The One From the Other

My sis sent me a Philip Kerr book she spotted, The One From the Other, and although I thought I’d read all the Bernie Gunther novels, this turns out to be one I missed. Philip Kerr died in 2018, so the last book published in the Bernie series was Metropolis. There aren’t any more to come.

If you don’t know Bernie, here’s the short version.

He’s a former homicide bull in the Kriminalpolizei, who’s turned private. When we meet him in 1936 Berlin, Weimar has rolled over and died, and the Nazis are now in the saddle. The hook is that Bernie is trying to navigate a maze of opaque signals and ambiguous rivalries, a hierarchywithout any structural consistency or guiding principle except brute force. The world seems to have collapsed around a single dynamic, that the weak are prey, and you can’t protect yourself. The strong will take whatever they want, whenever they want, because they can.

The gangster ecology is familiar from noir convention, but it feels different, in this terrain. It’s not individual – or entrepreneurial – although that flourishes, too, in the contaminated, feverish atmosphere: the opportunities for random cruelty are everywhere. The menace, though, is institutional. It’s built-in, the mechanics of behavior part and parcel with the political climate. Terrorism is a tool of the state.

Some things worth noting.

The books aren’t chronological.

They slide around in time, from book to book, and sometimes within a single book. This has a counterintuitive effect, that when we zoom in, the immediate focus is even tighter. The idea of a larger context, or that historical distance might soften the moment, is rarely any comfort. Bernie the acerbic Berliner is always ready with some gallows humor, but the gallows itself is never far from his mind. Before whatever it is happens, he anticipates the worst, and it never fails to be more devious and infernal than he’s prepared for.

Which leads to a second observation, about historical or dramatic ironies.

We learn early on in the series that Bernie survives the Nazis, that he survives the war, but he can’t overcome memory. The similarities to Alan Furst’s spy novels, or Eric Ambler’s, of a generation before, are striking; a character, thrown into the deep end of the pool, keeps their head above water by grabbing anything that floats into reach. More to the point, it’s very much of the moment. We, the reader, know Hitler dies, and the Reich goes down in flames, but the people in the story don’t. Philip Kerr never lets Bernie, who’s narrating the books, use a device like Had-I-But-Known. He rarely, if ever, foreshadows. Bernie meets a sociopathic snake like Reinhard Heydrich, chief of security, and his main concern is hoping the Reichsprotektor forgets his name – not Heydrich’s looming date with destiny in Prague, although seven books later, Bernie will show up just in time to turn the final page, and survive to walk on Heydrich’s grave.

As to the matter of voice.

Bernie seems to be talking out of the corner of his mouth, with a lit smoke burning down in the other corner, the ashes ready to fall behind his teeth. He confides in us. And the vocabulary! Kerr was Edinburgh-born. He read for the law, like Scott and Buchan, and began a post-graduate fascination with things German. Here’s a trick, in the Bernie books. Bernie uses a lot of slang, and to my ear, it sounds like idiomatic Berliner Deutsch, rendered as an English equivalent. It isn’t, in fact. I’ve heard some of the real thing, and what Kerr is up to is creating a kind of parallel idiom. It sounds right, and it feels right, in the context, but it might as well be Klingon: he’s making it up, umlauts and all. Which isn’t to say it’s not convincing. And that’s the point.

Kerr wrote the first three Bernie books, the Berlin noir trilogy, and then Bernie dropped out of sight. The One From the Other came out fifteen years after A German Requiem, book three. Kerr just says stuff got in the way. There it is. I wish there were more books, of course. But the best thing about my sister happening on The One From the Other, is that as soon as I finished it, I went straight to the library and took out March Violets, the first of the books, and I’ve started the series again, from nose to tail. Trust me on this one.

Berlin Noir

David Edgerley Gates


I mentioned last time around that I'd discovered a new enthusiasm, the Bernie Gunther mystery series written by Philip Kerr. These are period stories, set mostly during WWII, and because Bernie's a German homicide cop, he has to answer to the Nazi chain of command.

I picked up on Bernie mid-stride, reading A MAN WITHOUT BREATH first - the ninth book, which takes place in 1943, and involves the murder of Polish military prisoners by the Russians, at Katyn. My habit, generally, if I happen on a writer I like, is to go back and read their books in the order they were written. Right? Seems only fair. In this case, as it was with Alan Furst, I snatched up what was immediately available, and took one step forward, with THE LADY FROM ZAGREB, and one step back, with PRAGUE FATALE, and then FIELD GRAY. Next on the list is the Berlin Noir trilogy, the first three Bernie novels. I couldn't help myself. I grabbed whatever title was on the library shelf. I was too impatient to wait my turn.

I think there are three elements that make the books so fascinating. The first is historical irony. In more than one novel, actually, the story's framed with a look back, from the later 1940's or the early 1950's. Secondly, there's a constant sense of threat, the Nazi regime a bunch of backstabbers, and Bernie hangs on princes' favors. One dangerous patron is Reinhard Heydrich, a chilly bastard who meets an appropriate end. And thirdly, Bernie is really trying to be a moral person, against all odds. You go along to get along, to simply survive, in a nest of vipers, and hope it doesn't rub off on you. After seeing the Special Action Groups at work in Russia, and himself participating, Bernie is sickened by the whole enterprise. He suspects, too, that the handwriting's on the wall.

Bernie's a Berliner, a guy with street smarts, and too smart a mouth. He fought in the first war, in the trenches, and started out as a cop during Weimar. He has no politics. He's as contemptuous, early on, of the Communists as he is of the Nazis, and then, the better he gets to know the Nazis as they consolidate their power, he comes to realize they aren't the lesser of two evils. They are evil. And it does rub off on you.

This is the question often raised in Alan Furst's books, and the two writers have some things in common, aside from the time-frame and the context of their novels. We don't in fact know how we might behave at a personal breaking point, in the context of Vichy France or Nazi Berlin. It's comforting to think we might Bogart through, but daily life becomes an enormous struggle, for the simplest of things. Having a conscience, or a moral compass, might be a luxury we couldn't afford. We might not rise to the occasion. One of Bernie's superiors in Minsk even quotes Luther - "Here I stand" - and then dismisses it. You can't be serious, he tells Bernie. There's no room for that.

And in the middle of all this, institutionalized murder, mass hysteria, people still commit common crimes for common reasons. They kill people for shoes, or bread, or envy. FIELD GRAY has Bernie trying to solve a homicide inside a POW camp. The fact that he's a POW, and the camp is run by the Russians, only makes the whole thing more surreal. Often enough, it isn't some crazed Nazi weirdness at work, although that usually informs it. Everything's out of square. The truly strange thing is that you begin to see this unbalanced world as somehow the norm, at least to the degree of understanding how to navigate it, and once you go there, you've stepped over the edge. The pit opens.