Babylon Berlin
The late Philip Kerr’s last Bernie
Gunther detective novel is set in the milieu of Volker Kutscher’s “Babylon Berlin,” the
Berlin of the late 1920s where an anything goes nightlife parallels the decline
of Wiemar Germany and the rise of Nazism. The young Gunther has just been
transferred from the vice squad to the murder squad where Berlin is racked by
the vicious murders of three prostitutes who are then scalped. Immediately
thereafter several disabled World War I veterans who were begging at train
stations were shot and killed at point blank range. It is Gunther, under the
guidance of murder squad director Bernhard Weiss (a real person), who puts the
two sets of crimes together.
Along the way we see the seediness of
Berlin’s nightlife, we meet Lotte Lenya of “Three Penny Opera” fame, the artist
George Grosz and the screenwriter and wife to Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou. Lang
had just directed “Metropolis”, but Kerr’s Metropolis is really reminiscent of
Lang’s “M” which would debut in 1931.
Kerr gives us a sense of Gunther’s life
in a boarding house, his drinking problem and his interaction with women. And
through Gunther and his Jewish supervisor we get a sense of the impending doom
facing European Jewry. With “Metropolis” Kerr has gone out at the top of his
game.
The full amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R33V0JMKNXLH9H/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv
No comments:
Post a Comment