Kleo: Season 2 - Netflix Series

Kleo: Season 2 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Very entertaining. Previous posts about the show:

• Kleo - Netflix Series
• Christ the Redeemer
• Tubular Bells

Christ the Redeemer

We just finished rewatching Kleo. We pulled up Netflix the other night looking for something new to watch and we see that there is a new season of Kleo available. We remember watching it before, but not well enough to pick up where we left off, so we decided to just start watching it again from the beginning and see what happens. Maybe our memories will be jostled and we'll say 'oh yeah, I remember this'. We did remember bits and pieces of it, but not enough to get bored so and we ended up rewatching the whole thing. It's pretty great, it's a quirky little show, full of oddball characters, curious settings and bright colors.

Kleo is an East German assassin employed off-the-books by the Stasi, the East German Secret Police. She is sent to West Berlin through a tunnel to kill a man in a nightclub. She returns to East Berlin and shortly thereafter is arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison on vague charges of treason.

At the time of her arrest she is pregnant. On arrival in the prison she gets in a fight with a girl gang and gets the stuffing kicked out of her and she loses the baby. Not only does she lose the baby her organs are so damaged that she will not be able to ever have a child. Now she has another reason to seek revenge.

Just recently I realized that most women's greatest desire is to have children. This might be because this desire is similar to breathing - it's such a fundamental part of us that we don't even think about it. I know that when I was younger I didn't want to have kids. It wasn't until I was in my early 30's that this changed.

But back to our story. Kleo is in prison, it's 1989, the Berlin Wall comes down, all political prisoners are released, Kleo among them and she wants to know why she was sent to prison when, as far as she knew, she was just doing her job. So she goes looking for answers and at every step of the way the next person she encounters would rather kill her than tell her why, but she being an assassin, she kills them instead. 

Eventually she learns that the whole thing is about a secret pact East Germany made with President Ronald Reagan that would keep the East German government propped up with loads of cash. What? Why you might ask? Because the plot requires a secret that a whole bunch of people are willing to die to protect, that's why. It doesn't make any sense to me, but who knows? There has always been all kinds of skullduggery going on, so yeah, sure, why not? Whatever, we'll pretend Reagan made a secret pact with Erich Honecker. Was it really secret? Britannica has this to say:

"Under Honecker’s rule, East Germany was one of the more repressive but also one of the most prosperous of the Soviet-bloc countries of eastern Europe. He allowed the growth of some trade and travel ties with West Germany in return for West German financial aid."

Eventually we find that the secret is in documents contained in a red suitcase, so for the rest of the show we are chasing this red suitcase."

Note with coordinates

A few seconds before the end of episode 7, Margot Honecker (aka The Purple Witch) hands the above slip of paper to Ramona, another secret Stasi assassin, who just happens to be nine months pregnant.

Hiding Place for the Red Suitcase
Episode 8, 27 minute mark

Episode 8 has Kleo and her sidekick Sven finding the suitcase in the base of the above statue. I asked Google Lens to identify it and while it found a bunch of very similar statues, it did not find an exact match.

Christ the Redeemer

There is a similar statue in a similar location on the Chile-Argentine border, but you can see that while there are similarities, it is not the same one. Which makes me wonder - where did they find the statue for the show?

Central Chile, South America
Blue marker is from coordinates on the note
Red marker is the location of the statue

Anyway, because I gotta be me, I plotted the locations of the coordinates from the note and the actual statue on Google Maps.  The coordinates that the Purple Witch gave to Ramona point to the middle of the Atacama desert. No statue there.

Update December 2025 corrected a couple of typos.

Superfest Glass

How Communists Made Unbreakable Glass
fern

Curious that East Germany was able to produce this glass. It seems like the extra processing would have increased the cost, something a cash strapped country would want to avoid. So either the extra processing didn't cost that much, or the party decided it needed to be done regardless of the cost. Seems like bars and restaurants would be ideal customers, as long as it didn't cost too awful much, and they weren't contractually obligated to buy their glassware from the local Mafia don's brother in law.

Resonance

How Suzuki stole communist technology to make their motorcycles faster
bart
Great stuff.

YouTube blurb:

This is the incredible story of Water Kaaden and his innovative 2 stroke racebikes with MZ. Its also the story of one Ernst Degner and how he stole Kaaden's tech for Suzuki's race team. 

 

Kleo - Netflix Series

Kleo | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
Two years before the Berlin wall came down, an agent of the Stasi (East German secret police) sneaks into West Berlin and assassinates a man in a nightclub. When she returns to East Germany she is arrested and after a Kafkaesque trial is sentenced to life in prison. Three years later, the Berlin wall comes down, East Germany collapses and our girl walks out of prison a free woman.

She is, as you might expect, harboring a grudge against all and sundry who sent her up the river and she proceeds to methodically eliminate them. 

It's a great story made better by having an average looking woman in the lead role instead of some sevelt beauty queen. You can believe she could do all the stuff they show her doing. Okay, there are instances that strain credibility, like I don't know how she managed to stick herself to a 12 foot ceiling, but I think they are in there just for entertainment value. In any case, these little bits don't distract from the story.

The whole bit about blind obedience and the secret machinations of the state sounds a whole lot like what's going on with all the political trials going on now in Washington, D. C.

Links

• What Assange was indicted for. Good explanation of password cracking. Via Borepatch
• Berlin Wall Escape that was financed by an American News Agency. 1962. My Daily Kona
• How a Few Lucky Civil War Soldiers Started Glowing and Healed Faster. Bio-luminescent bacteria. Knuckle Draggin My Life Away

The Debt

The Debt Official Trailer #1 - (2010) HD

"In 1965, three Mossad agents cross into East Berlin to apprehend a notorious Nazi war criminal. Thirty years later, the secrets the agents share come back to haunt them." - IMDB

Pretty good thriller. Our three agents can get into East Berlin, and they manage to kidnap the evil Nazi, but how they plan on getting him out is kind of clever.

Map of Cold War Berlin Ghost Stations
Stations marked with a white bar are closed

Berlin was a civilized city, they had trams running on tracks all through the town, but the Berlin wall crossed some of these tracks. They dealt with this conflict by allowing the West German trams to continue to run through East Berlin, but all the East Berlin stations on that line were closed. They became known as 'Ghost Stations'.

Our agents arrange for a West German tram to fake some kind of problem so that it has to stop in East Berlin and while it is stopped, they are going to sneak their package onto the tram. Naturally enough, things do not go smoothly.

Watch out for Helen Mirren, she's deadly with a hypodermic needle.

Commies

East Berlin

"Ever wondered how the Communist countries first became Communist? It's not the secret police who do the deed, it's the tax collectors. That's how the Communists wiped out private companies: they increased the tax rate steeply according to the number of employees. Only firms with less than a dozen employees had a chance of surviving."  - Len Deighton in Berlin Game, midway through Chapter 4.

Berlin Game is a spy novel set in the early 1980s, long before the Berlin Wall came down. I ordered it from Amazon because of a character mentioned by Roberta X. The book was shipped to me from the UK.

Tear Down That Wall

Berlin Wall

 This week, the Berlin Wall has now been down as long as it was up; FSM be praised. - Stu

Looking for a picture I came across this map (top). For some reason I never considered that the wall completely encircled West Berlin, I only imagined it going through the middle of the city. But of course it would have to completely encircle the city as the city was encircled by East Germany. There was only one road to Berlin (I think), and there would have had to have been a wall along both sides of that road where it crossed East Germany, and then there was the wall that separated the counry. Geez, that's a lot of wall. Crazy.

Stu's post reminded me that I put up a post about people who had attempted to escape across the wall, but I didn't remember when I posted it exactly, so I searched for Berlin. I was surprised how many posts turned up.

Leaving Berlin by Joseph Kanon

RIAS, Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor in German or Radio in the American Sector

Leaving Berlin by Joseph Kanon is an espionage thriller set in post-WW2 Berlin. Our hero's father got him out of Germany prior to the war. Alex, for that is our hero's name, went to California, wrote a best seller and was living the good life until the HUAC started asking him questions that he refused to answer. No longer welcome in the USA he goes back to his home town in Germany: Berlin.

Brandenburg Gate

It's 1949, the Soviets and the Allies are pushing and shoving, working their way up to the cold war. Somebody in the American intelligence community realizes that Alex could be a valuable asset, never mind that he won't answer the bull-necked Senator's questions, so Alex has friends in the American sector. Because he has communist leanings, he has friends in the Soviet sector as well, and because this is his home town, there are people he knows from back in the day. Whether they are still friends might be in doubt, war changes people.

Adlon Hotel in Berlin, survived the war but burned in 1945

He quickly learns that the Soviet brand of communism is 100% bullshit, which puts him in a bit of bind. The action escalates so quickly it begins to look like a James Bond movie, but more complicated, and with real characters.

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Douglas C-54 Skymaster cargo airplanes at Templehof airport.

The Berlin airlift is going on and while it doesn't play a big part in the story, it's quite a story all by itself. I remember hearing about it when I was a kid, but I never realized just how big a deal it was. So they had to fly in some supplies from the West, I mean how many plane loads did they need? There couldn't have been more than a few hundred people living there, I mean most of them got killed in the war, right? Well, no.

Schematic Diagram of Air Lift Routes

There were almost three million people living in Berlin at the time. At one pound of food and two pounds of coal (winter in Berlin is cold) per person, that's like 5,000 tons of material a day. This is when cargo planes were hard pressed to carry five tons, which meant that there were a thousand flights a day, every day for ten months. That's a serious expenditure of effort. It paid off though, because eventually the Soviets relented and the Allies managed to keep hold of half of Berlin.

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Using a Geiger Counter on samples in a Wismut mine, c. 1960.

Another situation that bears on the story: the Soviets were mad to build their own atomic bomb and to do that they needed uranium. The only source they knew of at the time were some mines along the Czechoslovakian - German border. They went at it in a typical Stalinesque manner, using forced labor from POW's and criminals and when that wasn't enough they started conscripting regular people. While the conditions were not as bad as the German slave labor operations, they weren't good. Thousands of people died.

WISMUT mine in Thüringen, Germany. The hills are waste material that has been removed from the mine. The two white metal structures are the head ends of the elevators that go down into the mine.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Germany was left with a environmental disaster that they are still working to clean up.

Klaus Renft Combo

Klaus Renft Combo - Hinten an der Tur
East German rock 'n' roll, who'd o' thunk it? Anna mentions them in Stasiland, so I gotta look them up. I don't know if I like them or not. I'm sitting in the hotel lobby and there is Musak playing so it's not really a good time or place to evaluate a tune. I am going to want to listen to them. When I get a round to it I may not remember their name, but I know I will be able to find them here.

Howell Torpedo

Howell Torpedo 1896 animation- vbbsmyt
Stu tells me that there is a piece of Germany in the Caribbean. Seems that back in the glory days of red-blooded communism Fidel was feeling benevolent towards his eastern comrades and deeded a narrow little island to East Germany. East Germany, and their Caribbean island, have been subsumed by the reunited Germany.
    Looking for more information about this communist paradise I stumble across Last Stand on Zombie Island which seems to have more than its share of the weird, like the Howell Torpedo. The thing is powered by an internal flywheel that was spun up to 10,000 RPM by an external steam turbine before it was launched. The range wasn't tremendous, but it was better than any of the competing designs. The US Navy bought 500 of the things. The video does a good job of illustrating just how complex this design was, and this was 120 years ago. No wonder the F-35 cost $300 billion to develop.

Ernst Thälmann Island, Cuba.

As for the island, it was originally named Cayo Blanco del Sur but renamed to Cayo Ernesto Thaelmann by Fidel. Ernesto was a dyed-in-the-wool communist who fought against the Nazi's. He died in Buchenwald. Zombie Island has the story.

Update September 2015. Stu put up a post about his visit to Buchenwald, which prompted me to add a picture of the island.

Escape From East Germany

After WW2, the West was subsidizing West Germany and West Berlin, while the Soviet Union was extracting reparations. At least they were trying to. It was kind of like trying to squeeze blood from a turnip. Consequently the standard of living was plummeting in the East and people were fleeing in droves to the West, which didn't sit well with their new overlords and so the Berlin Wall was built to stop this white flight. People still kept trying to emigrate. Some of them succeeded. Some of them didn't. Failure usually meant prison or death. Here are some clever guys who made it. The linked stories make some interesting reading.


I hired Ivo to do some plumbing work on my house. He escaped from the Czechoslovakia with his girlfriend in 1986. They were both from the same small town. They went on vacation to Albania (now Slovenia), at the North end of the Adriatic, right next to Italy. They took their papers and cash, put them in a waterproof container, and swam across the bay to Trieste. It took them two years to get to the United States. Ivo's younger brother was opposed to him leaving, but his older sister was very in much in favor of it.

Zdenek Pohl and Robert Ospald

These two hippies built a couple of chairs to hang from the neutral wires on high tension towers. They climbed a 180 foot tower in the middle of the night and pulled themselves, hand over hand, across the border. Took them five hours to travel 300 yards.

Bernd Boettger's and his Diver Propulsion Vehicle (DPV)

Bernd Boettger tried swimming across the border via the Baltic sea, but was caught and spent a year in jail. For his next attempt he built a gasoline powered tractor to tow him. Took him 15 miles when he was picked up by a Danish lightship.

Here are a couple who didn't.

Daniela Walther with her grandparents

 Daniela's father tried to walk his family across the border on August 13, 1961, the same day construction started on the wall. Her mother's nerve failed her and they were caught. Her father spent eight years in jail. Daniela was sent to live with her grandparents. Her family eventually got to West Germany when they were ransomed.

Dr. Gerhard Wagner, Kaiserslautern, designed and built this aircraft to enable his family of five to escape from East to West Germany in 1981. It was never flown. The family were arrested the day before their planned escape and imprisoned for one year. They were then deported to the Federal Republic of Germany, i.e. West Germany. Wait a minute, he's sent to prison for trying to go, and when he gets out he's sent there? He may have been ransomed by West Germany.  Photo by Cplakidas. The airplane is at Deutsches Museum.