"It's better to live without principles than be righteous & dead": a review of A Quiet Flame
From Tuesday, 19 April to Thursday, 21 April, I read the fifth book (of seven, thus far) in Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther series (the first three books have been collected in omnibus format as Berlin Noir: March Violets, 1989; The Pale Criminal, 1990; and A German Requiem, 1991), A Quiet Flame (originally published in the UK in 2008 by Quercus; 1st U.S. ed. published in 2009 by G.P. Putnam's Sons [a member of the Penguin Group]; 389 pps.; ISBN: 978-0-399-15530-7); it's entirely fitting that Hitler's birthday fell in the middle of the time that I spent reading A Quiet Flame. This was a copy checked out from a local library, as was the fourth book in the series, The One From the Other (2006).
Bernie Gunther is a former detective for the Berlin police (the Kriminalpolizei or Criminal Investigation Department, "KRIPO" for short; incidentally, since this is a German acronym, it's pronounced "CREEP-o," not "CRY-po," as the letter "i" is pronounced as "ee," not "eye," as in English) who was, after the rise of the Nazis, forced to become an SS officer (although, unlike most of the SS members, he never actually joined the Nazi Party, as he loathed the Nazis; despite his leftist leanings, he had an equal or marginally greater loathing for the Communists, even before he spent the last two years of the war in a Soviet POW camp); after the war, he became a private detective, a job far more dangerous in occupied Germany (as the third and fourth books, A German Requiem and The One From the Other, displayed in some detail) than in any of the turf covered by State-side PIs.
Bernie is an appealing protagonist: tough though not brutal; wise-assed, and addicted to bad puns; easily as prejudiced as his most obvious inspiration, Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, but at least half of his prejudices have a damned good reason; flawed but fair-minded, and more sensitive and empathetic to his fellow human beings than even he'd care to admit. But he's also something of a tragic, enigmatic conundrum: if even a man as strong, smart and decent as Bernie Gunther could have found himself obliged to join the SS and participate, however unwillingly, in their nigh-genocidal activities on the Eastern Front, the reader may well find himself uneasily wondering how he would've fared under the Nazi boot heel -- and, more unsettling yet, how many other otherwise decent and likable people carried the Nazis' water, if not their banner.
A Quiet Flame finds Bernie landing in that storied post-war hide-out for SS officers (and silent partner of Nazi Germany during the war, for all that it hid behind the fig leaf of its declaration of war against Germany early in 1945; see Neal Bascomb, Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World's Most Notorious Nazi [NY: Mariner Books [Houghton Mifflin Harcourt], 2010; copyright 2009; ISBN: 978-0-547-24802-8], p. 69), Argentina, in 1950, together with the man he'd escorted to Jerusalem in 1937 (in The One From the Other), Adolf Eichmann; he is soon escorted to meet the country's on-again/off-again president, Juan Perón, and his young wife Eva ("Evita," or Little Eva -- a name that should give pause to those with even a cursory familiarity with Uncle Tom's Cabin, or an early protégé of the Goffin-King songwriting partnership), because his false passport declared him to be a doctor, and Perón was always anxious to welcome more Nazi doctors into his country. (Exactly why this is so is a significant plot point of A Quiet Flame.) Bernie quickly dispels Perón's misapprehension about him, causing the president to lose interest in him and for Colonel Montalbán, an officer in Argentina's secret police, the SIDE (Secretaría de Inteligencia de Estado, rendered here as the Security and Intelligence Directorate; it was succeeded, according to Wikipedia, in 1946 by the Secretaría de Inteligencia, or SI), to gain interest in him, particularly once he identifies Bernie as one of his heroes when he was studying jurisprudence at Berlin's university just before the collapse of the Weimar Republic.
Montalbán coerces Bernie into joining SIDE to assist him in the investigation into the disappearance of the teenaged daughter of a well-connected family, who, the colonel fears, may well be the victim of the killer whom Bernie was unable to bring to justice due to political pressure; the narrative switches back and forth from Argentina (largely Buenos Aires; it should come as no surprise to Kerr's readers that he makes a comparison between the air quality of the capitals of Argentina and Berlin, Bernie's hometown) in 1950 to the Berlin of 1932-33, and soon draws two devastatingly attractive women into its net (over and above Evita, of course), as well as various high-ranking Nazis, many of whom are actively seeking to finance the creation of a Fourth Reich with the ill-gotten fortunes they've smuggled into Argentina.
As is typical for the Bernie Gunther books, much German underworld slang is presented in English translation ("mints" for jewels, "jelly" for venereal disease [this latter was interesting to me given that "jelly" was a slang reference to a sexually attractive woman in the U.S. of the 1920s-1940s, viz. Jelly Roll Morton; although Wikipedia notes that "jelly roll" was specifically African American slang for female genitalia]), and a goodly amount of real-world and probable conspiracy history (ODESSA, Operation Paperclip, Argentina's Directive Eleven and Directive Twelve) is referenced and/or incorporated into the backbone of Kerr's plot; it's something of a hallmark of Kerr's plotting that the to-me astonishing revelation that Juan Perón wanted to utilize the numerous Nazi scientists in his country to make Argentina a nuclear power (Project Poplar; p. 327) is not the big reveal of A Quiet Flame.
Happily enough, Kerr's admiration for Raymond Chandler is tamed enough here so that A Quiet Flame, unlike the first book in the series, March Violets, isn't overgrown with similes. There is one conspicuous specimen early on, of roughly the same strength and placement as the "tarantula on a slice of angel food" simile in Farewell, My Lovely (a Nazi exile's monocle is described as looking "like a sprig of parsley on a cowpat"; p. 10), and then Kerr is content to put the big toys back into the box. If some of Kerr's literary allusions are a bit strained, if not anachronistic -- Bernie uses variations of a famous line of William Faulkner's (on p. 181) and an equally famous line from Mario Puzo's The Godfather (p. 307) -- there are enough pleasures in Kerr's writing to compensate for them.
Kerr has an eye for the trivial and/or disquieting detail that some readers of history live for: from the endowment of Hitler's propaganda minster, Josef Goebbels (p. 119, which puts one in mind of Porfirio Rubirosa, Charlie Chaplin or Humphrey Bogart) to the facts behind the "martyrdom" of Horst Wessel (p. 122) to the Gestapo's filing system and the plans of its head, General Reinhard Heydrich, to improve it (pps. 216-19), there is much to delight collectors of factoids. However, one shouldn't slight Kerr's writing ability: whether it's a broad bit of observational humor ("All men come to resemble their fathers. That isn't a tragedy. But you need a hell of a sense of humor to handle it."; p. 111) or a mordant, damning observation of the niggardliness of a city's inhabitants worthy of Chandler himself ("In Tucumán, they haggled with the priest when he gave them a penance."; p. 325), Kerr typically proves himself capable of the neat turn of phrase. Bernie's comment to a fellow detective -- "'In this job you meet the lazy, the stupid, the cruel, and the indifferent. Unfortunately, that's what's called an electorate'" (p. 165) -- is as relevant today as it was in the Berlin of 1932.
Ultimately what makes the Bernie Gunther books so compelling isn't merely Kerr's tweaking of the private eye or noir genres, his conspiracy-drenched mysteries, or the snappy, world-weary, disarmingly vulnerable narrative voice of Bernie himself; it's the fact that Kerr is probing, through his creation, Bernie Gunther, what is arguably the most profound mystery of the twentieth century, to wit: How could a group as openly, as unabashedly evil as the Nazis come to power in a major country, and convert or suborn so many people -- not only said country's own citizens -- into following their standard? This is made explicit in Bernie's J'Accuse monologue, late in the book, in which he does not stint from pointing the condemning finger at himself:
"'I blame the Communists for calling a general strike in November 1932, which forced an election. I blame von Hindenburg for being too old to tell Hitler where to get off. I blame six million unemployed -- a third of the workforce -- for wanting a job at any price, even if it meant Hitler's price. I blame the army for not putting an end to the street violence during the Weimar Republic and for backing Hitler in 1933. I blame the French. I blame von Schleicher. I blame the British. I blame Goebbels and I blame all those rich businessmen who bankrolled the Nazis. I blame von Papen and Rathenau and Ebert and Scheidemann and Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. I blame the Spartakists and I blame the Freikorps. I blame the Great War for taking away the value of human life. I blame the inflation and the Bauhaus and Dada and Max Reinhardt. I blame Himmler and Goering and Hitler and the SS and Weimar and the whores and the pimps. But most of all I blame myself. I blame myself for doing nothing. Which was less than I ought to have done. Which was all that was required for Nazism to succeed. I share the guilt. I put my survival ahead of all other considerations. That is self-evident. If I was truly innocent, then I'd be dead... And I'm not.'"
-- p. 322
To which Colonel Montalbán makes the obvious, if not wholly satisfactory, rejoinder, during a parallel argument: "'But I think it's better to live without principles than be righteous and dead'" (p. 369).
Such are the horns of the dilemma that the human race is poised upon; such is the race's folly -- and glory. Pretty rich turf for a mere noirish mystery to turn over.
Bernie Gunther is a former detective for the Berlin police (the Kriminalpolizei or Criminal Investigation Department, "KRIPO" for short; incidentally, since this is a German acronym, it's pronounced "CREEP-o," not "CRY-po," as the letter "i" is pronounced as "ee," not "eye," as in English) who was, after the rise of the Nazis, forced to become an SS officer (although, unlike most of the SS members, he never actually joined the Nazi Party, as he loathed the Nazis; despite his leftist leanings, he had an equal or marginally greater loathing for the Communists, even before he spent the last two years of the war in a Soviet POW camp); after the war, he became a private detective, a job far more dangerous in occupied Germany (as the third and fourth books, A German Requiem and The One From the Other, displayed in some detail) than in any of the turf covered by State-side PIs.
Bernie is an appealing protagonist: tough though not brutal; wise-assed, and addicted to bad puns; easily as prejudiced as his most obvious inspiration, Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, but at least half of his prejudices have a damned good reason; flawed but fair-minded, and more sensitive and empathetic to his fellow human beings than even he'd care to admit. But he's also something of a tragic, enigmatic conundrum: if even a man as strong, smart and decent as Bernie Gunther could have found himself obliged to join the SS and participate, however unwillingly, in their nigh-genocidal activities on the Eastern Front, the reader may well find himself uneasily wondering how he would've fared under the Nazi boot heel -- and, more unsettling yet, how many other otherwise decent and likable people carried the Nazis' water, if not their banner.
A Quiet Flame finds Bernie landing in that storied post-war hide-out for SS officers (and silent partner of Nazi Germany during the war, for all that it hid behind the fig leaf of its declaration of war against Germany early in 1945; see Neal Bascomb, Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World's Most Notorious Nazi [NY: Mariner Books [Houghton Mifflin Harcourt], 2010; copyright 2009; ISBN: 978-0-547-24802-8], p. 69), Argentina, in 1950, together with the man he'd escorted to Jerusalem in 1937 (in The One From the Other), Adolf Eichmann; he is soon escorted to meet the country's on-again/off-again president, Juan Perón, and his young wife Eva ("Evita," or Little Eva -- a name that should give pause to those with even a cursory familiarity with Uncle Tom's Cabin, or an early protégé of the Goffin-King songwriting partnership), because his false passport declared him to be a doctor, and Perón was always anxious to welcome more Nazi doctors into his country. (Exactly why this is so is a significant plot point of A Quiet Flame.) Bernie quickly dispels Perón's misapprehension about him, causing the president to lose interest in him and for Colonel Montalbán, an officer in Argentina's secret police, the SIDE (Secretaría de Inteligencia de Estado, rendered here as the Security and Intelligence Directorate; it was succeeded, according to Wikipedia, in 1946 by the Secretaría de Inteligencia, or SI), to gain interest in him, particularly once he identifies Bernie as one of his heroes when he was studying jurisprudence at Berlin's university just before the collapse of the Weimar Republic.
Montalbán coerces Bernie into joining SIDE to assist him in the investigation into the disappearance of the teenaged daughter of a well-connected family, who, the colonel fears, may well be the victim of the killer whom Bernie was unable to bring to justice due to political pressure; the narrative switches back and forth from Argentina (largely Buenos Aires; it should come as no surprise to Kerr's readers that he makes a comparison between the air quality of the capitals of Argentina and Berlin, Bernie's hometown) in 1950 to the Berlin of 1932-33, and soon draws two devastatingly attractive women into its net (over and above Evita, of course), as well as various high-ranking Nazis, many of whom are actively seeking to finance the creation of a Fourth Reich with the ill-gotten fortunes they've smuggled into Argentina.
As is typical for the Bernie Gunther books, much German underworld slang is presented in English translation ("mints" for jewels, "jelly" for venereal disease [this latter was interesting to me given that "jelly" was a slang reference to a sexually attractive woman in the U.S. of the 1920s-1940s, viz. Jelly Roll Morton; although Wikipedia notes that "jelly roll" was specifically African American slang for female genitalia]), and a goodly amount of real-world and probable conspiracy history (ODESSA, Operation Paperclip, Argentina's Directive Eleven and Directive Twelve) is referenced and/or incorporated into the backbone of Kerr's plot; it's something of a hallmark of Kerr's plotting that the to-me astonishing revelation that Juan Perón wanted to utilize the numerous Nazi scientists in his country to make Argentina a nuclear power (Project Poplar; p. 327) is not the big reveal of A Quiet Flame.
Happily enough, Kerr's admiration for Raymond Chandler is tamed enough here so that A Quiet Flame, unlike the first book in the series, March Violets, isn't overgrown with similes. There is one conspicuous specimen early on, of roughly the same strength and placement as the "tarantula on a slice of angel food" simile in Farewell, My Lovely (a Nazi exile's monocle is described as looking "like a sprig of parsley on a cowpat"; p. 10), and then Kerr is content to put the big toys back into the box. If some of Kerr's literary allusions are a bit strained, if not anachronistic -- Bernie uses variations of a famous line of William Faulkner's (on p. 181) and an equally famous line from Mario Puzo's The Godfather (p. 307) -- there are enough pleasures in Kerr's writing to compensate for them.
Kerr has an eye for the trivial and/or disquieting detail that some readers of history live for: from the endowment of Hitler's propaganda minster, Josef Goebbels (p. 119, which puts one in mind of Porfirio Rubirosa, Charlie Chaplin or Humphrey Bogart) to the facts behind the "martyrdom" of Horst Wessel (p. 122) to the Gestapo's filing system and the plans of its head, General Reinhard Heydrich, to improve it (pps. 216-19), there is much to delight collectors of factoids. However, one shouldn't slight Kerr's writing ability: whether it's a broad bit of observational humor ("All men come to resemble their fathers. That isn't a tragedy. But you need a hell of a sense of humor to handle it."; p. 111) or a mordant, damning observation of the niggardliness of a city's inhabitants worthy of Chandler himself ("In Tucumán, they haggled with the priest when he gave them a penance."; p. 325), Kerr typically proves himself capable of the neat turn of phrase. Bernie's comment to a fellow detective -- "'In this job you meet the lazy, the stupid, the cruel, and the indifferent. Unfortunately, that's what's called an electorate'" (p. 165) -- is as relevant today as it was in the Berlin of 1932.
Ultimately what makes the Bernie Gunther books so compelling isn't merely Kerr's tweaking of the private eye or noir genres, his conspiracy-drenched mysteries, or the snappy, world-weary, disarmingly vulnerable narrative voice of Bernie himself; it's the fact that Kerr is probing, through his creation, Bernie Gunther, what is arguably the most profound mystery of the twentieth century, to wit: How could a group as openly, as unabashedly evil as the Nazis come to power in a major country, and convert or suborn so many people -- not only said country's own citizens -- into following their standard? This is made explicit in Bernie's J'Accuse monologue, late in the book, in which he does not stint from pointing the condemning finger at himself:
"'I blame the Communists for calling a general strike in November 1932, which forced an election. I blame von Hindenburg for being too old to tell Hitler where to get off. I blame six million unemployed -- a third of the workforce -- for wanting a job at any price, even if it meant Hitler's price. I blame the army for not putting an end to the street violence during the Weimar Republic and for backing Hitler in 1933. I blame the French. I blame von Schleicher. I blame the British. I blame Goebbels and I blame all those rich businessmen who bankrolled the Nazis. I blame von Papen and Rathenau and Ebert and Scheidemann and Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. I blame the Spartakists and I blame the Freikorps. I blame the Great War for taking away the value of human life. I blame the inflation and the Bauhaus and Dada and Max Reinhardt. I blame Himmler and Goering and Hitler and the SS and Weimar and the whores and the pimps. But most of all I blame myself. I blame myself for doing nothing. Which was less than I ought to have done. Which was all that was required for Nazism to succeed. I share the guilt. I put my survival ahead of all other considerations. That is self-evident. If I was truly innocent, then I'd be dead... And I'm not.'"
-- p. 322
To which Colonel Montalbán makes the obvious, if not wholly satisfactory, rejoinder, during a parallel argument: "'But I think it's better to live without principles than be righteous and dead'" (p. 369).
Such are the horns of the dilemma that the human race is poised upon; such is the race's folly -- and glory. Pretty rich turf for a mere noirish mystery to turn over.