“The right to err”
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold“The right to err” is a phrase used by an East German wardress to characterize a prisoner condemned for failing to submit to the state’s version of Socialist reality. Recalled by Liz during her escape with Alec Leamas, it turns the abstract claim that people must be free to make mistakes into a test of what a political system permits its subjects to be.
The Wardress’s Definition
When Liz asks whether the institution is a prison for spies, the wardress rejects that description. It is instead a prison for people who fail to recognize Socialist reality, who imagine they have “the right to err,” or who slow the march; she sums them up as traitors. Her answer shifts the prison’s purpose from punishing a discrete act of espionage to suppressing dissent from the state’s political interpretation of reality.
The wardress follows this definition with a construction metaphor: Communism cannot be built without doing away with individualism, just as a great building cannot be planned if someone puts a sty on its site. In that logic, individual judgment is not an ordinary human liberty but an obstruction to a collective project. The phrase names the forbidden possibility behind that logic: a person might be wrong, or might refuse the official account, without thereby becoming an enemy.
Liz’s Recollection
The phrase returns when Liz and Leamas are in a car, arguing about how their lives have been used. Liz says that the way she has been treated makes the people on both sides seem alike: she has been “just currency to pay with,” and Fiedler was the only one who did not treat her as nothing. Leamas answers that he hates the world that makes such sacrifices, but insists that people everywhere are cheated, imprisoned, shot, or discarded.
As he speaks, Liz remembers the drab prison courtyard and the wardress’s words about those who slow the march and claim the right to err. The memory does not interrupt the argument with a new explanation; it brings the prison’s coercive language into the present exchange. The wardress’s formulation echoes the larger dispute over whether individual lives and judgments can be subordinated to a cause, while Liz’s recollection places that principle alongside her own experience of being treated as expendable.
Meaning in the Novel
The phrase’s force lies in the way it recasts fallibility as a political threat. In the wardress’s account, those who err or impede progress are obstacles to be removed; the construction analogy makes conformity sound like practical necessity. Liz’s memory preserves the human cost concealed by that tidy rationale. Against the march and the planned building, “the right to err” stands for the imperfect, individual judgment that an ideological system cannot safely accommodate.
