Hans-Georg Maassen is an unlikely dissident. In his trademark three-piece suits and small glasses, he looks more like a law professor. Indeed, that is what he studied, earning a doctorate on the legal status of asylum seekers in international law.

This bourgeois exterior is the perfect cover for a man who was Germany’s top spy, charged with protecting the country from the far-right and Islamists. But now he is no longer under the quiet protection of the German state; he is its victim. He is under investigation from the agency he once led, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV).

Like George Smiley, Maassen is a remnant of an older and more powerful country, soldiering on in spite of the decline, trying to preserve what he can. That someone who was once at the heart of the Establishment in the 1990s now finds himself an outcast is symbolic of how much Germany has changed. The cracks in the postwar political consensus have become impossible to ignore.

On his website – Die Akte Maassen – he documents his battle with the BfV, publishing in full all the documents that he has forced the government to release about his case. ‘It’s like mail from the madhouse,’ he tells me.

‘The painful decisions have to be made at the beginning. Otherwise you can’t survive politically’

‘The painful decisions have to be made at the beginning. Otherwise you can’t survive politically’

Certainly his case seems Kafkaesque. One piece of evidence against him is that he doubted President Joe Biden’s mental state and asked who was really running the US government. This apparently was proof of a belief in shadowy conspiracies, possibly anti-Semitic. Shortly after this became public, Biden stepped down as the presidential candidate for 2024 in part due to his health.

Another piece of evidence is a fan account of Maassen’s, which reproduces all his posts. When Maassen became aware he had retweeted an anti-Semite, he deleted the post. But the fan account did not. ‘I can’t prevent someone abusing my name,’ says Maassen, but that wasn’t enough for the BfV and this too was cited as evidence of his extremism. ‘We are experiencing the erosion of the rule of law,’ he says. He compares it to the law in communist East Germany, where it was an ‘instrument’ for enacting the will of politicians.

How did it come to this? Maassen was once a well-respected civil servant. He was born in the town of Mönchengladbach, North Rhine-Westphalia, near the Dutch border, to a family who ran a tobacco shop. He was always interested in politics and joined the centre-right CDU party at the age of 16, although he maintains that he had a ‘strict separation’ between work and politics, praising Otto Schily, the........

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