Die Akte Vaterland (2012)
(The Fatherland Files)
Volker Kutscher (1962)
564 pages
“Many say, [he’s] the best speaker in the district and should actually go into politics.”Gereon Rath, the police inspector at the center of Volker Kutscher’s detective story The Fatherland Files (Die Akte Vaterland), has little use for politics, and even less for rabid political ideologies and ideologues. At one point, in fact, he says it directly: “I’m not interested in politics … I fight crime.” (“Ich interessiere mich nicht für Politic …. Ich bekämfe Verbrechen.” 181)
“Well,” said Rath, “if politics is supposed to mean telling the people what they want to hear, and thereby making yourself popular, then he’s certainly a good politician.”
(“Viele sagen, Wengler sei der beste Redner im Landkreis und sollte eigentlich in die Politik gehen.”
“Na ja,” meinte Rath, “ Wenn Politik bedeuten sollte, den Leuten zu erzählen, was sie hören wollen, und dich damit beliebt zu machen, dann ist er bestimmt ein gutter Politiker.”) (334)
As the story opens, Rath and his team learn that the owner of a liquor distribution company has been found murdered in an elevator at the Haus Vaterland, “Berlin’s largest pleasure palace” (“Berlins größtem Vergnügungstempel” 18), an entertainment mecca worthy of modern day Las Vegas, with restaurants, bars, shows and more. As the investigation proceeds, what appears at first to be an isolated murder reveals multiple strands that generate more questions than answers.
Eventually the clues lead Rath to the eastern-most part of Germany, Masuria, a region that between the World Wars became cut-off from the rest of Germany, connected only by plane and a transit corridor through Polish territory. Once there, he finds a population that feels their isolation from the German heartland distinctly, and that has become caught up in a fervid cycle of mutual hatred with their Polish neighbors. Their isolation makes them particularly receptive to Hitler’s ideology of patriotic nationalism – ready supporters of anyone “telling [them] what they want to hear,” in particular regarding their inherent superiority over the Poles. It also exacerbates their already profound mistrust of any outsiders who appear to threaten their neighbors or their culture, making it difficult for Rath to know who he can trust.
Circling doggedly in on the complex truth behind the murder that opened the investigation, Rath gradually uncovers ever more complex layers of iniquity and duplicity. And, as he does, he finds many of the townspeople uniting against him, some passively while others more aggressively, but all defending their carefully constructed version of nationalist reality. For them, Rath becomes the embodiment of the meddling outsider come to destroy a way of life its adherents already perceived as at risk. Will Rath manage to assemble the proof he needs to reveal the rotting core of belief about their past the townspeople so desperately cling to before his newfound enemies catch up with him?
Kutscher opens the novel in Berlin, and the tension builds only slowly over this first section of chapters as Rath and his colleagues discover more questions and mysteries than concrete answers. When Rath is sent to Masuria to follow the enigmatic clues that the team has managed to stitch together, and he encounters the active resistance and dissembling denials of most everyone he questions, the pace of the story picks up, as does the danger for Rath himself. In the final section of chapters Rath moves between Berlin and Masuria, franticly trying to get a step ahead of his suspects and their legion of protectors.
Along with the standard disclaimers regarding the main characters in the book having no relation to real people, Kutscher makes clear in a post-script that he invented the crime at the heart of the novel. Not so, however, the historical crime underway in the period in which he has set the story – the summer of 1932, when Germany descended finally, and what would be irretrievably, into the darkness of Nazism. In Berlin Rath bumps up against the increasing brazenness of the fascists; but when he travels to the German equivalent in the 1930’s of what Americans refer to as “fly-over-land” – Masuria – he comes face-to-face with Germans far from the centers of power, many, if not most, of whom have developed a growing fascination with and attachment to the extreme patriotic nationalism of Hitler.
Though this is the first of Kutscher’s novels I’ve read, the subtitle of the book is Gereon Rath’s fourth case. There are occasional references to what seemed to be events in the earlier cases and also some plot threads left unresolved undoubtedly as fodder for future cases, but a reader can enjoy The Fatherland Files on its own, as I did, without having read the earlier books. However, after finishing this engaging story, with a sympathetic – if appropriately garrulous – detective and a fascinating historical background, fans of noir and history will most likely be off to the bookstore to buy and read the earlier stories in this engaging series.
Other reviews / information:
The translations from German are mine.
There do appear to be American translations of Kutscher’s series of Gereon Rath stories available.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
