Crazy in Berlin takes its epigraph from an old song: "You are crazy, my child; You must go to Berlin…." Title and epigraph provide a suitable focus to the shifting and multicolor meanings of the book. Private Carlo Reinhart is barely twenty-one years old when he arrives in Berlin, singular, thoughtful, and innocent, a mammoth-sized child of life's ambiguities. He leaves the city on a medical discharge from the "psycho" ward of the Army hospital. As for Berlin itself, it is a clever cynosure of the conflicts which permeate the action of the novel…. Berger, pressing his symbolism still further, makes [Berlin] the scene of a cloak and dagger story, of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence men, and of Double Agents, engaged in a monstrous mummery of illusion and reality, truth and falsehood, right and wrong. Nothing is ever what it seems to be…. There is no resolution to the...