Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther was the right hero for the worst of times
It is coming up on two years since Philip Kerr, author of the Bernie Gunther detective thrillers, died of cancer at the age of 62. The loss to both literature and entertainment was considerable. The Edinburgh-born writer was a master of his craft. More than that, he gave us a hero, deeply flawed, operating in the grotesque milieu of Second World War Berlin, who manages somehow to hold on to his humanity.
Thirty years on from his first appearance in March Violets, it is easy to see Gunther as an immortal. But he could just as easily have been a cameo cop, here today, gone tomorrow. Kerr didn’t want to get stuck in the exhaustingly competitive world of detective fiction. He wanted to stretch his wings. Having written the opener and two follow-ups, The Pale Criminal and A German Requiem (later collected by Penguin as Berlin Noir), his intention was to leave Bernie on his way to a Viennese café where his wife was waiting for him, with a new life in prospect. Fade to credits, like Rick and Captain Renault in Casablanca.
Instead, the author was forced to endure his Reichenbach Falls moment. Readers – and publishers – demanded that the brave, wisecracking Gunther be returned to duty as soon as possible. Kerr resisted. He had many other books to write. In the end, however, he gave in, resurrecting a flatfoot like no other, whose attempts to rescue a little honesty and decency in a world gone mad made the rest of us feel that evil did not always have to get its own way, even if it usually did.
When we first meet Bernie, it is 1936 and he is talking to a couple of Stormtroopers – affable fellows – who are dismantling and removing an advertising showcase for Der Stürmer, Germany’s leading anti-semitic newspaper. The Stürmer, we are told, which typically features “Aryan maids in the voluptuous embrace of long-nosed monsters,” attracts the weaker-minded reader. “Respectable people have nothing to do with it.”
Bernie is no longer a “Bull” – an officer of the Berlin Criminal Police, or Kripo. A Social Democrat, he resigned soon after Hitler came to power and is now a private investigator. But he is intrigued and asks the pair what they’re up to.
“‘It’s for the Olympiad,’ said one ‘We’re ordered to take them all down so as not to shock the foreign visitors who will be coming to Berlin to see the Games.’”
Straightaway, we know the world we are entering: Nazi Germany, three years before the invasion of Poland and nine years before the Führer shoots himself and his mistress to avoid capture by the Red Army, whose troops are knocking at the door.
What a decade it will prove to be – Europe’s darkest nightmare. The good news, if such is possible, is that throughout the slaughter and the tumult, Bernie will be our guide, constantly at the beck and call of the Nazi hierarchy, forever looking for ways to stay alive and keep the feeble flame of justice flickering amid the horror.
Move over Maigret. Make space, Philip Marlowe. Out of the way, Hercule Poirot, with your little grey cells. None of you ever had to ply your trade in the Third Reich, where the law is handed down by mass-murderers concerned not that Auschwitz was built to exterminate the Jews, but that the cost of providing temporary accomodation for the victims has gone through the roof.
Gunther – a veteran of the trenches in the Great War – sees it all, from the disintegration of the Weimar Republic, through the riots and near-civil war that gave rise to Hitler, all the way to the arrival of the Russians and the division of his country into West and East Germany.
As you might expect, he does not clamber from the wreckage with hands that are entirely clean. He does not demur when Himmler summons him to root out a traitor in the ranks of the SS (“Death before dishonour”) because no one says no to the Reichsführer. Despatched by Goebbels to the Eastern Front in a bid to prove that the Russians were guilty of war crimes, he accepts it as a soldier’s lot when he is forced to witness the extermination of the local Jews and other “undesirables”. A “request” from Reinhard Heydrich, principle author of the Final Solution, to investigate a squalid in-house murder in Prague requires him to turn a blind eye to the Reich Protector’s brutal treatment of the Czechs. It turns out that most of Hitler’s top henchmen have Bernie’s phone number in their Rolladexes. In a regime in which party hacks now control the police, the Gestapo and the security services (SD), only an honest cop, it seems, can be relied upon to flush out the real bad hats.
But you have to take your pleasures where you find them, and Bernie can’t stop himself from cheeking his bosses, all of whom, except Himmler – who kicks him viciously in the shins – allow him the freedom of court jester while periodically reminding him that the blade of the guillotine in Plötenzee Prison is not always as sharp as it might be. At one point, after temporarily falling foul of Heydrich, he is sent to Dachau, only to be released weeks later in order to resume his duties. Well, you have to laugh.
And yet and yet … Bernie Gunther is no mere company man, doing what he has to in order to advance his career. Every day, he has to ask himself the question the rest of us would have faced if the Wehrmacht had conquered Britain and informed us that the common law had been replaced by the Nuremberg decrees. Would we have complied or would we have taken up arms, knowing that the men in rubber coats were watching us?
In France, where collaboration was the default position, the Vichy government had no problem ordering the police and gendarmerie to round up the Jews and pack them off to the East – a development anticipated by one of Bernie’s SS assistants during a manhunt in the pre-war Saarland. In times of crisis, most people look out for themselves, not others. Thousands of ordinary French citizens, including for a time the young François Mitterrand, joined the paramilitary Milice, who when not tormenting the Jews did their best to expose any of their countrymen and women who joined the Resistance.
Would we, looking back from our “woke” twenty-first century world, have been any different? I doubt it. Foyle, of Foyle’s War, might easily have ended up as the English Bernie Gunther.
At any rate, while privately holding the Nazi leadership in contempt, Gunther is left with no option other than to do the bidding of his masters. Along the way, often at great personal risk, he does his best to minimise injustices. He helps whoever he can if he believes they are innocent. But when push comes to shove, he does what he is told, knowing that the alternative will be the “falling axe” or a set of electrodes attached to his testicles.
I should mention that one of the key protagonists in the unfolding drama is played by Berlin itself, which, as our hero keeps reminding us, never gave the Nazis more than 31 per cent of the popular vote. The German capital is portrayed as if it were distinct from the rest of the country, able to look down upon such provincial extrusions as Bavaria, the Rhineland and the Saar. Berliners are presented as Prussians, rough-hewn but with a sense of humour and a healthy disregard for the pretensions of politicians. Criminals, unless they are beasts, are not despised. The Bulls round them up and, where necessary, beat them up. But the two sides, law enforcers and lawbreakers, are clearly cut from the same cloth. As for the seedy delights of Weimar, Bernie is a fan, and so are we.
But all good things must come to an end. Germany’s defeat means that Gunther’s new life can finally begin, except that it fails to provide the denouement he, if not we, would wish. Branded a war criminal, exploited by high-ranking survivors such as Eichmann and Mengele, he is forced to flee Germany and work under a variety of aliases in France and Argentina. In 1956, in The Other Side of Silence, he is hired by the writer Somerset Maugham to deal with an ex-Nazi blackmailer who eleven years earlier had sent Bernie’s mistress and her unborn child to their deaths in the icy waters of the Baltic Sea. Not long after, in Prussian Blue, he is pursued through Lorraine and the Saarland by his wartime deputy Friedrich Korsch, who in 1939 had worked with him to solve a murder in Hitler’s Alpine retreat, in Berchtesgaden, only to end up a hitman for East Germany’s security chief Erich Mielke. He survives – just. But the stuffing is knocked out of him. For Gunther, history’s revenge is that he can never be allowed to escape his past.
So where is he now? Where did he end up? Sadly, we will never know.
Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther thrillers – all fourteen of them – are an opus that no one with an interest in the events of the 1930s and ’40s in Europe should miss. I am sad to have read the first thirteen. I wish I could come to them fresh, for the first time. But I still have volume 14 – Metropolis – to look forward to, which turns out to be Bernie’s origin story – an account of his days as a young patrolman and Kripo officer in the late 1920s and early ’30s. I plan to start on it tonight.