Review of If The Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr (Quercus, 2009)

It’s only eighteen months since the end of the Weimar Republic and unable to stomach working for the Nazi regime homicide detective Bernie Gunther has quit the police force and taken a job as the house detective at the world famous Adlon Hotel, just a stone’s throw from the Brandenburg Gate. There are rumours of impending race laws, but the Jewish population are already suffering daily humiliation and discrimination, including being expelled from all German sporting organisations. Such anti-Semitism looks like it might draw international condemnation and pressure with the Americans in particular threatening to boycott to the 1936 Olympics, but inexplicably the American delegate visiting Berlin reports to Roosevelt that stories concerning anti-Jewish actions are overly hyped. Two American guests at the Adlon have a vested interest in the decision – the beautiful Noreen Charalambides, a Jewish journalist and aspiring novelist who wishes to expose the truth, and Max Reles, a Chicago gangster, friendly with several high-ranking Nazis, who wants to repeat the mob’s success at the Los Angeles Olympics at rigging the construction contracts. Gunther has problems of his own – he’s managed to accidentally kill a cop and he needs his Jewish grandmother to be airbrushed from history – but he’s also soon unwittingly caught between the two Americans and has two murders to solve – that of a German businessman and a Jewish boxer. The only problem is, very few people want them solved. Twenty years later, having managed to survive the war, Gunther is hiding out in Cuba on an Argentine passport when the ghosts of the case reappear, only the Chicago mob have swapped deals with the Nazis for Batista’s regime.

Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series has a lot of things going for it. First, Kerr’s narrative is colourful and engaging, and he tells a well plotted story. Second, he expertly blends fiction with real people, places and historical events. Third, the books are politically astute and targeted, whilst at the same time being multi-layered, complex and ambiguous. Kerr is vehemently anti-Nazi, but he recognises that post Weimer Republic Germany was a cauldron of competing ideologies and that personal relationships often over-rode ideological differences. So, for example, former colleagues who have become pro-Nazi are prepared to help Gunther out as a personal favour, and vice versa, even though they know his political views. Fourth, in Bernie Gunther he has created one of the finest characters in crime fiction. Gunther is no black and white character with little depth. Rather he’s a resonant, luminous, multi-coloured, complex, compromised and flawed individual. While his heart is roughly in the right place, Gunther is morally suspect on many levels with his personal desires, head strong nature and smart mouth clouding his decision making, often placing him in situations where lying, cheating, stealing, killing, etc. is a necessary solution.

If The Dead Rise Not is a solid addition to the series, but in my view is not quite as good as some of the others in the series (which given the very high standard of the previous books is always going to be a tough challenge). The dialogue was, as ever, sharp and often caustic and very funny. The characterisation was excellent. The story was interesting. My issue was with pacing and coincidence. For me the 1934 period of the book, which was effectively the back story for 1954 period, was too long and drawn out and the 1954 period too short and underdeveloped. My sense was that the balance needed to be shifted to at least a fifty-fifty split in length, with the Cuba part of the plot extended and deepened to cover more of the politics of the time and the mob connections, and provide more details of Gunther’s life post-Argentina (following on from the last book – A Quiet Flame). The ending was also too swift. In addition, the plot hinges on a coincidence in which three characters who have not seen each other in twenty years meet in the one location (on a different continent) in the space of a few hours. I had a hard time buying that. Despite these two issues, the book was still a highly enjoyable read and I look forward to the next instalment in the series.

Review of Zoo Station by David Downing, Old Street Publishing (2007)

New Year’s eve 1939, the Nazis are ratcheting up the political pressure on their Polish and Czechoslovakia neighbours, and John Russell a freelance English journalist living in Berlin, is in a Danzig bar. When he returns to his hotel a Russian, who’d he’d last seen in 1924, is waiting for him with a proposition – to write pro-Nazi articles for Russian newspapers whilst simultaneously spying for them. Tired and frustrated with the Nazi regime he agrees, heading back to Berlin to his actress girlfriend and his son from his first marriage to a former German communist. Whilst researching and writing his stories he starts to teach English to the daughters of a Jewish couple who still hope to gain visas to travel to Britain, and is drawn into the story of his American journalist neighbour who has heard about a new, secret law to exterminate disabled people and then mysteriously commits suicide. Soon the Gestapo and British intelligence are also asking him for favours. All Russell wants to do is keep his head down and stay in Germany so he can remain with his loved ones; but he also wants to avenge the American’s death, save the Weisner family and undermine the Nazi regime in whatever way he can. Soon he’s criss-crossing Europe, sourcing and couriering dangerous information, hoping that everything works out as he hopes.

‘So what are you here for?’
‘Ah.’ Shchepkin hitched his trouser leg again. ‘I am here to offer you work.’
Russell raised an eyebrow. ‘You? Who exactly do you represent?’
The Russian shrugged. ‘My country. The Writer’s Union. It doesn’t matter. You will be working for us. You know who we are.’
‘No,’ Russell said. ‘I mean, no I’m not interested. I …’
‘Don’t be so hasty,’ Shchepkin said. ‘Hear me out. We aren’t asking you to do anything which your German hosts could object to.’ The Russian allowed himself a smile. ‘Let me tell you exactly what we have in mind. We want a series of articles about the positive aspects of the Nazi regime.’

I enjoyed Zoo Station without being bowled over by it. It’s an interesting story, competently told, with care and attention given to the historical context but lacking in high drama (despite all the potential, I was never 'on the edge of my seat'). The characterization is okay; the people populating the story are in the main ordinary folk trying to get by and the result is that they’re generally not very memorable. John Russell is a reluctant hero; he’s got no quirks or odd traits and he’s polite and sensible in dress and action. The pacing was fairly even until the end where it sped up. It would have been better I think to keep it even to the conclusion, using the plot to try and crank up the tension rather than the pace. Instead the ending feels hurried and a little ragged. The American journalist part of the story simply dropped from the plot after a while, pulled back in at the end but not very effectively and without revealing its resolution (in terms of the newspaper story or the source of the information). Overall, an interesting first novel and I’ll probably pick up the next book in the series to see how Russell gets on as an English man in Germany as war breaks out.

Review of Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada, translated by Michael Hofmann, Penguin Classics, (2009, in German in 1947)

If you’ve ever wondered what it is like to live in a fascist regime then you need to read Hans Fallada’s recently translated classic, Alone in Berlin, first published in 1947 (U.S. title is Every Man Dies Alone).

In 1940, the occupants of 55 Jablonski Strasse are all fairing differently in the Nazi regime. On the top floor is the elderly Jewess, Frau Rosenthal, whose lives in fear since her husband was arrested a few weeks beforehand. Under her lives Otto Quangel, a foreman at a carpentry factory, who is looked on with suspicion by his bosses because he refuses to pay party dues, and his devoted wife, Anna. Beneath them are the Persickes, a family of bullies, wedded to the Nazi party, and who like to throw their weight around. On the ground floor is the retired Judge Fromm, who quietly keeps order, and at the basement at the back of the house lives the snitch Emil Borkhausen, his wife, Otti - who supplements their meagre rations with gifts from obliging men – and their five children all of whom have different father. When Otto and Anna Quangel learn that their only son has been killed in the battle for France, they decide to start to undermine the murderous Nazi regime by leaving anonymous postcards around the city, criticising Hitler and the fascist system and urging people to resist in whatever way they can. Then with Judge Fromm they rescue Frau Rosenthal from the thieving hands of Borkhausen and the more malicious Persickes. They have started on a path of resistance that soon captures the attention of the tenacious Inspector Escherich of the Gestapo and his superiors, and so the cat-and-mouse game begins.

'Don't worry, Trudel,' says Otto Quangel, and his calm is such as to immediately help to settle her agitation. 'You know, with Otto Quangel a thing goes in one ear and out the other. I can't remember what you told me a moment ago.' With grim resolve he gazes at the poster. 'I don't care if the whole Gestapo turns up, I don't know anything. And,' he adds, 'if you want, and if it makes you feel more secure, then from this moment forth, we simply won't know each other any more. You don't need to come tonight to see Anna, I'll cook up story for her.'

Primo Levi, for whom I have the greatest respect, said that Alone in Berlin is ‘the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis’. I think it does a lot more than that – it doesn’t simply reveal the mundane and everyday resistances and small transgressions of ordinary people, but also how the fascist system worked in practice on a day-to-day basis for everyone in society including children, parents, relatives, friends, employees and employers, state agencies and the servers of law and order; how fear and terror permeated every facet of life regardless of whether one was ideologically opposed to Nazism or its most fervent advocate. Indeed, Fallada’s story of friendship, love, deceit, betrayal, and redemption, reveals in stark detail the micro-circuits of power (in all its guises – domination, intimidation, coercion, seduction, manipulation, etc) that swirled and eddied around people regardless of their class or rank to maintain the hegemonic social relations that kept people in line; made them self-discipline their behaviour and to discipline the behaviour of others; to comply with a system that bore down on them, exploited them, coerced them into implicitly participating in atrocities against their fellow Germans and other nations; and enabled those that craved power through violence and intimidation to enact their brutal punishments. In this sense, Fallada’s brilliant book is the fictional equivalent to the more academically orientated prison notes of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist imprisoned by Mussolini who sought to understand why both the masses and elites tolerated a fascist regime that did not represent their best interests and did not rise up in revolution to depose them.

This is not to say that people simply accepted the system that oppressed them - domination and abuses of power are always accompanied by resistance – but rather such resistance is individualised or small scale, failing to reach a critical mass, and often is enacted in such a way that the perpetrator cannot be identified and punished. And this is what Fallada’s story concentrates on – the small acts of defiance (the writing and distribution of anti-Nazi postcards, the sheltering of Jews and political prisoners, working at a slow pace, sabotaging machines, writing doctor’s notes so that a person didn’t have to serve at the front) and how the state seeks to crush them by turning people against people in the name of some higher ideal (in this case a Nationalist Socialist Germany) and rewarding those who inform, denounce and enforce, whilst at the same time reminding them that they are equally vulnerable if they step out of line. Alone in Berlin, by tracing the interlocking stories of a two dozen people – active resistors, those simply trying to survive, those unwittingly drawn into situations not of their choosing, and the Gestapo and their stooges – reveals the messy, complex and contingent set of social relations existing in the Nazi fascist state. There were Germans who were fanatical, homicidal nationalists that craved a superpower Third Reich free of inferior peoples, but there were also millions of ordinary Germans opposed to such ideology and the madness of war and were also victims of its regime.

Contemporary novels of the Nazi period tend to be Thrillers with a capital T – for example, they focus on a large conspiracy plot or key political figures. Alone in Berlin is a thriller with a small t. It undoubtedly sits within the crime genre, but its core is an exploration of humanity and humanism - how people think and act in extraordinary circumstances. Fallada’s narrative is well paced and expertly plotted – none of the story feels contrived – and his characterization is first rate. While it is often not an easy read, and I felt emotionally exhausted at the end, its story is compelling - it is a book that will haunt the reader long after they have finished reading it in all the right ways.

Thanks to Uriah Robinson at Crime Scraps for the recommendation.

Review of Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s by Otto Friedrich, published by HarperPerennial (1995, originally 1972)

I got interested in Berlin before the war through reading Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels (I’ve also recently read the excellent The Real Odessa: Smuggling the Nazis to Peron's Argentina by Uki Goni after reading book five in the series set in Argentina). It’s taken a while to read as its been my breakfast book and I’ve read a fair few novels whilst this has been on the go.

Before the Deluge is a social history of Berlin during the Weimar Republic from 1919 to 1933, covering traditional politics, economics, social conditions, cultural politics, the arts, and the lives of ordinary Berliners and the movers and shakers. It’s rich, dense, insightful, and full of interesting commentary and anecdotes based on the author’s experiences, documentary research, and interviews with key actors still alive in the late 1960s.

Rapidly expanding in population size, Berlin during the 1920s was a city of turbulent and vibrant change – governments coming and going; unions and the army vying for power; communists, socialists and fascists fighting running battles, assassinating rivals, and waging propaganda wars; the currency crashing to worthlessness followed by an economic boom and then another crash; cabaret, theatre, movies and music flourishing; social order becoming liberalised with widespread naturism and promiscuity at the same time that anti-semitism grows steadily; crime, prostitution and drug taking becoming rife; and the intellectual elite in psychoanalysis, physics, architecture and other disciplines flocking to the city.

What Friedrich’s book makes very clear is that there was nothing predestined about the rise of Nazism and the collapse of the Weimar Republic. It was the culmination of a complex set of contingent, relational process, not some teleological inevitability, and in Berlin the National Socialists never received more than 25 percent of the vote despite Goebbels best efforts (nor more than 44 percent nationally). Criminals have always found a route to political power. Usually it is through some kind of coup. Hitler tried this in the earlier 1920s and failed. Where he succeeded was through the democratic process. Ultimately ordinary, innocent people voted criminal minds into office thus ensuring the end of democracy and the descent into megalomaniacal nationalism. What that has tended to do is blind us to the fact that Germany was a cauldron of competing ideologies through the whole period of the Third Reich – we fall into the trap of seeing Germans at that time as a monolithic nation of fanatical fascists. And that’s what is so refreshing about Philip Kerr’s novels - Gunther is an anti-Nazi cop trying to get by in a corrupt regime.

If you want to get a sense of Germany in the 1920s and the path to fascist power, then Friedrich’s book is a great place to start.