The “Nazi Detective” as Provider of Justice in Post-1990 British and German Crime Fiction: Philip Kerr's The Pale Criminal , Robert Harris's Fatherland , and Richard Birkefeld and Göran Hachmeister's Wer übrig bleibt, hat recht
2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/complitstudies.50.2.0288
ISSN1528-4212
Autores Tópico(s)Comics and Graphic Narratives
ResumoWithin the wide-ranging field of crime fiction, a substantial subgenre containing over 150 transnational crime novels engages with the National Socialist past and its legacy in the postwar era.1 While a third of these Nazi-themed texts are set during National Socialist rule (1933–45), only a small minority of twelve novels or series feature a "Nazi detective": an investigative figure who works in an official capacity within the structures of the Nazi regime, as part of its police force, army, or paramilitary organizations.2 To date, there has been little examination of the problems and opportunities this detective figure generates for crime writers or of the wider moral implications of his presence within the crime narrative.3 This article explores these questions through an examination of the rise of the Nazi detective in 1990s crime fiction and an analysis of his representation as a provider of justice in three crime novels by "second-generation" authors from Britain and Germany: Philip Kerr's The Pale Criminal (1990), Robert Harris's Fatherland (1992), and Richard Birkefeld and Göran Hachmeister's Wer übrig bleibt, hat recht (2002) (To the Victor the Spoils).All but two of the Nazi detective novels identified during the research for this article were published after 1990. A number of factors, either singly or in combination, may account for the timing of this miniature boom among authors whose national backgrounds are British (three), German (three), Czech (one), Polish (one), Italian American (one) and Canadian (one). The fortieth and fiftieth anniversary commemorations of D-Day, in 1985 and 1995, focused renewed attention on the legacy of the Second World War in former Axis and Allied nations and in those that experienced occupation. Midway between these two points, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent end of the Cold War led to a reevaluation of Germany's and Europe's "double past" of fascism and communism and to public discussion of issues such as guilt, victimhood, and memorialization.4 Debates on such subjects were often extremely lengthy and fraught: for example, the building of a Holocaust Memorial in Berlin was first suggested in 1988, formally approved in 1999, and only completed seventeen years later, in 2005.5In addition, the 1980s and 1990s saw an increased focus on the wartime role of the policeman-perpetrator, via a succession of highly publicized war-crimes trials and an emerging strand of perpetrator-centered historiography that received extensive international attention. In 1981, revelations surfaced of Maurice Papon's involvement in deporting Jews while he was a senior police official in Bordeaux; he was finally brought to trial in 1997.6 Similarly, 1989 saw the arrest of Paul Touvier, a former head of intelligence in the Milice who worked closely with the Gestapo in Vichy France and was tried in 1994.7 During the 1990s, Anglo-American historians, influenced by the German Alltagsgeschichte (the history of everyday life) movement of the 1970s, also began to research the behavior of "ordinary" perpetrators, including policemen. Christopher Browning's study Ordinary Men (1992) scrutinizes the roles of 125 German Ordnungspolizei (regular uniformed police) serving in Reserve Police Battalion 101, a mobile execution squad that killed thirty-eight thousand Jewish civilians in Poland between 1942 and 1943.8 Daniel J. Goldhagen examines the same case in his controversial Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), which brought discussions about perpetrator motivation into the public realm, particularly in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States.9 While Goldhagen asserts a monocausal theory of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" to explain how the reserve policemen were capable of mass murder, Browning advocates a multicausal explanation of their behavior, which includes additional factors such as peer pressure, deference to authority, and careerism.10 His stated aim is not to excuse but to understand more fully the complex range of motivating factors that led the men to behave as they did.11The emergence of the Nazi detective in ten crime novels or series since 1990 has seen the Nazi protagonist shift from his customary position of "murderer" (in around 70 percent of the crime novels set during the regime) to that of the "detective" within the genre's murderer-victim-detective triangle.12 The previously straightforward identification of the Nazi as "villain" has consequently been disrupted, and his move to a role more commonly associated with the apprehension of the criminal and the provision of justice has resulted in the creation of a highly complex investigative agent. A nuanced examination of perpetrator motivation, as advocated by Browning, is especially visible in recent representations of the Nazi detective, providing a marked contrast to one-dimensional perpetrators of earlier works (such as Frederick Forsyth's The Odessa File [1972] and Ira Levin's The Boys from Brazil [1976]), whose motivations are typically depicted as psychopathic.13Crime writers opting to portray a Nazi detective are predominantly members of the second generation, born ten to fifteen years after the end of the Second World War. Authors at a temporal remove from National Socialism thus appear more willing or able to engage with the moral complexities of this figure than authors with a lived experience of the regime or of the Second World War. It is equally notable that only one author in the group (Ben Pastor) has Jewish heritage, signaling an understandable disinclination on the part of Jewish crime writers to depict detectives in the employ of the Nazi state.Writers who create Nazi detectives will have varying agendas for doing so, depending on their national and ethnic backgrounds, generational cohort, profession, political outlook, interest in particular historical issues and moral themes, and/or desire to create an "original" detective in a competitive literary marketplace. All, however, share one fundamental problem: that of reconciling the genre's dominant depiction of the detective as a representative of truth, morality, and justice with that of a detective working for a corrupt, fascist regime. Golden Age detectives such as Christie's Poirot and Sayer's Lord Peter Wimsey are shown identifying the murderer and delivering him or her into the hands of the police, thereby restoring social, moral, and judicial order.14 The majority of police procedurals feature detectives as upholders of the law (from Sjöwall and Wahlöö's Martin Beck to P. D. James's Dalgleish to Mankell's Wallander), and, as Lee Horsley notes, even hard-boiled detectives such as Chandler's Marlowe, who often sidestep the due process of law, are depicted as "essentially good and honourable," with a "moral integrity … that infuses the investigative narrative with a redemptive potential."15 By contrast, the position of the Nazi detective is problematic, because he is typically depicted as a member of the Nazi criminal police (Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo) or the secret political police (Geheime Staatspolizei, or Gestapo). His role within the fascist apparatus engenders a fundamental tension between the two primary components of the Nazi detective: the investigator who is presumed to seek truth and justice and the Nazi who represents a criminal regime.As historical records and studies show, the Nazi police operated in an arena that saw a swift erosion of normal principles of justice and in which maintaining individual separation from the ideological operations of the state was highly difficult. From the outset of the regime in 1933, "there was a gradual but thorough amalgamation of the police and the SS" (the Schutzstaffel, a defense corps, responsible for political enforcement and the administration of the concentration camps).16 In 1936, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, was made German chief of police. He rapidly combined the Gestapo and Kripo to form the security police (Sicherheitspolizei) under SS lieutenant General Richard Heydrich. In 1939, Heydrich was charged with leading the newly created RSHA, the head security office of the Reich, which functioned both as an office in the Ministry of the Interior and as one of the twelve main offices of the SS, incorporating the Gestapo (Department 4, led by Heinrich Müller) and the Kripo (Department 5, led by Arthur Nebe). Shortly after this restructuring, Gestapo and Kripo officials were awarded SS ranks equivalent to their status, effectively merging the police with the SS in a concerted attempt to exert ideological influence and control over the policing of the state.17The historian Robert Gellately argues that "by the end of the pre-war era, if not before, the Nazi police (especially the Gestapo and the Kripo) began to take very seriously their new mission to cleanse the body politic of 'harmful' or 'degenerative elements.'"18 Already in 1933, the Gestapo had the power to carry out "preventative" arrests and "to detain suspects in a concentration camp … without a hearing before a judge."19 The year 1935 saw the abolition of the detainee's right to legal counsel while in custody, and in 1937, the Gestapo was given the power to "correct" the outcomes of court trials by rearresting, imprisoning, or even executing individuals who had been acquitted by the courts.20 "Polizeijustiz" ("police justice") thus outweighed the formal judicial processes of the state and was used to target not just ordinary criminals but whole sections of society deemed "criminal" by Nazi ideology and law, such as Jews, communists, and homosexuals.21 Official formulations such as "violent criminal shot while resisting arrest" concealed extrajudicial killings carried out by the police.22In 1946, the Nuremberg International Military Tribunals declared the majority of Nazi policing, enforcement, and security organizations, including the SS, Waffen-SS (armed combat units of the SS), SD (Sicherheitsdienst, a security service) and Gestapo "criminal organizations," whose "essence" was "cooperation for criminal purposes," namely "crimes against peace," "war crimes," and "crimes against humanity."23 In what Donald Bloxham argues was a "striking omission," the Kripo was not included in the judgment, although technically it was part of the SS and worked closely with the Gestapo.24 However, the judges of the 1947 trial of Max Weilen, commanding officer of the Breslau Kripo, found that there was "perfect cooperation between the Gestapo and the Kripo on the top level of the RSHA" when the police handed over fifty British POWs to the Gestapo for execution in 1944.25 The Nuremburg judgment also noted that members of the Gestapo, Kripo, SD, and Waffen-SS regularly formed part of the Einsatzgruppen (task forces) that acted as mobile execution squads in the east, targeting Jewish civilians, partisans, and communists.26 Policeman-perpetrators were often members of multiple Nazi organizations, creating strong linkages and loyalties between them: for example, Arthur Nebe, head of the Kripo from 1933 to 1945, was also a high-ranking Gestapo official and major general in the SS and was seconded from his post to command Einsatzgruppe B (Action Group B) for five months in 1941, carrying out forty-six thousand executions in and around Minsk.27The documented criminality of the National Socialist state and its policing organizations present crime writers with the following problem: how to make credible the idea of a Nazi detective carrying out a murder investigation and upholding justice while working for a criminal state in which murder is ubiquitous and the law corrupt? One option is to present the detective as a noble exception—as a gifted and committed investigator who plies his trade honorably in spite of the criminality around him—although doing so may draw a charge of distorted historical representation or revisionism. Acknowledging the negative implications of the detective's Nazi identity can be equally problematic. If authors disappoint the reader's expectation of a fundamentally decent detective, they risk generating a textual crisis: the inability of the reader to identify with the detective as an upholder of justice may be felt to have "spoiled" the reading experience. In practice, authors often focus on the complexity of the Nazi detective's relation to the state, exploring the scope of his moral agency and/or corruption. In the hands of a skilled writer, the detective's journey offers opportunities for a nuanced investigation of how individuals came to work for the Nazis and how they negotiated or succumbed to the pressures of the regime. Crime writers also harness the first- or third-person perspective of the Nazi detective to detail the policing operations of the state, thereby revealing its ideologically corrupt conceptualizations of criminality and justice and illuminating its crimes, both on a micro level (in the form of specific acts committed by the police), as well as on a larger scale (in the form of war crimes and the Holocaust).The three crime novels examined in this article, authored by two British former journalists and two German historians, are set in Berlin and depict the capital of the Third Reich at different moments of the regime (two real and one counterhistorical). Kerr's The Pale Criminal, the second in the Bernie Gunther private eye series, is set in 1938 shortly before the Reichskristallnacht pogrom (the Night of Broken Glass) and shows Gunther rejoining the Kripo to catch a serial killer. Birkefeld and Hachmeister's Wer übrig bleibt, hat recht finds former Kripo detective and Waffen-SS officer Hans Kalterer tasked by the Gestapo to find a murderer during the chaos of the Allied bombings in 1944–45, while Harris's alternative history, Fatherland, sees Kripo inspector and Waffen-SS officer Xavier March investigating a number of suspicious deaths in the run-up to Adolf Hitler's seventy-fifth birthday in 1964. These texts have been selected as examples of "successful" Nazi-themed crime novels, with healthy sales and positive reader reviews, and for their potential to provide productive comparative analyses. While all of them position the Nazi detective as a member of the Kripo, Gestapo, or Waffen-SS, they depict the individual figures of Gunther, March, and Kalterer in significantly different ways, particularly in terms of their roles as providers of justice. The literary tropes of seeing and blindness, employed by each work to signal the detective's degree of moral awareness, form another key area of comparison.The article has three main areas of investigation. First, it examines the construction of the Nazi detective as an insider, outsider, or as a hybrid insider/outsider figure. Which character traits do authors assign their detective, and to what extent do his motivations and actions allow the reader to view him favorably as a provider of justice, given the corruption and criminality of the Nazi state? Second, to what extent can the Nazi detective figure be categorized as a perpetrator, resister, or victim of the regime, and what implications might such categorizations have in the context of larger historical discussions about the Nazi past? Third, to what degree do the texts subvert the conventions of the crime forms they draw on—the hard-boiled detective novel, the crime thriller, the police procedural and Verbrechensliteratur (crime literature)—and in what way does the observance or rejection of the genre's conventions impact on the texts' thematization of justice in the Nazi state?Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther series draws heavily on the American hard-boiled detective genre: Gunther is a world-weary, wisecracking private investigator in the style of Raymond Chandler's Marlowe, transposed to the mean streets of Berlin during the Nazi regime. Like Marlowe and other private eyes, Gunther was once a member of the police but resigned when he could no longer accept the system; thus he moves from the status of state-employed insider to independent, freelance outsider.28 However, in The Pale Criminal, the second novel in the series, Gunther rejoins the Kripo to help solve the murders of seven teenage German girls in 1938. This countermotion from outsider to insider is an audacious twist on the conventions of noir and places Kerr's protagonist in a highly unusual position: It felt strange being back in a case-meeting at the Alex [the police presidium on the Alexanderplatz], and even stranger hearing Arthur Nebe refer to me as Kommissar Gunther. Five years had elapsed since the day in June 1933 when, no longer able to tolerate Goering's police purges, I had resigned my rank of Kriminalinspektor…. If anyone had said then that I'd be back at the Alex as a member of Kripo's upper officer class while a National Socialist government was still in power, I'd have said that he was crazy.29Gunther's resignation when the Nazis came to power, due to Hermann Goering's removal of "so-called unreliable police officers" from the Kripo (133), occurs before the opening of March Violets, the first Gunther novel, but is referenced repeatedly throughout the series in order to emphasize his political nonconformity. As is made clear in March Violets and If the Dead Rise Not (2009), Gunther voted for the Social Democrats and the principle of democracy in the 1933 elections and finds both Nazis and Communists objectionable (11 and 160).30 However, he is now shown returning to police work in what has become a tightly controlled Nazi system. There is thus a tension between Gunther's past status as an investigative outsider opposed to the regime and his present status as a police insider, reporting to senior Nazi police officials such as Arthur Nebe and Richard Heydrich, whose names will also be familiar to many postwar readers as Nazi perpetrators.The novel provides an accurate overview of Nazi policing structures and organizations in 1938 and shows how the Kripo and Gestapo were expected to serve the ideological aims of the regime through the application of Polizeijustiz. Force is viewed as vital to effective policing in Nazi Germany, as Heydrich makes clear while playing croquet: "Laws are merely hoops through which the people must be driven, with varying degrees of force…. [T]here can be no movement without the mallet" (304). The extremes of force sanctioned by the state are illustrated by the case of Josef Kahn, a Jewish man suffering from a personality disorder, who is falsely accused of the girls' murders, institutionalized, and killed as part of the clandestine euthanasia program, although an official report claims he committed suicide (356–57). His story underscores a key theme in the series: the inversion of the law in Nazi society, which sees Kripo detectives exploiting the notion of Polizeijustiz to endorse, carry out, or conceal crimes. Already in March Violets, set in 1936, police pathologist Hans Illmann is shown "presenting forensic evidence of a homicide to the very people who committed it" (55).The circumstances of Gunther's reentry into the force are complex. He returns reluctantly; he has been threatened by Nebe and Heydrich with the loss of his private investigator's license and feels "forced to accept" their request to take the case (307). However, he also exploits the situation by negotiating himself a promotion to Kriminalkommissar (criminal police commissioner), which strengthens his position within the power hierarchy and brings him monetary gain (307). Kerr is nonetheless careful to emphasis that Gunther has not been "bought." His continued independence of thought is stressed by his constant wisecracks to senior Nazi officials and open criticism of the regime (381–82). This kind of verbal challenge is used in a fashion that Ralph Willett argues is typical of hard-boiled crime, serving as "an assertion of autonomy" and to demonstrate "irreverence toward … institutional power."31 His "insubordinate spirit" (373) is further demonstrated by his selection of a female criminologist and left-wing pathologist to work on the case: by choosing colleagues on the basis of ability, he is shown valuing good policing above an ideological selection process based on gender or political viewpoint (312). Most importantly, he is sincere in his hunt for the murderer, in opposition to other Kripo officers, who are keen to pin the killings on Josef Kahn because he is Jewish (312). Gunther's probity is emphasized by his removal of Inspector Deubel following the latter's extrajudicial execution of the suspect Gottfried Bautz. Collectively, this set of traits and actions are used to suggest that Gunther will successfully maintain his outsider status "inside" the Nazi system, thereby safeguarding his moral integrity and, by extension, the reader's identification with the detective. Like Chandler's Marlowe, he is portrayed as the "last just man" in a corrupt world.32However, Kerr uses the hard-boiled genre's capacity for illuminating moral complexity to move beyond a black and white juxtaposition of Gunther's "good" policing to the "bad" policing of the Kripo. When Gunther tells Deubel that "I'm choosy about who I have to work with. I don't like killers" (401), Deubel challenges his sense of moral superiority: "You want to open your eyes, Gunther. Take a walk down to the cells and the interrogation rooms and see what's happening in this place. Choosy about who you work with? You poor swine. There are people being beaten to death here, in this building. Probably as we speak" (401). Here, Kerr employs discourses of seeing and blindness to signal Gunther's willful ignorance of the fact that murder is a daily occurrence at the police presidium ("You want to open your eyes … and see what's happening," emphasis added). Such blindness to reality is at odds with the usual ability of the P. I./eye to "see" and, by implication, to understand what is happening around him: as Rosemary Jackson argues, his "knowledge, comprehension and reason are established through … the look."33 The typical "stress on the power of the eye" in hard-boiled crime is thus subverted: until Deubel's intervention, Gunther "sees" very little of the bigger picture, willfully avoiding uncomfortable truths about his membership of the Kripo.34 Even once he does "open his eyes" Gunther's scope for action is limited. He can exclude Deubel from his team but cannot bring charges against him due to a lack of evidence and the normalization of murder within Nazi policing culture. The best Gunther can hope for is to keep his own team's procedures free of impropriety, but he is forced to accept that he remains part of a larger, corrupt policing machine.Further incidents are used to expand the novel's theme of personal corruption. These are accompanied by Gunther's first-person reflections, which highlight the moral erosion he experiences while working for the Kripo. For example, when Gunther unthinkingly says "Heil Hitler" leaving Nebe's office one day, he is filled with self-loathing: "I said it. And not out of obligation, in response to someone else, in which situation I might have consoled myself with the excuse that I was just keeping my head down and avoiding the trouble of giving offence. I said it first" (358). The significance of this act is magnified by Gunther's earlier attempts in March Violets to avoid giving the Hitler greeting or salute (107): the fact that he now automatically volunteers the greeting suggests a worrying internalization of Nazi culture and practices. Later, Gunther briefly sanctions the use of violence against a suspect by his subordinate: "I watched dispassionately at first, … hating myself for keeping alive the best traditions of the Gestapo, and for the cold dehumanised brutality I felt inside my guts. I told him to stop" (482). This episode illustrates how easily even "good" policemen like Gunther can become desensitized to violence and thematizes the struggle of the individual to maintain moral integrity while working for a criminal state.However, at the end of the novel Gunther metes out a highly problematic form of justice to one of the murderers, part of a group of high-ranking SS officials whose ritual murder of German schoolgirls was intended to incite a pogrom against the Jews. Instead of placing SS-Hauptstürmführer and Nazi psychotherapist Lanz Kindermann in custody, Gunther drives him to a remote location and carries out an extrajudicial execution (504). This act is presented as an eye-for-an-eye, Old Testament form of justice that is defensible given the gruesome nature of the crimes and the wide-reaching corruption of the Nazi justice system. In Gunther's view, Kindermann "got what a murderer properly has coming to him. Someone had to. I don't suppose any of those other bastards will ever get theirs. The SS brotherhood and all that, eh?" (516). When Gunther is shown to be right—the other murderers are merely removed from the SS rather than being publicly tried or punished—he is presented an upholder of justice who steps in as an individual to compensate for the judicial failures of the state.While the resolution of the case outside formal and largely inadequate judicial structures is a typical feature of the hard-boiled genre, Kindermann's execution renders Gunther as morally bankrupt as other Kripo officers who deliver Polizeijustiz by taking the law into their own hands.35 Like Deubel, Gunther becomes an extrajudicial killer whose actions are ultimately covered up by the Nazi state. However, the troubling parallels between Gunther and Deubel remain unaddressed by the narrative, creating a lacuna that disrupts the moral logic of the novel. When Gunther is ridiculed for his naivety following Bautz's murder, he declares that "somebody has to give a damn, otherwise we're no better than criminals ourselves. I can't stop other people from wearing dirty shoes, but I can polish my own" (401). But by the time he has solved the case, this principled position has been quietly abandoned, and the self-critical reflections that accompanied earlier morally problematic incidents are conspicuous by their absence. Readers are thus encouraged to accept Gunther's representation as a provider of retributive justice without dwelling on the criminality of his actions, and they are unlikely to dispute this depiction given Kindermann's obvious guilt and their own desire, conditioned by the conventions of the genre, to sustain the identification of the detective as a force for good.36 Amazon reader reviews of The Pale Criminal bear out this point: while Gunther's honesty and integrity are repeatedly mentioned, no one comments on the troubling nature of the justice dispensed to Kindermann.37 Both Gunther and the novel's readers remain willfully blind to the detective's moral corruption, replicating his "unseeing" state at the beginning of the narrative.Kerr thus allows Gunther to exit the text as an upholder of justice, safeguarding his standing as the "good guy" who avenges the murdered girls in a Nazi state indifferent to their fate. Although this strategy protects the crucial reader-detective bond, it also constitutes a missed opportunity to reflect more deeply on Gunther's problematic hybrid identity as insider/outsider, his difficulties in negotiating the respective demands of these roles, and the inadequacy of terms such as "perpetrator" or "resister" for the purpose of categorizing him at the end of the novel. Depending on one's moral perspective, the execution of Kindermann can be viewed as either an act of perpetration (a Nazi policeman's abuse of power) or resistance (the elimination of a dangerous Nazi)—or even both simultaneously. Pointing up the paradoxes that arise from Gunther's decision to execute Kindermann could have enriched the narrative's consideration of the thorny nature of justice in the Nazi state; in the hands of a skilled author like Kerr, such added nuance need not have threatened the success of the crime narrative. However, Kerr opts to maintain the conventions of the genre, drawing back from an exploration of the morality of Gunther's actions, in order to protect his status as an "essentially good and honourable" detective.38Published in 1992, two years after The Pale Criminal, Robert Harris's international bestseller Fatherland is set in an alternative postwar era in which Germany won the war and has established a vast empire that includes Eastern Europe and Russia. The year is 1964, a temporal moment that functions simultaneously as an alternative past (from the reader's vantage point), as an existing present (the lived reality of the characters within the narrative) and as an alternative future (flowing forward from the 1940s).As Albert Speer's grandiose Berlin prepares for Hitler's seventy-fifth birthday celebrations, Xavier March, a Kripo inspector with the rank of Waffen-SS Sturmbahnführer (SS army major), is called to the shores of Lake Havel following the discovery of an old man's body. March's investigations in the course of the novel reveal that fourteen Nazi alte Kämpfer (old fighters), who attended the 1942 Wannsee Conference at which the policy of an Endlösung (Final Solution) for the "Jewish question" was implemented, are being murdered by the state to ensure that the Holocaust, of which there is only a shadowy awareness in Germany and beyond, is kept secret. In the process, the novel draws attention to the constructed nature of historical narratives: the "history" fashioned by the victorious Nazis after the war has rendered the genocide practically invisible. March is positioned as a "good German" intent on revealing the criminality of the state by leaking evidence that proves the Holocaust to the outside world. This is thus a crime novel in which the crime being investigated (the murder of veteran Nazis) leads to the revelation of a much larger crime (the Holocaust), and the life stories of the murder victims, all former perpetr
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