The Lady from Zagreb (2015)
Philip Kerr (1956-2018)
421 pages
Though author Philip Kerr’s engaging and popular noir series the Bernie Gunther novels centers on the eponymous detective, it is the stories’ setting within the dark reality of the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, and more broadly the Second World War in Europe, that provides the framework and intensity. Kerr’s extensive research shines through in these books, as he incorporates not just the most familiar happenings of the period but also lesser known historical events – conflicts and atrocities overshadowed in the popular histories of the time by the more familiar and disturbing horrors that occurred.
Kerr also gives many of the most well-known of the Nazi political and military leaders central roles in these stories by having them recruit Gunther for detective work they need done. Generally the assignments Gunther ends up with involve sensitive situations that his clients in their leadership positions naturally want to have kept quiet, which allows Kerr to create the plausible fiction that the events of the plot could have happened within the historically recorded lives these figures led.
Gunther has a well-known reputation among the highest officials of the regime as not being a Nazi supporter; his verbal sparring with them about the actions of the regime and the true status of the war effort often veer dangerously across the line from light-hearted to treasonous. It is clear to all involved that these leaders who could have him killed on a whim, but it is precisely this compromising characteristic – paired with his survival instinct – that makes him a valuable asset to them when they have some private affair that needs dealt with. Though the cases mostly tend to further reinforce his disgust with the ugly underbelly of Nazi Germany that they reveal, his deep-rooted detective’s desire to solve a mystery ultimately sees him through to their end.
And so it is in the tenth novel in the series, The Lady from Zagreb. The story opens in 1956 in a cinema on the French Riviera, where Gunther now lives and works. He has not come to the movie out of any interest in the plot, focusing instead on its starring actress, a woman with whom we come to learn he had an all-to-brief love affair during the war. Indeed the film itself bores him, and he soon closes his eyes to relive the details of their encounter in Berlin in the summer of 1943.Thinking back to that period in the middle of the war, he recalls being summoned to the office of Josef Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, one of Hitler’s closest allies. Goebbels, in his position as head of the German Film Association (UFA), has fallen in love with a beautiful new starlet, Dalia Dresner. Dresner, however, has refused to act in the next film Goebbels wants produced, saying that in the wake of her mother’s death she wants to reestablish contact with her father, who has gone lost in their native Croatia. Goebbels doesn’t want to use official resources to track down her father, which would risk having his enemies in the government discover his private interest in Dresner, and so he turns to Gunther, coercing him to accept the mission to Croatia.
Soon after, Gunther meets Dresner, and falls in love with her immediately, adding motivation to his originally half-hearted acquiescence to Goebbels’ request. Once in Croatia, Gunther finds himself in the middle of a civil war raging largely unseen among the broader hostilities of WWII, a savage conflict filled with unimaginable partisan atrocities that only serves to deepen the nihilist view Gunther has developed from all he has already seen elsewhere in the war.
The discoveries he makes in Croatia, however, put him in a compromising position in his careful but passionate pursuit of Dresner, to whom he is attracted both for her beauty as well as for her being the one small bit of light for him in the darkness that has comes with being tied so intimately to the regime. At the same time, he finds himself having to pacify a suspicious Goebbels, as well as fend off both German and foreign agents aggressively trying to divine actions and intentions. Will he be able to stay one step ahead of the forces arrayed against him, and successfully pursue his love for Dresner?
Though the reader learns of Gunther’s affair with Dresner already in the opening pages, Gunther begins his recollection of events in 1942, over a hundred pages and a full year before the meeting with Goebbels in which he first learns about the actress and takes on the assignment to find her father. In the extended opening section of the novel leading up to that meeting, Kerr creates a complex combination of subplots, including a mysterious murder that initially goes unsolved. These various storylines seem for much of the story largely unrelated; only in the final pages does Gunther finally tease out the many mysteries he is faced with and their relevance to one another.
Compared with the Bernie Gunther novels that I’ve read from earlier in the series, The Lady from Zagreb has less of the action of a WWII detective thriller. Instead, the story constitutes an extended rumination on the darkness that settled over Europe in the 1930’s and 40’s, and its impact on Gunther. By the time of Gunther’s affair with Dresner, he had been to concentration camps in the east and witnessed the scale of the unfolding genocide. That knowledge and the same clear-eyed thinking that makes him a successful detective have enabled him to see through the persistent and insistent nature of the regime’s propaganda, and to recognize the full extent of the atrocities being perpetrated by the regime and its followers.
This knowledge, as well as the private disappointments he faces in his personal life, provide the foundation for the Gunther who will appear in the next several novels, including The Other Side of Silence (review linked to at right): a despondent former detective who has landed in the post-war years in the French Riviera, working at a hotel and wandering the streets lost in a melancholy that has him ever on the verge of suicide.Other reviews / information:
There were interesting, if tangential, connections in Kerr’s story to another detective story I read recently, Volker Kutscher’s The Fatherland Files (review linked to at left). Both stories take place in Berlin, though Kutscher’s story is set a decade earlier, just as the Nazi’s are coming to power in the early 1930’s. Several true life members of the Police leadership who appear in Kutscher’s novel are mentioned also by Gunther. And (not surprisingly), like Gunther, Kutscher’s detective has little use for the rising regime.
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
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