When it comes to crime writing the weight of history lies heavy on Berlin. It’s obviously a place with a problematic past and it’s this history—Weimar, the Nazis and the later Cold War division of the city—that has been, and continues to be, such a honeypot for so many authors. Naturally history is paramount in the city’s crime writing too. So this Crime and the City on Berlin veers more towards historical crime fiction: there’s an awful lot of it, and much of it is sehr, sehr gut….
Let’s start with perhaps the two biggest Berlin detectives in the world of crime fiction—Detective Inspector Gereon Rath and Bernie Gunther. Rath, star of the Babylon Berlin series by German writer Volker Kutscher, predates Bernie slightly, at least on the streets of Berlin if not the bookshelves. It’s the late twenties in Kutscher’s meticulously recreated Berlin—crime scene photography is new, the nightclubs are full of narcotics. Gereon is newly transferred to Berlin (under something of a cloud from his last posting) where he’s thrown into the middle of a murder investigation. In German there are seven Rath novels; in English we currently have four of them—Babylon Berlin, originally published in German in 2008; The Silent Death (2009); Goldstein (2010) and The Fatherland Files (2012). Kutscher has sold well over a million books worldwide while the Sky TV series of Babylon Berlin is a hit internationally too. More Babylon Berlin is to come.
It’s something of a crime in itself that Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther isn’t on TV yet (though rumor has it that Tom Hanks has it in development). Gunther is a chain smoking, heavy drinking loner in the Chandleresque tradition transferred to 1930s Berlin. There are fourteen novels in the Gunther series starting with March Violets (1989) set in 1936 Berlin amid the rise of the Nazis. The Pale Criminal (1990) and A German Requiem (1991) formed an initial trilogy of “Berlin Noir” novels. From there Bernie acquired a life of his own. Since the initial trilogy Gunther has aged (and moved from the 1930s to the post-war period) and travelled a bit too—to Munich, chasing rogue Nazis in Buenos Aires, Batista’s Havana, Paris, Nazi-occupied Prague, Smolensk, Croatia, neutral Zurich, the French Riviera and Athens. In the final book of the series published posthumously (Kerr died in 2018), Metropolis (2019), we finally return to Berlin, 1928, to a younger Bernie Gunther, the start of his career in the Berlin Vice Squad. What are the chances, back then, that Gunther and Rath both ate some schnitzel in the canteen at Police Headquarters near Alexanderplatz?
Berlin seems to inspire series—Rath, Gunther and plenty more. Jim McDermott’s Major Otto Fischer series is on its seventh book. Fischer is an invalided Luftwaffe Intelligence officer and his adventures started with The Peenemünde Deceptions (2013), followed by The Deaths of Berlin (2014), A German Winter (2015), The Lie Division (2016), Siege Works (2017), All Traitors’ Day (2018) and A Dragging of Chains (2019). Most take place in the final years of the war—a destroyed and rubble strewn Berlin in the last desperate months of the Third Reich as killers converge on the city and secrets look set to emerge. Soon we are in a post-war Berlin—a city of black-markets, criminal gangs and foreign occupation and division. From there to the East-West division of the city and the raising of the Berlin Wall. Fischer experiences Berlin’s end of the hot war and the start of cold war with all manner of murders and criminals.
Luke McCallin has created a wartime Berlin series too. Gregor Reinhardt of the Berlin police is a Berliner through and through, although war moves men around. In the first Reinhardt novel, The Man from Berlin (2013), we are in Nazi-occupied Sarajevo in 1943 where German officers are being murdered and not by partisans. In The Pale House (2014) Reinhardt is now a German intelligence officer, still in Yugoslavia as mutilated bodies keep turning up. And then, in The Ashes of Berlin (2016), it is 1947, Germany has been defeated and Reinhardt has been hired back onto Berlin’s civilian police force. More murders but now the city is full of Americans, Soviet and British to suspect.
And then there’s David Downing’s Anglo-American journalist John Russell in the “Berlin Station” series. The series, named after Berlin’s railway stations, started with Zoo Station (2007). Russell is a member of the foreign press corps in Berlin, with a German actress wife and the Nazis on the march. In Silesian Station (2008) Germany is on the brink of war with Britain. In Stettin Station (2010) Russell is effectively trapped in Berlin in 1941…and on into the post-war period. The series of six novels, ending with Masaryk Station (2013) in 1948 in East Germany has done phenomenally well in the UK as e-books.
So many good Berlin-set books to mention…
- Glasgow writer Louise Welsh loves Berlin. Her down-at-heel Glasgow conjurer William Wilson gets booked for a string of cabaret gigs in Berlin in The Bullet Trick (2006) and ends up investigating murder when audience members start dying. Welsh returned to Berlin in 2012 with The Girl on the Stairs where Jane is pregnant and has moved to a pre-war Berlin tenement to live with her lover. All is good until she starts to have concerns about the neighbors.
- Armando Lucas Correa’s The German Girl (2017) sweeps from Berlin at the brink of WWII to Cuba on the cusp of revolution, to New York in the wake of September 11th. Based on a true story, the descriptions of pre-war Berlin are excellent.
- That immediate post-war desperation and chaos is the subject of Pierre Frei’s Berlin, a Novel (2005)—a serial killer on the loose just one month after the end of the war and terrorizing the American sector.
A quick true crime recommendation is A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin: The Chilling True Story of the S-Bahn Murderer (2014) by Scott Andrew Selby. Paul Ogorzow was a model German. An employed family man, party member, and sergeant in the infamous Brownshirts, he had worked his way up in the Berlin railroad from a manual laborer laying track, to auxiliary signalman. And a serial killer. If the Nazi war-time police hadn’t been so politicized and intent that serial killers could only be foreigners, communists, Jews, or British agents they might have caught him earlier. But it was unthinkable in Hitler’s new Reich that a good German might also be a mass murderer.
There simply isn’t space to note all the great espionage writing on Berlin—John le Carré, Len Deighton…but perhaps we can squeeze in John Lawton’s John Holderness (aka Wilderness) novels, as his hero is a criminal rather than a spy. Wilderness is recruited as MI5’s resident ‘cat burglar’ and finds himself in 1963 Berlin in Then We Take Berlin (2013). Someone and something needs smuggling out of East Germany. In the follow up, The Unfortunate Englishman (2017), two Brits are stuck on the wrong side of the Wall and need rescuing.
And we need to find a final bit of space for Joseph Kanon, because he’s simply so good. Kanon’s The Good German (2004) is set in the immediate post-war moment of the carve up of the city by the allies and all the black marketeering and Cold War politicking that followed. Reporter Jake Geismar returns to the Berlin in 1945, a city he used to work in before the war. The city is unrecognizable—streets have vanished beneath the rubble, familiar landmarks truncated by high explosives. But amongst the ruins Berliners survive. Kanon returned to the city in Leaving Berlin (2015), set in 1948, though the city is still in ruins and espionage and crime intermingle.
I know…I know…we only scratched the surface of Berlin’s crime and espionage writing. And it seems not a month goes by without another Berlin-set book comes out—it’s that kind of city. It has long fascinated crime and spy writers and doesn’t show any signs of stopping. It is to be hoped by your humble columnist that this list of recommendations is at least a start…
