I got the book from my local library. It’s the English translation; I believe the book was written in German originally.
Berlin 1944: a serial killer stalks the bombed-out capital of the Reich, preying on women and laying their mutilated bodies in front of war memorials. All of the victims are linked to the Nazi party. But according to one eyewitness account, the perpetrator is not an opponent of Hitler’s regime, but rather a loyal Nazi.
Jewish detective Richard Oppenheimer, once a successful investigator for the Berlin police, is reactivated by the Gestapo and forced onto the case. Oppenheimer is not just concerned with catching the killer and helping others survive, but also his own survival. Worst of all, solving this case is what will certainly put him in the most jeopardy. With no other choice but to futher his investigation, he feverishly searches for answers, and a way out of this dangerous game.
This was an interesting, weird and a hard read.
Interesting because of the time and the place the events too place: Berlin in the middle of WW2, with nightly air raids by the allied forces. I’ve read a lot of books, and watched a lot of movies and tv shows – both fictional and documentary – about what life was like London, Paris and elsewhere during WW2 and all of them from the POV of Jews, US and UK soldiers and French resistance fighters. But I think I’ve only seen one thing about regular Germans living their lives in Berlin/Germany under the Nazi regime and nightly air raids by the allied forces. And I’m not even sure whether that one thing was fictional or a documentary. So it was really interesting reading about Oppenheimer’s POV and what and how the people he came across in his investigation thought about what was going on. It also touched on low level Nazi people going about their jobs while being true believers or not, and how the society worked or not between Nazi true believers and the “normal” Germans who supported Nazi ideas/the Party to just survive in the Nazi Germany or just didn’t care about any ideology at all. The historical and societal views I found really interesting! Although I realized that I’ve no idea how close to the truth all that is, because we only learned about the politics, the violence, the Holocaust and not much about how much or little in reality the German people as a whole was rah-rah Nazi rah-rah Heil Hitler rah or how much your random joe knew about the mass murders of Jews until after the war. It was presented in school as the whole nation being fanatically into Hitler’s ideology and politics, with some outliers who suffered for it.
After I finished the book, I realized that interestingly, I had no idea how old Detective Oppenheimer was supposed to be! At first I thought he’s in his mid-30s, but then it comes out that he was in the WW1, and that his wife and he had a child that had died of some illness an unmentioned number of years before (at least a year or two before, but likely several years). I got the impression that the child had been closer to 10 than not. And that Oppenheimer had been kicked out of the police by the Nazis like 5 years before the events of the book, and had been in police before that for like at least 15 years? But all that age and time stuff re: Oppenheimer’s background is vague but in the end I revised by age estimate that he’s somewhere around 45-50. But I could be wrong about all of these!
Also, I have a problem giving the character the name of Oppenheimer! That’s too well known a name, in my opinion. But the book was published in Germany a decade ago so well before the recent Oppenheimer craze.
The murder case itself – just your normal psycho murdering women stuff. Something interesting was the discussions about why the murderer would do these things – there’s now so much known psychological make-up of psychos, sociopaths etc. that the heroes can always form a theory of what is happening, why and what are likely causes to be driving the killer, based on a lot of research done on and with murderers. It was kind of weird reading a book where none of that is known! They theorized a lot, based on a few earlier murderers that had been caught. I’m not sure how natural it felt, though.
Technically, as concerns the English translation… the book was a very hard read for me! The English translation is very formal, clumsy and most of the time does not flow well at all. Physically, the book should have been an easy read: 346 pages, large hard back book, with good sized font. But it was very hard for me to read because of the translation was so clunky. It took me 4 months to finish it and it was purely because of the quality of the translation. I also thought the book was much longer than 346 pages and was stunned when I realized otherwise. If I hadn’t been so interested in the depiction of life in WW2 Berlin under nightly air raids and Nazi regime, I would have quit about half way in. I’ve never studied German so I can’t read it at all and so can’t say for sure, but while reading I felt like the original writing may be perfectly nice and flowing in its original language and that the translator failed to adapt that in their work. I really wish I could have read it in original German!
And the weird part? There was a handful of paragraphs that were so utterly British that I got a whiplash: Wait — what?! Did I missundertand?! Is this taking place in England after all?!!?
Am I glad that I persevered? Yes! It gave a new POV to WW2, and I’m glad to have spent the time on it.
Other thought:
The book got me curious about the historical truth, so maybe I’ll look up some research and info. I was taught about WW2 in mid-late 1980s so it’s been a while, and I’ve since learned that our school failed to make it clear that our country actually made a pact with Nazi Germany during WW2 – even if it was driven in part by our need to defend ourselves against Russia’s invasion, and I think there was some denial of help from UK etc so Nazi Germany was our best bet. It was a nasty surprise to learn that we had been on the side of the Nazis! It was just somehow totally glossed over in school. It was like yes, we made a pact with Nazi Germany but it was to defend our country’s independence against Russia, and Nazi Germany is EVIL!!! and we had nothing to do with Nazi Germnay! We fought against Russians!! Nothing to see here!! Move on! I actually have started to think that we as a country have not dealt with neither thing – being allies with Nazi Germany, and the war trauma from Talvisota and Jatkosota agaist Russia. Some historians and doctors say that a lot of Finnish problems can be traced back to untreated war trauma from Talvisota and Jatkosota, and that trauma has been and is still being passed on generation to next to some extent.
