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January 22, 2004
HAVE WE BEEN HERE BEFORE?
We're good little Nazis now: "Republican students at the University of Colorado launched a Web site to gather complaints about left-leaning faculty members, saying they want to document discrimination against conservative students and indoctrination to the liberal viewpoint." This is scary stuff.
It reminds me of the atmosphere of "Berlin Noir," Philip Kerr's trilogy of detective novels, which take place during the Third Reich just before World War II. They've been my great reading pleasure these days.
The central character is Bernhard Gunther (Bernie to his friends), a former detective who quit the force before he "got weeded out" by the Nazi party. Now he's a private eye. What is particularly good about "Berlin Noir" is that it gives an authentic picture of life under Hitler and his minions. It's full of small details rarely found in history books except as abstractions. And it explodes the widespread myth of German efficiency and brilliance, replacing it with the reality of corruption and stupidity.
Here's a taste of "March Violets," the first in the trilogy:
"You're Gunther, the detective?""That's right," I said, "and you must be --" I pretended to read his business card, "-- Dr Fritz Schemm, German lawyer." I uttered the word "German" with a deliberately sarcastic emphasis. I've always hated it on business cards and signs because of the implication of racial respectability; and even more so now that -- at least as far as lawyers are concerned -- it is quite redundant, since Jews are forbidden to practice law anyway. I would no more describe myself as a "German Private Investigator' than I would call myself a "Lutheran Private Investigator" or an "Antisocial Private Investigator" or a "Widowed Private Investigator," even though I am, or was at one time, all of these things (these days I am not often seen in church). It's true that a lot of my clients are Jews. Their business is very profitable (they pay on the nail), and it's always the same -- Missing Persons. The results are pretty much the same too: a body dumped in the Landwehr Canal courtesy of the Gestapo or the SA; a lonely suicide in a rowboat on the Wansee; or a name on a police list of convicts sent to a KZ, a Concentration Camp. So right away I didn't like this lawyer, this German lawyer.
Speaking of favorite novels, I was reminded of another by Tunku Varadarajan, who wrote in the Wall Street Journal the other day: "It's not possible to spend an hour in urban India without ingesting life's unfairness. ... Luck and grueling effort are the main safety nets in places like India, and poor children aren't spared the legion of woes that their parents face daily."
I don't know about "ingesting" it -- how about "absorbing" it -- and I don't appreciate Varadarajan's smugness in the telling of it, but he makes me relish all the more Clive James's "The Silver Castle," which traces an urchin's life from the Bombay slums to Bollywood, and which I highly recommend (a helluva lot more than Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children").
Posted by at January 22, 2004 10:33 AM