Richard Wagner Miss Bukarest (Miss Bucharest) Aufbau-Verlag, September 2001. 190pp. ISBN 3-351-02926-8 Dino is a Romanian who once worked as a secret service agent. As such, he spied on artists and academics, and those activities, performed in his native country, come back to haunt him, after his emigration to Germany, as a result of the murder of a woman called Erika. Required in his new role as a German detective to investigate the crime, he finds himself obliged to re-examine - and to record in a manuscript - the events leading to his family's emigration. They include the revelation that he had had an affair with Erika, the 'Miss Bucharest' of the title, who was also his wife's best friend. The story is then taken up by the second of the main narrators, Klaus Richartz, an academic with whom Dino was involved back at home and who now receives the latter's anonymous manuscript. This causes him similarly to review his part, and to attempt to reconcile his adventurous years as a Romanian dissident back in the 1970s with his rather banal life today. Eventually the storytelling mantle is passed to Dino's son Christian, who up to the present has shown little interest in his Romanian past and is furthermore adamant that he wants nothing to do with his father's involvements at that time. He and his sister are now young Germans bent on immersing themselves totally in their new Western way of life, to the point of forgetting even that they can speak Romanian. His father's story of Erika, however, and of his own former career, shakes Christian out of his complacency, enabling him to confront his own rather vacuous existence and, finally, to solve the crime. The legacy of the cold war and the influence of the past on the present are two themes lurking beneath the surface of this tale. All three storytellers point them up from different angles, and each adopts his own style, Christian's narrative being perhaps the most revealing and instructive of all. Thought-provoking and historically fascinating.