Customer Reviews

Berlin: A Novel

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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

Living in Berlin in 1945 was a challenge. Rubble from bombed out buildings was everywhere - people tried to live in the remnants. Negotiating the roads was an obstacle course and transport severely restricted. Food was in limited supply and cigarettes were an important commodity. Frei, who lived in Berlin at that time, and may have crafted one of his characters, teenager Ben, after his own image, paints a vivid picture of how people struggled and survived after the war. Towards the end of 1945 people start to feel that life might be getting better - at least in the western parts of the city. The author's primary subject, though, is not the portrait of a city emerging from the ruins. His narrative concentrates on the hunt for a serial killer and the young women he stalks. The story centers on the American sector and the American administrative compound around "Uncle Tom's Hut", a well known Berlin underground train station. The victims, actual and potential, work in the US compound and have passes that allow them to move outside past the curfew. The same appears to apply to whoever the killer is. This situation forces the US officers reluctantly to work with the German detective, Ben's father, who is charged with the case. Interesting tensions between victor and defeated develop as a result.

Alternating with the chapters that describe the hunt for the mysterious killer are those that narrate the stories of the victims. These descriptions move the book beyond the usual thriller genre. Frei carefully chooses women from very different social strata and backgrounds. They range from an aristocrat to a village girl turned actress to a street kid from a poor housing estate to a young widow trying to protect her disabled child. The author explores their lives from early childhood through the Nazi period and the war to the period when they are stalked by the killer. This technique allows Frei to expand into the historical background, relating the whole spectrum of German attitudes toward the regime: the enthusiasts, the middle-of-the-roaders, the naïve and the odd critic. The locales shift with each character, it could be Berlin or Spain, or a concentration camp commandant's lavish home. Some background characters turn up in different scenarios adding linkages and depth to the individual stories. The women, while very distinct and well depicted, have some traits in common: they are all beautiful, blond and blue-eyed. Frei also bestows them with a rather easygoing life style open to intimate adventures, whether for material gains or not. This would seem to be somewhat surprising for the times, but the author clearly enjoys recounting details.

Frei's Berlin is not so much a thriller as a social portrait of a city in its historical context. While the hunt for the killer keeps the reader intrigued, the real attraction of the novel is in the life stories of the young women, their background and struggles through the most dramatic and devastating period in recent German history. Anthea Bell's translation is, as always, excellent. Readers of the German original have noticed a marked improvement in language and style in her translation. [Friederike Knabe]

An unusual mystery in that the focus is on the murdered women rather than on the killer. The life of each victim is revealed from about the early 1930s to the present period of the story which is summer of 1945, Berlin. Each woman has a different story to tell which I found interesting, and in revealing their story, you can observe what German life was like during the rise of the Nazis and during the war. This is not a comprehensive history of life under the Nazis, but it is focused down to the life around these women. A couple of the victims had incredible stories to tell, and then you feel the sadness of their death--after all that, their hopes were ended because of a disturbed serial killer.

Pierre Frei is an old correspondent that has lived in many parts of the world. His worldliness shows in this story. He does not have any pretensions; nor do his characters. They have had to learn to take what has been dished out to them.

A story worth reading if you are tired of the standard detective novel.

I really loved Joseph Kanon's The Good German (not to mention Alibi, the Prodigal Spy, and Los Alamos) and I was looking forward to this book because it does mention Kanon on the back cover. Now, it's not a terrible book, it captured me enough to want to keep reading because the stories about each woman's life up to the present was captivating. However, there seemed to be no authenticity regarding Berlin at the time- no mention of the rubble, the desolation or even the smell from corpses. It all seems to be parks, lakes, forests, Uncle Tom's Hut, and this teenager being remarkably able to travel about freely, his primary purpose being to save enough money for a fancy suit to impress a girl he likes in order to have sex with her. (Just a sub story and a silly one.) I suppose what did me in was there was virtually no suspense- the serial killer would just simply show up, throttle them with a dog chain, and that was the end of that. There was no suspense, no chase, and no depth into who that person was. There was however, an awful lot of sex- and not even good sex at that. It made me think this author is weirdly fascinated with bad sex (at it's most disgusting) and the entire fabric of the world he creates it based upon this. There's also the cop-out factor here- we see side characters that were active Nazi's but not a single main character seemed to have the vaguest connection with their country (although all characters show they can stand up against mighty forces, only one momentarily stands up for a Jewish friend.) There are the Nazi's, the Americans, the Russians... and then them, the victims. (I hope German school children are not taught this we-had-no-choice sap!)Furthermore, it's outrageous to find [...]

I was disappointed in the thriller aspect of this book. There was not any in-depth analysis and narration dealing with the criminal. Also, any ties to link the criminal to the suspect as revealed in the end were almost non-existent and/or vague.

On the other hand however, the sections of the book dealing with the victims lives were very interesting. I found them enlightening as to everyday life in Nazi Germany.

Overall, I think the book would have been better and not so disappointing if it had been about the lives of these women in Nazi Germany and omit the thriller plot altogether.

Yes, I am disappointed but will be generous and give 4 stars.

I should state right up front that I'm not a fan of serial killer stories, I don't find them particularly interesting, and had I known that the framework for this book is the hunt for a serial killer, I may well not have picked it up. The reason I did pick it up is because the setting is one that interests me. From the brilliant film "The Third Man" to Nobel laureate Heinrich Boll's "literature of the rubble", post-WWII is rich with dramatic possibilities. Here, the American occupied sector is the backdrop for a serial killer and as the ending for the stories of several women's lives. Although the framing device is the hunt for a madman, the book's real value and interest come in the intervening chapters, each of which acts as a 40-80 page novella about a German woman coming of age before the war, and what she does to survive it. In that regard, the book makes for very lively and readable social history.

Unfortunately, the structure robs the narrative of any potential suspense and makes for rather choppy reading. Contemporary chapters concerning the hunt for the serial killer alternate with each victim's lengthy backstory in a way that makes it very hard to keep track of all the various German and American characters. And since each of the victims is introduced at her death, the flashback life story that immediately follows is overlain with an oppressive sense of impending tragedy. Especially as in each case, the woman is killed on the very night her life seems to have finally turned the corner for the better.

These women include a village farmgirl turned actress, a middle-class nurse, a slum-dweller turned upscale prostitute, a horse-riding aristocrat, and a bookshop assistant, each carefully constructed to show a different aspect of German society. Along the way we get glimpses into the film industry, the upper crust of society, a concentration camp, a racial hygiene center, the foreign ministry, the French resistance, and of course, the Allied occupation, replete with Soviet mass rape and Americans handing out candy. Through the women's stories, we get a panoramic view of pre-war Germany which seems to mostly consist of people not taking the Nazis very seriously. Sure, there are plenty of supporting characters who get out early, and others who get in on the ground floor early, but the general sentiment is one of naivety -- which smacks of a certain amount of wishful remembrance. Frei grew up in Berlin in the '30s and '40s, and the rascally teenage boy who opens the book by finding a dead body, closes the book by loosing his virginity, and spends the intervening time scrounging and scamming to buy a snazzy suit is likely semi-autobiographical.

In any event, when the killer and his motivations are finally revealed it's all rather underwhelmingly banal. Of course, the story of beautiful blonde young women getting senselessly brutalized by a madman acts as a metaphor for Germany brutalized by Nazi rule, but it's not a particularly elegant or sophisticated metaphor. Aside from the structural problems undermining the entire work, the book is additionally marred by some truly hilarious descriptions of sex and the tendency to make significant and awkward jumps in time between paragraphs with no cue for the reader. I'm tempted to recommend reading just the chapters with women's names as titles for the social history within, for Frei has a nice eye for detail and description, and does a good job of making the scene come alive. But it's a very marginal recommendation, as the women's lives tend to devolve into melodrama, and the serial killer framework never really works.

I fell for the back cover blurbs asserting that one would learn about 1930's and post-war Berlin and bought the hardbound copy. However, readers who remember their high school world history and have read any other books on Germany in the first half of the 20th century will glean little from this laughable garbage. Perhaps 5% what is scattered through this book is worth reading, and those bits kept my book open until the last forty pages or so. I just skimmed through the last two chapters. The main problem with the book is that the author seems to be reliving his adolescent fantasies through not just one, but most of the characters, and the results are sickening. Also, Frei provides precious little detailed physical description of Berlin, and I had to fill in the blanks with my own memories of visiting the city and previously read books. We all deserve to read better fiction than this. Frei can't touch Le Carre, Furst, or Kanon.