an official from the British Foreign Office, arrives to investigate the disappearance of Leo Harting, a minor British Embassy officer; moreover, secret files have disappeared with him. The embassy's head of Chancery, Rawley Bradfield, is hostile to Turner's investigation. Despite that, he is dinner party host to Turner and Ludwig Siebkron, head of the German Interior Ministry; the latter is close to industrialist Klaus Karfeld, who is successfully building a new nationalist political movement which is anti-British and anti-Western European, and which seeks to turn West Germany away from Western Europe and bring it closer to Communist Eastern Europe. Great Britain's diplomatic mission perceives growing support for Karfeld's movement as a threat to obtaining support for Britain's entry into the Common Market.

Initially, Turner suspects Harting is a spy, probably working for a Communist government. But he comes to discover that Harting had once been a war crime investigator in Germany and he has been secretly using Chancery resources to continue investigating Karfeld's career as the war-time administrator of a Nazi laboratory that poisoned 31 half-Jews, crimes for which Karfeld had been investigated but for which he escaped responsibility. Harting is, in fact, hiding from Siebkron who is aware of Karfeld's crimes and seeks to protect him from being exposed. To Turner's chagrin, Bradfield is unsympathetic to Harting's circumstances and uninterested in protecting him because he considers him a criminal and a political embarrassment.

Turner discovers that Harting recently learned Karfield is immune from prosecution due to the statute of limitations. Turner deduces that a violent incident at a previous Karfield rally, in which a mob stormed a British library and fatally assaulted the female librarian, occurred because Harting had attempted to shoot Karfeld from a window of the library. Turner believes Harting may try again to assassinate Karfeld at his next rally, which Turner and Bradfield attend.

The novel ends with Karfeld addressing the rally and delivering an anti-Western European, Nazi-apologist speech until violence erupts between his supporters and a group of socialist counter-protestors.

• Rawley Bradfield - Head of Chancery at the British Embassy in Bonn
• Leo Harting – long-term temporary employee at the British Embassy
• Alan Turner – British Foreign Office official
• Ludwig Siebkron – German Interior Ministry official
• Klaus Karfeld – German industrialist and politician with a hidden Nazi past

As the author said in his 1991 preface to the new edition the novel "is printed with aversion in my memory".[3] The part of Alan Turner was secretly allocated to him. Also he wrote there that "the novel is not the eyesore I always imagine it to be". John le Carré said that his invention was "to write something close to a black comedy about British political manners, and yet the result was widely perceived to be ferociously anti-German". He said that he wanted to write "an informed nightmare, not an accurate prophecy. My aim was to tell what I might best call a political ghost story". Leo Harting is the ghost, Alan Turner is his exorcist and Bradfield is the owner of the haunted house. Three characters are imagined. Writer used the real person Herr Junger, the Embassy fixer, as Leo's prototype.

First drafts of the book he created in Vienna, where Simon Wiesenthal helped him with Karfeld's background.

• David Cornwell (John le Carré) worked as an intelligence officer for MI6 under diplomatic cover as the 'Second Secretary' of the British embassy in Bonn, during the period depicted in this novel.
• At the time of publication there were worries that the extreme right was rebuilding in West Germany, particularly with the success of the far-right National Democratic Party in various state and municipal elections after its founding. However, these fears later proved to be unfounded.
• West German Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, was, like Karfeld, a former Nazi, who had joined the Nazi Party in 1933. Although Kiesinger was cleared of war crimes by the denazification courts, radical groups such as the Red Army Faction argued that an informal but powerful network of ex-Nazis, including Kiesinger, controlled the country.
• Real locations in Bonn such as the British Embassy feature prominently.

• The Economics Minister at the Bonn embassy was James Marjoribanks. One of the characters in Le Carré's book is also called Marjoribanks.
• John le Carrè describes Bonn in dark colours: "The choice of Bonn as the waiting room for Berlin was always an absurdity, now it is an abuse. Probably no other people than the Germans would have managed to elect a chancellor and then bring the capital to their door. [...] The British embassy is inextricably linked to this unnatural main village, this island state, which lacks political identity as well as a social hinterland and which has committed itself to temporary arrangements. […] You know what people say about Bonn: Either it's raining or the railroad gates are down. In fact, of course, both happen at the same time. An island cut off from the world by the fog, that's what it looks like here. It is quite a metaphysical stain: the dreams have completely supplanted reality. We live somewhere between the recent future and the not so distant past."

• 1968, UK, William Heinemann, ISBN 0-434-10930-4, October 1968, Hardback
• 1970, UK, Pan, ISBN 0-330-02306-3, 3 July 1970, Paperback

• Serialised in seven episodes for BBC Radio 4, broadcast in Summer 1982.