For many years now the publication of a new Bernie Gunther novel by Philip Kerr has been something to look forward to, but this time it’s a sad occasion as well, because Philip Kerr died in 2018, before this book was published. It is therefore our goodbye to Bernie Gunther and our farewell to his creator.
It was a brilliant idea to take a Raymond Chandler-style, wise-cracking narrator and make him an ex-policeman, now a private detective, trying to make a living in Nazi-era Germany.
For this last appearance, Kerr takes us back to where the whole story began, Berlin in 1928, with a youngish Bernie still haunted by his experiences in the trenches and newly appointed to the murder squad. Despite the first three novels being re-issued as an omnibus volume under the title Berlin Noir, not all of the saga takes place there. Over the course of 14 novels and approximately 30 years, Bernie finds himself in many of the conquered territories of the Third Reich and, after the war, in Vienna, the South of France, Greece, and South America, re-visiting Berlin in flashback.
For me, though, the scenes set in Berlin have a special quality, so this last novel is a real treat, as Bernie delves into the neon-lit night of the metropolis in search of a serial killer. Or is it two killers? Bernie has to offer himself as a potential victim to find out. Detection isn’t really the point here, though, it’s merely the pretext for a portrait of Berlin in all its 1920s wildness.
Kerr has always mingled real-life characters with his fictional ones, but as this is the only one of the books set before the Nazis came to power, several of the real-life characters here, rather than the familiar villains such as Goebbels and Reinhardt Heydrich, are the artists of the Weimar era.
Thus, Bernie becomes a somewhat unwilling sitter for both George Gross and Otto Dix. Thea von Harbou, Fritz Lang’s wife and screenwriter, asks for Bernie’s inside help with a crime story she is planning. Bernie’s impersonation of a disabled war veteran brings him into contact with the theatre world as well. At the theatre where his make-up is being applied, the music that Bernie doesn’t care for is The Threepenny Opera. The singer he thinks can’t carry a tune turns out to be Lotte Lenya. There’s a sly vein of humour in that Bernie’s taste in art and music is conventional. He’s quite disdainful of the works that we readers of 2019 regard as modern classics.
There is a another film reference too, when Bernie “accidently on purpose” mistakes the actor Gustaf Grundgens for Emil Jannings. Grundgens was the basis for the character in the film Mephisto, the actor who stayed in Germany and worked under the Nazis.
Kerr has planted film references in his Bernie novels before. In A German Requiem, set in Vienna in 1948, there’s a British film crew shooting in the streets at night, a nod to The Third Man. Dalia Dresner in The Woman from Zagreb, was a (fictional) UFA star.
And so to the neatest film reference of all. The novel takes its title from Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s futuristic fantasy film. The black joke about the killer having the word “murderer” chalked on his back, and the witnesses’ accounts of the suspect whistling a classical tune, point us in the direction of another Lang film, however. The attentive reader who has seen the film in question, will spot what is going on here by the appearance and behaviour of one character in particular.
Bernie has already suggested to Thea von Harbou that, in a film about serial murder, the audience might inclined to think that if the victims were prostitutes, they deserved their fate. It would work better with children as victims. He has also told her that detectives need contacts in the criminal underworld. And so, after the way events play out towards the end of the story, Bernie says he has another film idea for her. It’s left for the reader to realise that this is Lang’s classic M, and it’s a clever conceit that the idea for it came from Bernie Gunther, based on his own experience.
I saw M for the first time on TV, on the BBC many years ago. Now, the world in which one could stumble by accident on a classic film such as this in the middle of the evening, seems as remote as the Weimar republic itself.
However, Kerr also suggests that a certain public cruelty is not unique to the Berlin of that era. The Cabaret of the Nameless, where talentless individuals are tricked on to the stage to be mocked by the audience, is alive and well on British television today.
Of course, no novel in English as steeped in Weimar culture as this one is, would be complete without a reference to Christopher Isherwood and there it is, at the visit to the grisly Berlin mortuary. Philip Kerr takes his place alongside Isherwood, Len Deighton and John le Carre as a British author who has found literary inspiration in Berlin.
We will never know where Kerr might have taken the series had he lived to write more. There’s an intriguing loose end in the penultimate novel, Greeks Bearing Gifts. There is a suggestion that the 60-year-old Bernie is going to work for the Israelis hunting down Nazi war criminals on his return to Germany. This would have fitted in nicely with Bernie’s dealings with Eichmann in earlier books. Bernie could have played a role in the capture of Eichmann, which would have been atonement for the things he was forced to do on the Eastern front.
I must say I enjoyed this book hugely and it might even rival The Lady From Zagreb as my favourite of the whole series. I particularly like that one for its delving into a murky area of history, and the nice black joke when the clean-cut young SS officer who is chauffeuring Bernie reveals that his name is Kurt Waldheim. And the lady herself, Dalia Dresner, has to be the ultimate femme fatale.
The Good Reader 