Review: ‘Deutschland 86,’ an East-West Thriller, Looks South

You may find the scheme at the center of “Deutschland 86” a bit confusing. That’s all right; so does Martin Rauch (Jonas Nay), the reluctant East German spy roped into carrying it out.

As it’s explained to him, his government needs him to facilitate an illicit sale of West German weapons to South Africa, with the assistance of the African National Congress — even though the ANC is bitterly opposed to the apartheid regime, and South Africa is allied with East Germany’s rivals in the Cold War.

Martin is told the deal is for the greater good. But he still has questions. “East, West,” he says. “Who are the good guys?”

In the pulpy-serious “Deutschland 86,” the definition is very flexible.

The 10-episode series, beginning Thursday on SundanceTV, is the follow-up to 2015’s “Deutschland 83,” a German-American coproduction created by the wife-and-husband team Anna and Jörg Winger. That season introduced Martin as a naïve border guard, recruited by his aunt Lenora (Maria Schrader), a cynical, formidable intelligence operative, to infiltrate the West German military in 1983.

The drama was like a peppermint schnapps chaser to the moody vodka shot of FX’s “The Americans.” It had a pop sensibility and stylish air, and it was as much a coming-of-age story as a Cold War thriller.

Picking up three years later, “Deutschland 86” broadens its scope and shifts its axis, focusing on how the battle between capitalism and communism enfolded north and south as well as east and west.

The series (subtitled in English) opens in Cape Town, where Lenora shares a stunning midcentury-modern apartment with Rose Seithathi (Florence Kasumba), an ANC agent. (There’s a striking scene in which the two operatives stride down a hallway, equal in their deadly confidence, then separately enter the “Whites” and “Non-Whites” elevators.)

They’re selling arms to the enemy because East Germany is dead broke, in debt to the West, cut loose by Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. Its bureaucrats are left to try to salvage communism through fire-sale capitalism: selling off artworks, importing garbage from West Germany, allowing medical tests on its citizens. At least, they console themselves, they’re not starving like the Romanians — yet.

Needing help, Lenora finds Martin at an orphanage in communist Angola, where he’s been exiled after disobeying orders, at the end of “Deutschland 83,” in order to stave off a nuclear war. He’s a more somber character now, hardened and healthily mistrustful, but he agrees, in exchange for being allowed to return home and see his young son.

The new season is more action-oriented than the first, skipping across the continent of Africa and both sides of the Berlin Wall, abetted by some hefty exposition downloads and pop-cultural references. (Falco fans, you shall not be disappointed.)

The story feels more strained in its efforts to keep numerous characters from the “83” season busy. In East Germany, Annett (Sonja Gerhardt), the mother of Martin’s son, has become a zealous functionary in the Stasi, where Walter (Sylvester Groth), Martin’s father, is pitching an arms-smuggling plan inspired by a German version of “The Love Boat.” Another thread, involving activists in West Germany and the growing AIDS crisis, feels detached.

There’s a lot of history and genealogy to recall in these subplots, and the three years that have passed since “83” are like three centuries in peak-TV time. “Deutschland 86” largely stands on its own, but you may need a Google tab open while watching.

The show’s strength remains Lenora and Martin, who are both partners and antagonists. He’s a patriot but a confused one, trying to keep his moral bearings while his country loses its own. To Lenora, Martin is a callow, self-indulgent boy, unwilling to sacrifice the few to help the many: “You can’t see past the end of your own nose.” Schrader, radiating ‘80s Eurocool, gives swagger and charisma to what might otherwise be an empty villainess.

For “Americans” fans in withdrawal, this isn’t a perfect replacement. It’s not a slow burn but a potboiler, and it sometimes lurches into “24"-esque absurdity and James Bond sudsiness. (When Martin is assigned to seduce a mark, there’s a cornball shot of him framed, “Graduate"-style, between her calves.)

But it has a similar sense of espionage as an intimate entanglement and a theme of risking one’s life for a lost cause, because family is family and home is home. And the details are remarkable, like the Angolan war orphans — at risk of being conscripted as soldiers in an exploitative proxy war — sitting on the floor to play RisiKo!, a variant of the global conquest board game Risk.

That’s “Deutschland 86” in miniature. It’s good fun, but it knows that its subject is more than a game.