”Everybody stared at Sally, in her canary yellow beret and shabby fur coat, like the skin of a mangy old dog.
‘I wonder,’ she was fond of remarking, ‘w”Everybody stared at Sally, in her canary yellow beret and shabby fur coat, like the skin of a mangy old dog.
‘I wonder,’ she was fond of remarking, ‘what they’d say if they knew that we two old tramps were going to be the most marvelous novelist and the greatest actress in the world.’
‘They’d probably be very much surprised.’”
I was watching the Rick Stein travel show Long Weekends, and he was in Berlin. As with most of his shows, he incorporates books that correspond with his travels and many times produces memories of his youth, travelling about Europe with a knapsack full of books. In this episode, he discussed Christopher Isherwood’s book Goodbye to Berlin and of course Sally Bowles obsession with a concoction she called Prairie Oyster. ”Dexterously, she broke the eggs into the glasses, added the Worcester sauce and stirred up the mixture with the end of a fountain-pen.” Sally practically lived on them and soon has Christopher craving them as well, or maybe he just craves them as part of the Sally mystique.
I’m sure almost everyone on the planet has seen the 1972 film Cabaret, based on this book, or the stage play. If you haven’t, you must. Sometime in the early 1990s when I was still hanging about the University of Arizona campus trying to finish up a degree in English Literature, a young woman asked me to go see the stage play Cabaret with her. My budget at the time was more in the range of $1 movies than $60 for a seat to see a play, so I readily said yes and would have said yes if she had sported a moustache and a raging case of BO, but to add to my enjoyment, the young lady was not only attractive but intelligent and a huge fan of Cabaret. We arrived, and I felt constricted in my borrowed suit and self conscious about my skinny tie, which I felt that if the embarrassment reached too high a level at least I could strangle myself with it, quietly, somewhere in the back of the theatre where I wouldn’t intrude on the events on stage.
Before things could begin, a woman came out on stage moving in that self-conscious way that people do who are uncomfortable speaking before a large audience. I thought to myself, shit, she’s going to tell us that the show has been cancelled due to unforeseen disasters, which I was prepared to yell...but the show must always go on. She tapped the mic, always a delaying tactic for the self-conscious, and said, “We have a problem ladies and gentlemen; the lead actor playing the Emcee has become ill and can’t perform.”
I looked over at the stricken face of my companion as groans emanated from the crowd around us. The woman’s voice brightened, “But, and I can’t hardly believe this, but we called Joel Grey to see if he could possibly stand in...and he said, yes!”
A pandemonium of clapping broke out, led by my ecstatic companion. You’d have thought that a Beatle had wandered on stage as Joel Grey poked his head out the curtain for a moment to soak in the applause. For those who don’t know, Grey was the actor who played the role on Broadway and in the film version, so this was a real treat indeed. At the time, it was a great experience, but of course, as time has gone by, I’ve grown in my own cultural awareness, and my memories of that experience have only become edged in more vibrant colors.
So the poignancy of this book is that it is set in the 1930s, just as the Nazis are coming to power. The gorgeous decadence and extravagant creativity that is exploding out of Germany is about to be stomped with jackboots. Isherwood and Sally Bowles are living in the last few moments of this period and are trying to discover ways to break through and have enough money to leave their hand to mouth existence behind them. They try to shake down a rich American, but discover that they aren’t quite as clever as they thought, nor is he quite as doltish as they hoped. Sleeping with ”dirty old Jewish producers” isn’t really getting Sally anywhere either. She does like to shock people, and when Christopher introduces her to his girlfriend, things do not go well.
”’Haven’t you any small-talk except adultery?’
‘People have got to take me as I am,’ retorted Sally, grandly.
‘Finger-nails and all?’ I’d noticed Natalia’s eyes returning to them again and again, in fascinated horror.
Sally laughed: ‘Today, I specially didn’t paint my toe-nails.’
‘Oh rot, Sally! Do you really?’
‘Yes, of course I do.’
‘But what on earth’s the point? I mean, nobody--’ I corrected myself, ‘very few people can see them…’
Sally gave me the most fatuous grin: ‘I know, darling...But it makes me feel so marvellously sensual….’”
There is this great moment in the book, one of many great moments, when Christopher is talking to a friend about belonging to a place and how Berlin has become that place for him that he can feel most like himself. I think most of us seek such a place our whole lives and have to settle for finding a place that at least allows us an opportunity to mostly be ourselves, but actually finding the Shangri-La, the place that best speaks to our soul, is an elusive discovery. If you have found such a place, don’t let wild horses pull you away from it, but then sometimes, like in the case of Berlin, something happens that changes the place from what you need it to be. The magic is crushed beneath the marching feet of a coming tide of faux-moralistic, bombastic rhetoric.
The rise of Hitler is starting to intrude on their lives, and one of Christopher’s friends makes an observation that could apply to politics today.”The political moral is certainly depressing: these people could be made to believe in anybody or anything.”
There is lots to enjoy in this novel, but I must confess that when Sally Bowles is off stage, I pine for her return. What is most appealing about her is her freedom to really be herself, and if you must love her, it will be because you know everything there is to know about her. Shame is a foreign concept to her. Impulses are to be embraced, and life must be squeezed until the last drop of joy or pain can be extracted.
*****This book received the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2019, it was ranked 5th on The Guardian's list of the 100 best books of the 21st ce*****This book received the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2019, it was ranked 5th on The Guardian's list of the 100 best books of the 21st century.*****
”Standing on the ruins of history, standing both in and on top of history’s depository, Jacques Austerlitz is joined by his name to these ruins: and again, at the end of the book, as at the beginning, he threatens to become simply part of the rubble of history, a thing, a depository of facts and dates, not a human being.”
His name is Jacques Austerlitz. He did not grow up with that name. He grew up in Wales as the son of a Calvinist preacher/retired missionary and his timid, colorless wife. They called him Dafydd Elias. It was a relief when he escaped this dreary half-life of oppressive thoughts and a plodding existence, waiting patiently for an afterlife. When finally he was allowed to go to school, it was as if he’d escaped from a prison sentence. It was at school that he learned of his unusual name. It is a name that denotes a merging of cultures, Czechoslovankian and French. Are there clues in that?
He discovers that he arrived in Britain during the summer of 1939 as an infant refugee on a kindertransport from Czechoslovakia. His life before he arrived in Britain is a blank canvas, as if, while he was carried across the ocean, his memories fled back to his homeland.
He goes to Oxford and discovers he is drawn to European architecture. He has a nervous breakdown. He knows he must return to Czechoslovakia and fill in the gaps of his missing life. He finds some clues that help unlock the hidden door in his own mind, allowing the language of his past life and the memories to start flooding into his brain. ”I have even thought that I could still apprehend the dying away of my native tongue, the faltering and fading sounds which I think lingered on in me at least for a while, like something shut up and scratching or knocking, something which, out of fear, stops its noise and falls silent whenever one tries to listen to it.”
An unknown narrator tells us this story through a series of meetings he has with Austerlitz. They meet first in Antwerp and then in a cavalcade of European cities. It is as if they are drawn to each other and there is almost a supernatural need for this story to be told to the narrator so that he can share it with us. Each time they meet, Austerlitz picks up the thread of the story at the very moment he left it when they last parted. He weaves together sections of his life and introduces us to people he met along his journey to find himself.
There are so many wonderfully written passages to quote, but the ones that are lingering in my memories this morning are the ones that involve loss. ”I remember, said Austerlitz, how Alphonso once told his great-nephew and me that everything was fading before our eyes, and that many of the loveliest of colors had already disappeared, or existed only where no one saw them, in the submarine gardens fathoms deep below the surface of the sea.” There is certainly a nostalgia for the past being felt by Alphonso, but to even think about the loss of colors from the modern age that will never be seen again is a disconcerting thought. We’ll never see the world the same way as Alphonso did, and neither will our children see the same world we did. Maybe the color isn’t gone though, maybe it has just faded from his own eyes?
”It was as if time, which usually runs so irrevocably away, had stood still here, as if the years behind us were still to come.” I once stepped into an old man’s house, and it was as if his front door had been a portal to 1942. In the world that he could control, the interior of his house, he made time stand still. I felt this moment of discombobulation as if, when I stepped out of his door and back into the real world, my era would be waiting in the distant future.
”Unfortunately the tribe of the Aztecs had died out years ago, and that at best an ancient perroquet which still remembered a few words of their language might survive here and there.” It freaks me out to contemplate the idea that a race of people can die out and that their language only survives in the feeble lexicon of a handful of parrots.
”I wandered, all through that winter, up and down the long corridors, staring out for hours through one of the dirty windows at the cemetery below, where we are standing now, feeling nothing inside my head but the four burnt-out walls of my brain.” I’ve never had a nervous breakdown, but it is always one of those lingering concerns that, eventually, one day, my brain will rebel against me and say, enough is enough...I’m pulling the plug. One doesn’t know who he will be on the other side, or if he will ever recover who he was, or maybe it's best he doesn’t. It is a scary thought to think of the shattered remains of my brain, like a building that has been hit by a bomb.
I have, of course, dabbled with the idea of reading W. G. Sebald. Nobel committee members have stated that he would have eventually won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He had an untimely end, an inconvenient car crash, that left him dead at fifty-seven. I wonder if he had time to be incensed that the stories still left to be told in his head would forever be just a few jottings in a notebook and of course, there are all the stories that he hadn’t even discovered yet. Louis Erdrich is the one who gave me the two-handed push in the back to finally read him. She was on a trip through Ojibwe country, and at night, while stuck in some cheap motel being gently swayed by the passing semi trucks, she would read Austerlitz. I was riding along with her, reading the tale of her travel in her Books and Island book. She talked about the long, complex sentences in Austerlitz. There is one sentence that goes on for more than seven pages. That might even be more Faulkneresque than William Faulkner himself. She said she had to read sentences over and over again, but she didn’t see it as a burden.
I have a very good attention span and found it interesting (I actually chuckled a few times at finding myself caught out) to discover myself losing the thread of a sentence. I, too, had to go back and reread sentences, whole pages; sometimes I skipped back two or three pages to begin again. There is one point when I contemplated whether I was really smart enough to read this book, but I’m a stubborn man when it comes to books. As I read, there was a growing understanding that I simply must finish this book, not because it is challenging, but because this book is too important not to understand its story. I kept waiting for that familiar click in my head when my brain has made the adjustments to the writing style, but it never really happened. I’m not sure we are supposed to be comfortable with the complexity of the structure. I also felt the fluttering of butterflies in my stomach that told me that I had stumbled upon something special.
As I sit here at my computer writing this review, contemplating my reading experience, I have the strong urge to reread it. This time I will be completely zoned in, impervious to distractions, and grasp the nuance of every sentence the moment I read it (I do beguile myself). I want to brush away the feeling that I failed the book in some way. With that feeling, I also feel euphoric, like I’ve ventured into something unknown and came away a better person. New vistas may have opened up in my mind. What else can I deduce from all this other than that the book is a masterpiece?
”Berlin sounded too disdainful in his ears. A new name was required, one worthy of a capital of world renown. A name like Germania, perhaps.”
In 1944, ”Berlin sounded too disdainful in his ears. A new name was required, one worthy of a capital of world renown. A name like Germania, perhaps.”
In 1944, Berlin is being bombed into oblivion. If there is going to be a Germania, it will be built on the smoldering ruins of the old. Richard Oppenheimer lives in a Jewish house with his Aryan wife. His marriage to her has been the only thing that has kept him alive. When a man in an SD (Sicherheitsdienst) uniform shows up at his door in the middle of the night, he believes his luck has run out. He feels a sense of relief that finally his wife Lisa will be rid of the burden of him. She will be safe and free of the constant worry of the sound of heavy boots on the stairs coming to take them away.
But as it turns out, the SS has a use for him.
Before the rise of the Nazis, he was a well-regarded police inspector, and now they have need of his special skills to help them find a depraved, serial killer who is viciously mutilating the genitalia of women and leaving them as offerings before monuments from World War One.
These aren’t prostitutes, exactly, who are being murdered, but they are women who are engaging in sexual activity with men who are highly placed in the Nazi regime. Needless to say, the powers that be would like the killer caught and the murders swept under the rubble. If the SS fail to find satisfactory answers, Oppenheimer will make a perfect scapegoat.
Serial killers are difficult to catch, even in modern times, and it is much harder trying to catch one against the backdrop of a world war with allied bombing raids frequently forcing Oppenheimer to seek shelter as he chases down every slender lead he is fortunate to know about.
I’ve read many books regarding the blitz of London, but I’ve spent very little time reading about the bombing of Berlin. The conditions in Berlin were, in many ways, worse than they were in London, with many people expecting to die at any moment and many, including Oppenheimer of course, secretly hoping for an Allied win. Oppenheimer keeps himself propped up through the chaos on a steady dose of Pervitin, an early form of crystal meth. It was liberally distributed to German soldiers to allow them to exist on very little sleep and be kept in a constant state of euphoria. Oppenheimer has a doctor friend who keeps him supplied. Doctor Hilde’s house is a warehouse for banned books. ”She opened the door to the black stove in the corner of the room, stood in front of it, and proclaimed, ‘For Stefan Zweig.’ Then she threw the luxury edition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf onto the coals and lit it with a match.” Hilde is also Oppenheimer’s connection to the German resistance, and soon they want to know everything he is learning about the activities of the Golden Pheasants, the nickname for the senior party members, who skim off the cream of food and goods and live in the lap of luxury while the city around them starves. Oppenheimer has enough trouble staying alive without getting himself caught up in politics, but when they offer him an opportunity to flee the country with his wife, the temptation to cooperate is too good to pass up.
It’s not just that he wants to solve the crime to stay alive. He feels alive again, for the first time in years, and wants to catch the killer for his own satisfaction as well. It becomes almost as important to him as his own life.
The killer is becoming frustrated, too. He has sent letters to the police that have never been read. His missives are buried in a huge pile of letters sent by citizens denouncing their neighbors or family for violations against the Third Reich. These are people who fully understand that, by doing so, they are not just getting their neighbors and family members in trouble but are potentially condemning them to death. The Nazis rely on bullets more than incarceration for punishments. These tattle tales/liars/judgemental people consider themselves to be good people, but it is examples like these situations that make it very hard to like humanity.
Circling back to the burning copy of Mein Kampf, I find this passage to be very interesting as well: ”Oppenheimer doubted that Mrs. Korber had ever actually read Hitler’s book. Even among his most zealous followers, there were very few who voluntarily did that. Similar to a dusty family Bible, the work was more of a devotional object used to show your disposition than reading material that you perused to uplift yourself.” I’ve never really equated Mein Kampf with The Bible, but the blind faith of their followers is very similar indeed. If you want to have an intelligent conversation with someone about The Bible, don’t have it with a Christian; have it with an atheist. The atheist is much more likely to have read the book. I’m sure the same can be said about White Supremacists. I would postulate that few have read Hitler’s book, but probably all of them own a copy. Blind faith is easier to maintain than building a belief on a bedrock of truth.
Oppenheimer is in the unenviable position of trying to keep too many people happy and succeeding with none of them. As he closes in on the killer, he realizes that the window for having any kind of future for himself is also closing. When he is no longer useful, what will be his fate?
This reminds me of the TV show Foyle’s War in the sense that it sometimes seemed ridiculous to be looking for the killer of a person(s) in the midst of a war that is grinding up human beings by the millions. Serial killers are terrifying, but hardly in the same league as the politicians who send men into the bloody battlefields to be slaughtered, but then there is no mystery to be solved there. We know the culprits. Trying to figure out the motives for the vicious murders of these women is even more interesting than catching the killer. The case is intriguing, but what is most fascinating for me is the time that Harald Gilbers spends showing the reader the daily lives of these people under siege.
I received a free ARC of Germania by Harald Gilbers from Macmillan in exchange for an honest review.
”Berlin was a crazy city and it was getting crazier and crazier.”
It is 1931, and clashes between communists and fascists are almost becoming routine. ”Berlin was a crazy city and it was getting crazier and crazier.”
It is 1931, and clashes between communists and fascists are almost becoming routine. Jews are starting to get the first taste of what the future will be, and law students are showing up to class espousing the fanatical views of the Nazi party. Against all this turmoil, Charlotte Ritter is trying to find a young girl who witnessed the murder of her friend by police. Gereon Rath is trying to figure out why people with mobster connections keep ending up in the canals. ”He didn’t realize until he saw the eyes staring back at him out of a face so pale and swollen it no longer looked human. But human it was, the skin waxy and green with algae, hair swaying like seaweed. There was a deep, and bloodless--and therefore all the more hideous--wound on the man’s face, which exposed half his teeth and made it look as though he were snarling. He was staring at a corpse.”
Investigating would be easier if he wasn’t, as it turns out ineptly, being forced to keep tabs on the American gangster Abraham Goldstein. Goldstein is as slippery as a greased pig. Back in the states, he learned some skills slipping away from G-men, and he soon has Gereon scrambling to keep up with his movements. The assumption is that Goldstein is up to no good, but his true purpose for being in Berlin remains a mystery. I really enjoy this character. He is a Jew unlike any Jew the fascists have encountered before. There is this scene where he comes upon four Nazis beating up an old Jew, and let’s just say the brownshirt bastards don’t do as well against an American mobster as they do against the nearly helpless people they are used to harassing.
Gereon and Charlotte are also trying to figure out their own relationship. They are crazy about each other, but often work at cross purposes. She is trying to establish a career for herself, a difficult task in 1930s Germany for a woman, and Gereon is often trying to figure out how he works into her future plans. Gereon is also caught between his own mob connections and his job as a police officer. He tries to use both forces to help solve his murder cases without compromising his own integrity. As Gereon and Charlotte pursue their investigations, it soon becomes apparent that their cases intersect, and as always, when they are at their best is when they are working together. I’d love to see them both leave their career paths and open their own private investigation firm.
I was first introduced to the works of Volker Kutscher when I watched the simply amazing TV show on Netflix called Babylon Berlin, which is based on the Kutscher novels. I then learned that Sandstone Press in the Highlands, the furthest North publisher in Britain, had decided to translate the books into English. There are five books out in the series, of which this is the third one. The covers are elegant, noir beauties, and they all match, making a very pleasing grouping on my shelves.
I absolutely adore the way the German actress Liv Lisa Fries plays Charlotte Ritter in the TV series. In fact, I prefer the Charlotte in the TV series to the one in the book, though I will say that in this book Charlotte shows more of the characteristics that I like about the Fries version. I’m hoping I continue to see a fine evolution of her character with each book.
I would suggest watching the three seasons of Babylon Berlin on Netflix first and then, if you want more Gereon and Charlotte, start tracking down the books. I enjoy both, but the TV series does such a wonderful job conveying the grit, the deviances, and the radical politics that turned Berlin in the 1930s into a cauldron of crazy.
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