Murder in the Fuehrer's Germany
In 1989 Scottish novelist Philip Kerr published his first novel starring Berlin private detective Bernie Gunther. The book was set in 1936, the early days of the Nazi regime. Kerr followed with a sequel the next year and then again in the year that followed. The second book was also in 1938, while the third took place during the allied occupation of Germany. These three books are often referred to as the “Berlin noir trilogy.”
One of the central elements of noir literature is moral ambiguity. Kerr certainly found the mother load of ethical haziness with a detective trying to work in Nazi Germany. The police in Germany had been professionalized for decades, but trying to enforce the law after 1933 was a difficult task when the regime itself was criminal and corrupt, regularly murdering German citizens in violation of its own laws for a host of reasons.
Gunther is a cynic, with a dark sense of humor, but one who also tries to find the truth. The Nazis value his investigative skills, but his determination to solve cases does not always go over well with party bosses often ordering executions and expecting officials of the state to look the other way. It seemed like Kerr made a mistake in skipping over the war years.
Fifteen years later, Kerr returned to the Gunther character with stories that start after the war, but often flash back to the pre-war and wartime eras. “Prussian Blue: A Bernie Gunther Novel” (Marian Wood Books/Putnam, 2017) is now the 12th Bernie Gunther title. This novel starts in 1956 with the former Berlin police detective living in southern France under an assumed name. (Although never a member of the Nazi party, like many police officers Gunther had to join the SS as the Nazi security apparatus took over all forms of law enforcement.) General Erich Mielke of the East German Secret Police—the Stasi—attempts to recruit Gunther to kill a British spy. (Mielke was a real and extremely dangerous individual who oversaw the internal security for East Germany during most of its existence.) Realizing he is neither an assassin nor anything but a loose end, Bernie goes on the run trying to make it to the German border.
As he drives across France being chased by a former associate of his now in the employ of the East Germans, Gunther begins to reflect on a case they worked together in 1939. Reinhard Heydrich, the SS general in charge of both internal security and the police in Nazi Germany sends Gunther to Berchtesgaden to investigate a murder that has taken place at Hitler’s mountain retreat. Heydrich wants the crime solved before the leader’s fiftieth birthday. Kerr refers to Hitler as the “leader” in the text, which is the English-language meaning of the “fuehrer.” This linguistic decision is a good touch, giving Nazi fanaticism the cult-like feel it deserves. Kerr’s presentation of Heydrich is the product of good historical research, but also the liberties that a novelist can take in a work of fiction. Heydrich is urban, charming, and a highly competent administrator who is so depraved that he thinks nothing of having a few of his own Gestapo agents executed to send a message to a bureaucratic rival. (Although Kerr’s rendering of Heydrich is fictional, it is plausible. From Kerr’s presentation, it easy to see how the real Nazi oversaw the conference that made mass execution of Jews the formal policy of the Third Reich.)
What the reader gets are essential two Bernie Gunther stories; a mystery and a thriller that are intertwined. Many people in Berchtesgaden do not want the murder solved. Gunther discovers that there is massive corruption taking place in the Bavarian Alps. Nazi administrators want the resort built quickly, so construction workers are exempted from military service, and provided methamphetamines to allow them to work longer hours. The reward for this hard work is a semi-official prostitution operation. Kerr reminds us that the Third Reich was a kleptocracy that would put Putin’s Russia to shame. Nazi officials are seizing private real estate to build Hitler’s personal resort with compensation that often borders on the token; they are getting kickbacks from the construction firms; taking a percentage of the profits from the prostitutes; and demanding and getting protection money from locals to designate them or their family members as employees of the construction firm in order to keep them out of the army. Gunther’s investigation threatens to expose all of this corruption.
Kerr cleverly has both stories culminate in the same spot. In every good mystery, the bad guy is eventually caught, but in Nazi Germany, “bad guy” is a relative term. The murderer is arrested and then receives the type of murky justice that one might expect from administrators who do not want to admit that someone could breach the secure zone surrounding the leader’s resort. Gunther’s reward for a job well done is hardly a reward. The resolution of Gunther’s dispute with the Stasi is more clear-cut and sets up more adventures in novels yet to come.
