The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Berlin in the 20th century was a gift to writers. The more desperate, wild and debauched the city was, the more sinister and full of intrigue, the greater the raw material for those who used it as the setting for their fiction. In “The Berlin Stories,” Christopher Isherwood immortalized the city of the late 1920s and early 1930s, reveling in its decadence and producing amoral, likable characters like Sally Bowles, who would later reappear in the stage musical and film “Cabaret.” John le Carre masterfully captured the atmosphere of Cold War Berlin in “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” and, of course, there were Alexander Doblin, Bertolt Brecht, Vladimir Nabokov and countless others of lesser renown. It was a city that experienced freedom veering into anarchy, followed by both brands of totalitarianism: fascism and communism. What more could a writer ask for?

Joseph Kanon, a former publishing executive and author of the wartime thrillers “Los Alamos” and “The Prodigal Spy,” now joins this list with “The Good German,” a novel set in Berlin in the summer of 1945. Jake Geismar, an American correspondent who had reported from the city before the war, returns on a magazine assignment to cover the Potsdam Conference, only to be stunned by the devastation, physical and psychological. There’s the “unavoidable cliche,” Geismar says, that the ruins make the city look like the other side of the moon. There’s the eerie quiet. There are the bodies still floating in the canals and the Russian soldiers raping and pillaging at will. There are the Americans, hastily seeking to establish a joint occupation but already awakening to the tensions of the incipient Cold War. Kanon has clearly done his homework, and he makes after-the-fall Berlin a real and haunting place.

All of this serves as the backdrop for Geismar’s adventures. By chance, he witnesses the body of an American soldier wash up on the shore of the lake next to the conference center in Potsdam. The corpse is loaded with occupation marks, the newly minted currency, that fly loose from him as he is dragged to shore. Geismar decides that he needs to solve the mystery of this one soldier’s death, that this will be his story about Berlin. As he begins to explore the shady black market dealings that the money suggests, he’s also on another hunt: for Lena, his German mistress before the war. The search for Lena leads him to her husband, Emil, a brilliant mathematician who worked with Wernher von Braun on Hitler’s rocket program. Soon the two hunts become intertwined, sometimes a bit too neatly.

Geismar is constantly up against the pervasive guilt. “How could they do it? All the questions came back to that,” he muses. “He’d seen it in the faces of the GIs, who’d hated France and, then, confused, felt at home in Germany. The plumbing, the wide roads, the blond children grateful for candy ...Just like us. Then they’d seen the camps, or at least the newsreels ...” So, who was guilty of what had happened in Nazi Germany? The answer “was a twisted parody of Goebbels’ big lie--if you made the crime big enough, nobody did it,” he muses. He discovers that Emil’s calculations included estimates of how long slave laborers could live on 1,100 calories a day as they worked on new weapons facilities. He attends the trial of a Jewish reporter who worked in his office before the war--who later became a greifer, someone who identified other Jews for the Gestapo to save her loved ones. “A Jew. Killing your own,” one of her accusers says.

Then there are the Americans. Though some of the occupiers are genuinely eager to nail the worst German offenders, others want to help the corporate big shots slip through the de-Nazification process and start making money again. This is especially true for the American companies that continued to do business with German companies through intermediaries even after Hitler came to power, and they are anxious to resume their earlier open partnerships. And when it comes to the scientists, there’s little pretense about what’s at stake. One of the Americans also hunting for Emil tells Geismar he has no patience for “guys still fighting the war, looking for Nazis. Don’t waste my time with that. I don’t care if he was Hitler’s best friend.” The object is to grab the German scientists before the Russians do and to dispatch them across the Atlantic to work on American weapons programs.

Kanon serves up a potent mix of intrigue, cynicism and an occasional flash of idealism, which adds up to a riveting yarn. “The Good German’s” one weakness: As the action progresses, Geismar becomes too much of an American superhero instead of a believable foreign correspondent. He outwits, out-muscles and out-races everyone, especially the Russians, emerging from car chases and wild shootouts with the kind of injuries that allow him--and love--to emerge triumphant. A more vulnerable hero and fewer Hollywood touches (yes, the movie rights have been optioned already) would have added to rather than detracted from Kanon’s tale. But most of his evocation of Berlin right after defeat feels right on and is very much worth even the less credible parts of the ride.