Rarely has the secret of a secret agent been revealed as quickly as at the beginning of the new Netflix series "Kleo": A Trabi pulls up, the Wall shimmers in the background in the headlights, a young woman in a blue tracksuit gets out.

She turns to the camera for a moment, says snappy "Always ready", then disappears into a tunnel.

There she finds a bundle of Deutschmarks, a razor and a wig in a hiding place.

And when she reappears in the west in a white dress and black pumps, in the famous disco "Big Eden" at the bar, it doesn't take long before she has danced to a man.

And as soon as the two landed on the toilet, he's already dead. Unfortunately, the coke that she offered him was poison.

Harold Staun

Editor in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

  • Follow I follow

Kleo, the granddaughter of a Stasi general, sees herself as a proud chekist who identifies with the ideals of her country to such an extent that she not only goes out with sincere devotion in the West as a contract killer, but also listens to Silly afterwards to calm down and " Pittiplatsch" looks.

But suddenly she is dropped by her superiors, arrested and imprisoned for life.

Which means in her case: three years until the fall of the wall.

After she is released as part of the general amnesty for political prisoners, a shrill tour de force through the joke of the German-German years of reunification begins.

Kleo wants to know why her beautiful killer life ended in such an ominous way and takes revenge throughout the chain of command for eight episodes.

The Kill Bill bride from Pankow

As extraordinary as the tragedy of this fate is (she also lost her unborn child in a fight in prison), Hanno Hackfort, Richard Kropf and Bob Konrad - who wrote the series together with Elena Senft - are not interested in to turn them into political or psychological thrillers.

The series, the opening credits note with proud irony, is based on a true story, and yet none of it actually happened.

So it becomes clear from the first minute that it's less about the drama and more about giving German television a new character: a Postwende riot girlie with real socialist superpowers, something like Nina Hagen's daughter and Uma Thurman, a sort of kill-bill bride from Pankow.

Jella Haase makes every effort to portray Kleo as an unscrupulous brat who has been trained out of any empathy for her victims and who, although she was so bitterly betrayed by her comrades, has remained stuck on her Stasi programming, which has been overtaken by contemporary history, and undeterred as a bot goes through life.

When mixing poison, she innocently recites Rumpelstiltskin rhymes (“Oh, it’s good that nobody knows my name is Kleo Straubi”) when her ex-boyfriend and old Stasi buddy reminds her that there is no longer a state that she knows she replies carefree: "Take it easy" - and when he warns her about the KGB, she pulls out her favorite weapon with the cheeky slogan: "KGB, what's that?

Köstritz beverage operator?" While Kleo's old colonel quickly learned

How she moves as a defiant child through the ruins of her living environment is also very amusing in scenes, but in the long run it is as fast-paced as a sightseeing tour in a Trabi.

As a motor for a furious spy comedy, quirkiness and flashy wigs are ultimately not enough.

And when the story finally takes the time to delve a little deeper into the depths of Kleo's past, she's already too well established as a comic book character for her trauma to create any tension.

Most of the beautiful secondary characters are hanging in the air: the West Berlin policeman Sven (Dimitrij Schaad), for example, who is on the trail of Kleo's revenge campaign and is characterized above all by his mediocrity, until you realize that naivety can also be a weapon.

Kleo's old colleague from the Stasi (Vincent Redetzki), a psychopath and a convinced Eastern extremist who, with the courage to use violence and crooked glasses, stuns the insult of capitalist victory with Laibach songs and, of course, is called Uwe.

But the most lovable is Thilo (Julius Feldmeier), a radiated raver with a pot cut, who moves into her old apartment in Kleo's absence and who at some point pieced together a wonderfully chaotic conspiracy chaos from the files in her grandfather's basement.

Thilo is on a cosmic mission himself,

he is supposed to bring techno into the world, which is why he responds to Kleo's murders with the necessary rudeness.

He would be the perfect character to take the seriousness out of the drama surrounding a global intelligence plot—if it weren't laced with irony itself.

Like so many in "Kleo", he remains just a comic relief in a world that doesn't need any liberating comedy at all.