Funeral in Berlin

Funeral in Berlin is a 1966 British spy film based on the novel Funeral in Berlin by Len Deighton. It is the second of three 1960s films starring Michael Caine that followed the characters from the initial film, The Ipcress File . The third film, made in 1967 was Billion Dollar Brain. Caine would... reprise the role of Harry Palmer three decades later for Bullet to Beijing and Midnight in Saint Petersburg. Berlin in the 1960s is a city divided between Cold War lines with inhabitants of the Communist East trying to escape to the West. Even with the infamous Berlin Wall these escapes are common and successful. Colonel Stok , the head of intelligence in the Soviet Union's Berlin section and the one responsible for preventing escapes over the Wall, contacts British Intelligence and informs them that he wants to defect to the West. Secret agent Harry Palmer is sent to West Berlin to find out if Stok's offer is genuine and arrange his escape. Palmer was once involved in black market dealings in Berlin and was given the choice of joining British Intelligence or going to jail.
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Spy fiction, literature concerning the forms of espionage, was a sub-genre derived from the novel during the nineteenth century, which then evolved... into a discrete genre before the First World War , when governments established modern intelligence agencies in the early twentieth century. As a genre, spy fiction is thematically related to the novel of adventure , the thriller and the politico–military thriller . In nineteenth-century France, the Dreyfus Affair contributed much to public interest in espionage. For some twelve years , the Affair, which involved elements of international espionage, treason, and anti-Semitism, dominated French politics. The details were reported by the world press: an Imperial German penetration agent betraying to Germany the secrets of the General Staff of the French Army; the French counter-intelligence riposte of sending a charwoman to rifle the trash in the German Embassy in Paris, were news that inspired successful spy fiction.
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