Stained Glass is more of a novel than a thriller, and it differs from the idols of its marketplace in some interesting ways. The first is in its sense of character. The second is in the correlative of its title. The third and most important difference is political. Stained Glass is squarely centered on a political issue, not a fantasy. It is worth reading and remembering because it is informed by strategy, and consists, as a novel, in the working out of a political possibility….

The subject is the unification of East and West Germany at a time when this might still have been attempted. The book has a short timetable; all of the action is dependent on the defeat of Konrad Adenauer by [Wintergrin,] a man prepared to take many more chances than der Alte—a man whom the United States has an acknowledged interest in removing...