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WORK TITLE: Babylon Berlin
WORK NOTES: trans by Niall Sellar
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 12/26/1962
WEBSITE:
CITY: Cologne
STATE:
COUNTRY: Germany
NATIONALITY: German
http://sandstonepress.com/authors/volker-kutscher * https://www.babylon-berlin.com/en/about-babylon-berlin/the-setting/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born December 26, 1962, in Lindlar, West Germany (now Germany).
EDUCATION:Writer. Has worked as a newspaper editor.
ADDRESS
CAREER
WRITINGS
Babylon Berlin has been adapted into a television series.
SIDELIGHTS
Volker Kutscher is a German writer. He studied German literature, philosophy, and history and worked as a newspaper editor before turning his attention to writing fiction. Based in Cologne, Kutscher writes fulltime in German. In an interview in Shots, Kutscher talked about his connection to crime fiction. He admitted that “detective fiction is the only fiction I have written so far. I don’t know why exactly. Maybe it’s about suspense. I think a good story is a good story and not necessarily to be crime fiction; but it has to be thrilling nonetheless.”
Babylon Berlin
Niall Sellar’s English translation of Kutscher’s Babylon Berlin was published in 2016. Set in Weimar Berlin in the 1920s, the first of Kutscher’s “Gereon Rath” series centers on the eponymous detective as he navigates a city in rapid transition as it provides shelter for a great amount of greed, violence, corruption, vice, and the proceeding downfall of democracy. After accidentally killing a man, Rath is forced out of the Cologne homicide squad. His father manages to arrange for him to work with the Berlin vice squad. In Berlin he yearns to return to the homicide squad and leave the vice squad. He gets his chance when communist May Day celebrations force a joining of the different police divisions to contain the trouble created by Russians in the city. Rath and stenographer Charly Ritter have a mutual attraction that develops as they work on the case of a man who was found murdered and mutilated in his car. Rath uses this to uncover a secret shipment of gold that the Nazis, Russians, and gangsters are keen to keep quiet. In his investigation, he accidentally kills another criminal and hides the body to avoid facing the same punishment he received in Cologne. Later he is assigned to investigate that very same death.
In the same interview in Shots, Kutscher also discussed his protagonist for the “Gereon Rath” series. He clarified that “my protagonist Gereon Rath is a Police Detective in a changing world. His employer is the state, but a state that is changing from democracy into dictatorship. Rath isn’t a flawless hero; he’s just an ordinary man. A man who tries to live is life and to do the right thing, but he also is corruptible in some ways.” Kutscher continued the interview, reflecting on the amount of research it takes to successfully recreate the setting and feel in a novel of historical fiction. “I had—and still have—to do a lot of research. During this process I learned many things previously. But I enjoy researching because I’m very curious about the Weimar Berlin era.”
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews lauded that this novel “is an excellent police procedural that cleverly captures the dark and dangerous period of the Weimer Republic before it slides into the ultimate evil of Nazism.” A Publishers Weekly contributor reasoned that “Kutscher keeps the surprises coming and doesn’t flinch at making his lead morally compromised.” Writing in the European Literature Network Website, Judith Vonberg stated: “Absorbed in a story peopled by characters who are weak, corruptible and driven by money, power and sex, the reader forgets that this is an historical novel until jolted into wakefulness by such moments. Kutscher creates an eerily familiar world with a protagonist who rarely lives up to his own ideals and whose belief that crime and politics are mutually exclusive is exposed as naïve.” Reviewing the novel in the Crime Review, Arnold Taylor observed that Kutscher “sustains more than enough interest by creating uncertainty in the mind of the reader, together with a desire to find out how the various strands of the story are going to be brought together,” adding that the “surprise development towards the end of the novel … is entirely believable.”
Reviewing the novel in Shots, Bob Cartwright explained that “it is all a strong and heady brew which never oversteps itself by a descent into the implausible. That’s maybe because the Weimar Republic offered so many possibilities that there was so little room left for anything at all implausible. The political structure was totally fragmented offering equal scope for socialists, communists and fascists. The economy was buggered … so the black market was effectively the only market.” Cartwright asked numerous questions on how Rath would manage to get through his day filled with so much crime and navigate the troubled city, insisting: “My impatience provides a good measure of how much I enjoyed Babylon Berlin.” Writing in the View from the Blue House blog, Rob Kitchin recorded that “the plot is reasonably complex involving a fairly large cast of characters and a handful of intersecting threads, and it takes a bit of work to track them all.”
The Silent Death
Babylon Berlin’s sequel, The Silent Death, was published in 2017. Berlin’s film industry is in turmoil as it transitions from silent movies to “talkies.” Rath is called in to investigate the death of an actress who is killed when lighting equipment falls on her mid-shoot. Rath’s father then asks him to look into the disappearance of another actress for the mayor of Cologne. Meanwhile, Rath’s relationship with his ex-girlfriend, Charlotte, grows complicated.
Reviewing the novel in the Promoting Crime Fiction by Lizzie Hayes blog, Jennifer S. Palmer commented that the novel’s “progress is reminiscent of a film script.” Palmer also contended that “the frenetic atmosphere of the city of Berlin emphasises a nightmarish quality added to references to shadowy activity involving films, women and drugs.” In a review in the Herald, Alastair Mabbott opined that “the book’s length works against it: it isn’t really outstanding or unique enough to merit a 500-plus page count. But the way Kutscher evokes a specific place and time through its fashions, cars, customs and attitudes makes The Silent Death a particularly atmospheric and immersive thriller.”
Kutcher’s “Gereon Rath” series was adapted into, what Hollywood Reporter contributor Scott Roxborough called “the most expensive non-English language series ever made.” Roxborough appended that “if it works, it could change how Europe makes TV.” Shot largely in Berlin, the sixteen-part series makes use of stages to recreate Berlin in the 1920s. In an article in the London Observer, Kutscher explained his joy concerning the success of the series and its adaptation to television. “It really blew me away. It’s really big and exciting TV. How deeply I was dragged [into] the world of Babylon Berlin, how real the 1929 Berlin becomes on screen. I have never seen something like that before on German TV, not even in [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), August 4, 2017, Alastair Mabbott, review of The Silent Death.
Hollywood Reporter, February 9, 2017, Scott Roxborough, “‘Babylon Berlin’: How the German Series Could Change High-End TV.”
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2017, review of Babylon Berlin.
Observer (London, England), August 20, 2017, Dalya Alberge, “Nazis, Noir, and Weimar Decadence.”
Publishers Weekly, March 27, 2017, review of Babylon Berlin, p. 82.
ONLINE
Crime Review, http://crimereview.co.uk/ (December 24, 2016), Arnold Taylor, review of Babylon Berlin.
European Literature Network, http://www.eurolitnetwork.com/ (June 15, 2016), Judith Vonberg, review of Babylon Berlin.
Promoting Crime Fiction by Lizzie Hayes, http://promotingcrime.blogspot.com/ (July 13, 2017), Jennifer S. Palmer, review of The Silent Death.
Shots, http://www.shotsmag.co.uk/ (July 14, 2017), Ali Karim, author interview; (November 7, 2017), Bob Cartwright, review of Babylon Berlin.
View from the Blue House, http://theviewfromthebluehouse.blogspot.com/ (June 9, 2017), Rob Kitchin, review of Babylon Berlin.*
Series
Gereon Rath
1. Babylon Berlin (2016)
2. The Silent Death (2017)
Nazis, noir and Weimar decadence: Babylon Berlin recreates an era for TV detective drama
Volker Kutscher, German author of series of bestsellers now coming to TV, tells how he was inspired by The Sopranos and Raymond Chandler
Volker Bruch as Gereon Rath in Babylon Berlin. Photograph: X Filme Creative Pool GmbH
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Dalya Alberge
Sunday 20 August 2017 00.04 BST
Last modified on Tuesday 5 September 2017 20.55 BST
One of the most expensive drama series ever created for television will be screened in the autumn – a 16-part crime story set in 1920s Germany costing £36m.
The German-language Babylon Berlin series has been adapted from a 2008 bestselling thriller by Volker Kutscher. Set in the glamorous and decadent world of 1920s Berlin, with communists and Nazis clashing on the city’s streets, it follows a young police inspector who investigates a porn ring and uncovers a web of corruption.
It is one of six critically acclaimed novels featuring the detective Gereon Rath and was partly inspired by the crime fiction of Raymond Chandler and the hit HBO television series The Sopranos. The German-language editions alone have sold more than a million copies.
What to watch: your definitive TV guide for fall 2017
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Although Babylon Berlin and the second novel in the series – The Silent Death – have been translated into English, Kutscher is still barely known in Britain. He is due to appear at the Edinburgh book festival on Monday. The Observer spoke to him just after he had attended a preview screening of the new drama.
He said: “It really blew me away. It’s really big and exciting TV. How deeply I was dragged [into] the world of Babylon Berlin, how real the 1929 Berlin becomes on screen. I have never seen something like that before on German TV, not even in [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz.”
Kutscher, 54, who studied German literature, philosophy and history, conducted extensive research into prewar Germany for his novels: “I’m very curious about this time – an important time, not only in German history. I always questioned how a civilised country, a republic like Germany, could change into this dictatorship. There’s no easy answer to this.”
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As the film makers embarked on their shoot, he told them: “You can do anything you want, but please stay with my characters and the heart of my story.”
In an unusual collaboration, Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries and Henk Handloegten are all co-writing and directing, doing parallel shoots with three units. There are also three producers: Stefan Arndt, Uwe Schott and Michael Polle.
The series was shot mostly on location in the German capital, but they also built four entire streets across a vast area of the Babelsberg Film Studio in nearby Potsdam. Polle said they recreated the 1920s streets with such realism that they look genuine even close-up, helping the audience “travel in time”.
The cast is headed by Volker Bruch as Rath, who also starred in the controversial mini-series Generation War, and Liv Lisa Fries, who this year was singled out by Variety as one of 10 new European actors to watch.
Robert Davidson, the managing director of Kutscher’s English-language publisher, Sandstone, praised the books’ attention to historical detail and their exciting plots: “It’s the world of Cabaret, but it’s also realistic. It takes place when the Nazis are infiltrating German society [and] when the communists are seen as more of a threat than the Nazis; when there’s extreme poverty in Germany, and a generation of men who’ve experienced the first world war have this feeling of national failure.”
There are analogies with Britain and America today, he said: “There appears to be in both countries a feeling of national failure, where a fairly large section of society reaches for the exclusion of the other.”
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Babylon Berlin trailer (German).
Describing the character of Gereon Rath, he said: “He’s 29 and well-connected because his father is the chief of police for Cologne. He’s something of an outcast, because he was working as a policeman in Cologne when he shot someone – the son of someone powerful – and was lucky to escape going to prison. He finds himself in the vice squad in Berlin.”
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Davidson said the producers of the television adaptation have risen to the challenge of matching the quality of American and Scandinavian series such as The Sopranos and The Killing.
Kutscher has just started work on the seventh novel in the series. He said: “The first one was in 1929. Now the seventh is in 1935. I want to go to 1938, then end the whole series.”
Babylon Berlin, which will be broadcast by Sky Atlantic from 13 October, reflects how high-end television drama is now drawing big budgets, as well as big stars and directors. Other forthcoming productions include an innovative series involving writer Nick Hornby and the television division of See Saw Films, the company behind the Oscar-winning The King’s Speech. They are making a series of 10 10-minute episodes that will focus on a couple in the 10 minutes before they go into their weekly marriage counselling session. They will be directed by Roger Michell, whose films include Notting Hill.
Hakan Kousetta and Jamie Laurenson of See Saw Films said that there was no longer a “stigma” about moving between the big and small screen.
'Babylon Berlin': How the German Series Could Change High-End TV
1:00 AM PST 2/9/2017 by Scott Roxborough
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X Filme
Liv Lisa Fries and Volker Bruch star in 'Babylon Berlin.'
"It feels like we’re living in a pre-war period," says Henk Handloegten, director of the ambitious drama that offers a timely look at pre-WWII Germany.
Is the world ready for Babylon Berlin?
The German TV series, a crime drama set in pre-World War II Berlin, is crazily ambitious. With a reported budget of $45 million, the period epic, co-written and co-directed by Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries and Henk Handloegten, can lay claim to being the most expensive non-English language series ever made. If it works, it could change how Europe makes TV.
“It’s never been done before,” says producer Jan Mojto, whose Beta Film is co-financing Babylon Berlin with German public network ARD and pay TV group Sky and is selling the series worldwide. “This is new model for creating television ... but it’s the only model — because mediocrity, ordinary fare, has no chance in the marketplace.”
Babylon Berlin certainly is not ordinary. Based on a series of novels by German writer Volker Kutscher, the Raymond Chandleresque crime story — about a German detective, Gereon Rath (played by Volker Bruch), sent to Berlin to investigate a porn ring run by the Russian mafia — is set against the social and political upheaval of Germany in 1929, when the world’s most modern and progressive society is threatened by rising right-wing extremism and a world economy teetering on the brink.
“The trick is to try to create the sense that the people at the time don’t know what’s going to happen,” says Tykwer. “No one in 1929 could have imagined what would become of Germany.”
The parallels to the modern world — the financial crisis and the rise of Donald Trump and right-wing parties across Europe — are obvious but, according to the directors, completely accidental.
“We started to work on the series in 2013 and the longer we worked, the more the world of today started to resemble the end of the 1920,” says Handloegten. “We had the parallel already between the financial crash of the 1929 and the crash of 2008-2009. Then their was the Euro crisis. And the rise in populism, the call for simple solutions and for a strong man to take charge. The world seemed to be catching up to our scripts.”
The rise of the Nazis, and the devastation of WWII and the Holocaust, have been widely depicted in film and TV. Rarely seen is the period just before, when democracy — in the form of the idealistic, if flawed, Weimar Republic — was still fresh in Germany and the country was in the midst of a cultural, political and social revolution.
“The 1920s was a crazy time, society wasn't fixed, conservative and cautious but experimental,” says von Borries. “Berlin was a international, cosmopolitan capital, attracting young people and artists from around the world, much like it is again today. They all came together on Berlin's streets: communists, Nazis, feminists, homosexuals.”
That wild mix of the modern and the new is the backdrop for Babylon Berlin, which, according to Tykwer, used the plot of Kutscher's novels “as a jumping-off point” to explore the world of 1920s Berlin.
All three directors make a link between that world and their experience of Berlin in the early 1990s, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
“It felt like the patriarchy had fallen away, like Dad's gone and the son can party,” says Handloegten. “That was the '90s and, I imagine, that was the '20s as well. For women, for outsiders, it was a time they could express themselves. Emancipation, gay culture, artists of all kinds, flourished.”
Making such an ambitious series in Germany — the directors had a full 180 shoot, often working with two or three units in parallel — would have seemed impossible just a few years ago. Marcus Ammon, the Sky Deutschland executive in charge of original production, admitted when he first heard of the project, he knew it would be too big for any one German channel to handle.
“You knew, just from the vision that Tom had, that it was going to be very, very expensive,” Ammon says. “We couldn't have afforded it on our own.”
What made Babylon Berlin possible was a one-of-a-kind partnership between Sky, German public broadcaster ARD and producer/sales agent Beta Film, whose credits include German miniseries Generation War and hit Italian mafia drama Gomorrah. They greenlighted a two-season, 16-episode order of the show.
“This had never been done before — a German TV series with this sort of budget, and a 16-episode order,” says Beta Film's Mojto. “It was the change in the international market that made it possible and the decision by ARD in particular, as well as Sky, to take the risk.”
The change in the market that Mojto mentions was the rise of Netflix and the boom in high-end TV series. Binge-watching viewers across the world had gotten used to TV made on a feature-film budget. Ordinary European series, made for a fraction of the budget of a big U.S. show, were finding it harder to compete. What audiences, and channels, worldwide wanted was bigger, more ambitious shows that stood out from the pack. For European producers, that meant cooperation was essential. Channels in different countries — or different outlets in one country — would have to pool their resources.
The Young Pope, the papal drama series from Oscar-winner Paolo Sorrentino starring Jude Law as the first American pontiff, is an example of this kind of economic collaboration. The show was bankrolled by HBO, Sky Italia and France's CanalPlus. Such cross-border teamwork has become commonplace in international TV.
But Babylon Berlin is the first non-English language series to attempt to use this model on such a scale. The collaboration between Germany's leading pay-TV channel, Sky, and its biggest public broadcaster, ARD, is also unique. The two have agreed to a staggered release of the show. Sky will debut Babylon Berlin on Oct. 13 this year exclusively on its pay-TV platform in Germany. ARD will wait a year before premiering the first season on free TV.
“If it works, it could be a model for the future,” says Ammon. “It definitely allows us to do projects we'd be hard-pressed to do alone.”
Sky's U.K. and Italian channels have also snatched up Babylon Berlin, and Beta on Wednesday announced they have already sold the series across much of Europe, including to public broadcasters SVT in Sweden, DR in Denmark and NRK in Norway. Spain's Moviestar+/Telefonica pay-TV platform and Belgium's Telenet have also grabbed local rights for Babylon Berlin. A U.S. deal is expected soon.
“Anticipation is incredibly high for this series,” admits Mojto. “But I think the results will exceed the expectations.”
Kutscher, Volker: BABYLON BERLIN
(Apr. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Kutscher, Volker BABYLON BERLIN Dufour (Adult Fiction) $16.00 5, 9 ISBN: 978-1-910124-97-0
Welcome to Berlin in the 1920s: a city filled with vice, violence, greed, corruption, and political mayhem.Detective Inspector Gereon Rath is forced to leave the Cologne homicide squad after he accidentally kills a man. His well-connected father gets him a job with the Berlin vice squad, led by avuncular DCI Bruno Wolter. A raid on a porn studio almost gets Rath killed but nets vice a new informant, a junkie who will feature in Rath's future cases. Berlin is full of Russians representing every point on the political spectrum, and after vice joins the police action to contain a communist May Day celebration, Rath, who longs to be back in homicide solving real crimes, decries politics to his boss. When an unidentified man is found badly mutilated in a car in a canal, Rath secretly works the case as he pursues his other duties. At the scene is Charly Ritter, law student and stenographer from the homicide division. Her mutual attraction with Rath quickly leads to an affair. Through his investigation of his vice and murder cases, Rath learns of a secret shipment of Russian gold that communists, Nazis, and gangsters are all desperate to find. In a strange twist of fate, Rath accidentally kills another criminal. Determined not to suffer the same fate he did last time, he hides the body and is assigned to find the killer once it is discovered. The life-and-death political battles over the soul of Germany are a major hindrance to Rath's search for solutions to several interconnected crimes. The first in a series that's been wildly popular in Germany is an excellent police procedural that cleverly captures the dark and dangerous period of the Weimer Republic before it slides into the ultimate evil of Nazism.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Kutscher, Volker: BABYLON BERLIN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA487668674&it=r&asid=bb66862467ca06f5474c1655741996ef. Accessed 7 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A487668674
Babylon Berlin
264.13 (Mar. 27, 2017): p82.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Babylon Berlin
Volker Kutscher, trans, from the German by
Niall Sellar. Sandstone (Dufour, dlst.), $16
trade paper (528p) ISBN 978-1-910124-97-0
James Ellroy fans will welcome Kutscher's first novel and series launch, a fast-paced blend of murder and corruption set in 1929 Berlin. Det. Insp. Gereon Rath has been transferred after his role in a controversial fatal shooting to Berlin's vice squad, a move arranged by his influential father, a legendary police officer, to keep him out of trouble. Against the backdrop of widespread unrest resulting from clashes between the police and Communist demonstrators, Rath gets involved in a murder inquiry after the corpse of an unidentified man is retrieved from the Land-wehr canal. The dead man was battered with a hammer, but died from a heroin overdose before he entered the water. The plot thickens when Rath learns that Stalin has sent agents to Berlin to search for a huge trove of gold rumored to be in the city that could be used to fund counterrevolutionary efforts to topple him. Kutscher keeps the surprises coming and doesn't flinch at making his lead morally compromised. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Babylon Berlin." Publishers Weekly, 27 Mar. 2017, p. 82. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA487928126&it=r&asid=541be19638c624038fee2ee6b699b1a9. Accessed 7 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A487928126
#RivetingReviews: Judith Vonberg reviews BABYLON BERLIN by Volker Kutschner
Jun 15, 2016 • No comments
Discussing his series of bestselling crime novels at the ‘European Literature Festival’ this May in London, German author Volker Kutscher reflected on his decision to set the first instalment Babylon Berlin in 1929. “It’s more interesting to see how it all starts than to look at the war itself,” he said. But as I read Babylon Berlin I realised that Nazi Germany had no starting point. What Kutscher conveys in this gripping noir thriller is the ease with which a minor political movement infiltrates a society gripped and distracted by the all-pervading fear of communism.
Kutscher’s protagonist is Detective Inspector Gereon Rath, a morally compromised, sometimes barely likeable, figure who has been transferred to the Vice Squad in Berlin after a shooting incident while working for Homicide in Cologne. Illicit porn is soon the least of his worries as he becomes entangled in a menacing underground web of Russian gangsters, gold smugglers and Nazi arms dealers. Masterfully spun, the plot leads Rath into a dark world with few heroes where the line between solving and committing crime becomes ever more blurred.
Berlin has long been an obvious setting for crime novels. Its allure is summarized by Rath’s colleague Bruno Wolter who says to the newly arrived detective, “We get to gad about the night spots of the most exciting city in the world, which is also the most disreputable.” Inter-war Germany has seen its fair share of fictional dramatizations too. Yet there is nothing hackneyed about Kutscher’s novel. Its portrayal of the disintegrating Weimar Republic is neither historicised and tedious nor a self-conscious reconstruction in glorious technicolour.
Instead, we are thrown into a humdrum world that looks much like our own. In fact, Kutscher is obliged to offer frequent, sometimes painfully contrived, reminders that the novel is set in 1929 not 2016. At one point, Rath, who is giving his friend Weinert, a journalist, some information about a murder case not yet known to the rest of the press, tells him not to publish the material quite yet. “I’ll give you the green light in a day or two,” he promises. Weinert is confused. “Green light?” he asks. “Just like at Potsdamer Platz,” Rath explains, one of the first junctions in Berlin to have traffic lights. Later, a man dies when a hairdryer falls into the bath while he is washing. “Modern times, modern accidents,” one policeman comments.
Absorbed in a story peopled by characters who are weak, corruptible and driven by money, power and sex, the reader forgets that this is an historical novel until jolted into wakefulness by such moments. Kutscher creates an eerily familiar world with a protagonist who rarely lives up to his own ideals and whose belief that crime and politics are mutually exclusive is exposed as naïve.
In Babylon Berlin, the first of a series of novels concluding in 1938, it is the communists who present the city’s police with the greatest problems. The Nazis are a small group, largely seen as irrelevant, as suggested by their designation in the novel with a small ‘n’. Words that are burdened with meaning for the modern reader – Goebbels, swastika, SA – are passed over with little comment by the novel’s characters. Hitler is, to us oddly, described as “that Hitler, a strange bird with a Charlie Chaplin moustache”.
These moments are the clearest reminders of the chronological gap between the narrative and our own reality as well as the most powerful indication of the parallels between that time and today. All that is required for extremism to take hold is a city of individuals so distracted by one threat that others are ignored. Until it has taken hold, this novel chillingly shows us, extremism is not even recognised as such. We are urged to look out for the burgeoning Hitlers in our world and not to become, in Kutscher’s own words, the “victims of history” like the characters that inhabit Babylon Berlin.
By Judith Vonberg
Babylon Berlin
By Volker Kutscher
Translated by Niall Sellar
Published by Sandstone Press
Judith Vonberg
Judith Vonberg is a freelance journalist and PhD student at the University of East Anglia. Her thesis surveys the depictions of Britons and Germans in popular culture between 1945 and 1965. She graduated from Oxford University in 2011 with a degree in English and Modern Languages and received her MA from Queen Mary, University of London, in 2013. As a journalist, she writes on European culture, migration and national identity. You can visit her website here.
Babylon Berlin
by Volker Kutscher
A car is found in the Landwehr Canal and in the car is a man who has been brutally tortured. DI Gereon Rath, although not a member of the Homicide Division, decides to investigate.
Review
Detective Inspector Gereon Rath has been re-assigned from the Homicide Division of the Cologne Police force to the Vice Division of the Berlin Police. His move had become necessary following his shooting of a man who had been firing at passers-by. It turned out that the man was the son of an important newspaper publisher who decided to make Rath’s position impossible by printing frequent articles blaming him for his son’s death. Eventually, Rath’s own father – a high-ranking police official in Cologne – persuaded the Commissioner of Police in Berlin to take him on transfer.
Berlin under the Weimer Republic was very similar to New York in the ‘Roaring Twenties’. For those who could afford it the night life was wild and exotic. There was little difference between a night club, of which were many, and a brothel. Drinking until the early hours was common and along with the drunkenness came drug-taking. If the night life was licentious, daily life could be dangerous. The Weimar government was quite unable to control the various political gangs, both Communists and the growing National Socialists or Brown Shirts. Taken together with the simply criminal, the Mafia or Ringverein, they created an element so lawless that the CID divisions – Homicide, Vice and Political – were hard put to contain it. The author is very successful in creating what is almost a documentary feel, whilst at the same time sustaining a very strong narrative.
The novel begins in a dramatic fashion with the description of a man who has been tortured seeking to end his life to avoid further pain. It continues with a different kind of drama as Rath pursues a man up the scaffolding of a building under construction. After this the pace slows and the novel becomes more of a police investigation, though by no means a conventional one.
It could be argued that there is rather too much in the way of plot and perhaps too many characters. The romantic element, for example, is half-hearted and could have been omitted entirely without any significant loss. There is also far too much time spent talking about travelling in Berlin. Clearly, the author is very familiar with the city, but for those who are not such detail can be boring – not to mention unnecessary. It has the effect, particularly in the middle section of the book, of slowing the action down.
However, it has to be stressed that the author sustains more than enough interest by creating uncertainty in the mind of the reader, together with a desire to find out how the various strands of the story are going to be brought together. There is a surprise development towards the end of the novel – one that is entirely believable – as we discover who the real villain is. The circumstances under which we find out see a return to the thrills of the opening – an ending that more than makes up for any criticism about the length and complexity of the plot.
Reviewed 24 December 2016 by Arnold Taylor
Thursday, 13 July 2017
'The Silent Death' by Volker Kutscher
Translated from German by Niall Sellar
Published by Sandstone Press,
18 May 2017.
ISBN 978-1-910985-64-9 (PB)
Volker Kutscher really conveys the atmosphere of a frenetic Berlin in 1930. The battles between Communists and Nazis are rumbling along in the background in a city where people can find interesting bars and restaurants and obtain, if they wish, drugs to add to their excitement. Rath is a native of Cologne so he can look at Berlin fairly dispassionately.
In Berlin, in 1930, silent movies are being replaced by the new and expensive talkies so there is turmoil in the acting and producing world as people manoeuvre to get established in this changing milieu. When an actress is killed during the filming of a talkie by a lighting system falling on her, Inspector Gereon Rath is sent to investigate. He has various demons of his own to fight. His father arrives in Berlin and requests that he help the mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, with a problem; a friend has asked him to investigate the disappearance of another actress, his job has involved him in activity around the funeral of Horst Wessel who is to become a Nazi martyr. Meanwhile he has returned to smoking and there is his exgirlfriend Charlotte…. Furthermore Rath doesn’t get on with his superior and has hit Brenner, a fellow detective, in public for coarse remarks about a lady; Brenner has used the incident to cause trouble for Rath. Rath is sidelined in the investigation into Betty’s death until it becomes apparent that there could be links between her death and those of other actresses.
The action takes place over 2 weeks from Feb. 28th, 1930 to March 14th and its progress is reminiscent of a film script. In fact, the script for the silent movie was very helpful in pinpointing the development of Betty’s murder. The frenetic atmosphere of the city of Berlin emphasises a nightmarish quality added to references to shadowy activity involving films, women and drugs. Rath is self-destructive in what has become the traditional way of detectives of any era but he is, of course, also clever and persistent so he eventually reaches a successful conclusion though he only just escapes some bad effects on his professional career and on himself.
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Reviewer: Jennifer S. Palmer
Volker Kutscher has written a series of novels about Gereon Rath - the first of these, Babylon Berlin, is a Sky TV series.
Photo Credit: Monika Sandel
Volker Kutscher was born in 1962 in Lindlar, West Germany. He studied German, Philosophy and History, and worked as a newspaper editor prior to writing his first detective novel. Babylon Berlin, the start of an award-winning series of novels to feature Gereon Rath and his exploits in late Weimar Republic Berlin. This enormously successful crime series which, in addition to compelling narrative, is notable for its scrupulous accuracy on Germany in the years between its beginning in 1927 and the approach to the Second World War. Volker Kutscher works as a full-time author and lives in Cologne.
Niall Sellar was born in Edinburgh in 1984. He studied German and Translation Studies in Dublin, Konstanz and Edinburgh, and has worked variously as a translator, teacher and reader. Alongside his translation work, he currently teaches Modern Foreign Languages in Harrow. He lives in London.
Jennifer Palmer Throughout my reading life crime fiction has been a constant interest; I really enjoyed my 15 years as an expatriate in the Far East, the Netherlands & the USA but occasionally the solace of closing my door to the outside world and sitting reading was highly therapeutic. I now lecture to adults on historical topics including Famous Historical Mysteries.
4th August
'Atmospheric and immersive thriller' - The Silent Death, by Volker Kutscher
Alastair Mabbott
The Silent Death Volker Kutscher Sandstone Press
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The Silent Death
Volker Kutscher
Sandstone Press, £8.99
Review: Alastair Mabbott
IN the autumn, Sky TV will begin showing Babylon Berlin, a new crime drama based on the novel of the same name by Volker Kutscher. The Silent Death is the first of its sequels to be translated into English, and boasts all the usual elements of the genre, most prominently a troubled, maverick cop at odds with his bosses because he refuses to play by the rules. What distinguishes this detective series is its setting, as Kutscher’s books are set in Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s, taking the darkness and moral ambiguity of noir to a new level. Film noir was heavily influenced by German Expressionism in the first place, and the atmosphere of Weimar Berlin suits the genre down to the ground. Vague, generalised paranoia is no substitute for the sure and certain knowledge that the seeds of evil lurking under the surface are indeed about to bloom.
Kutscher’s protagonist, Inspector Gereon Rath, is, thankfully, an unlikely candidate to be swept away on the tide of Nazism, judging by his taste for American jazz records. But he’s a man who can live with the inconvenience of acquiring a slightly tarnished reputation in the course of his work. The 5000 marks left in his mailbox by a grateful gangster, and Rath’s relocation to Berlin from Cologne after a fatal shooting was splashed all over the papers, attest to that.
The story revolves around the tensions in the film industry brought about by the rise of the talkies. Film studios which have prospered in the silent era are claiming that it’s a gimmick, and that only silent movies are pure examples of the form. What’s more, upgrading the technology is very expensive, and complicated by licensing and compatibility issues. Tempers are hot, but would anyone actually turn to murder to protect the silent film? It looks like it. Actress Betty Winter is killed by a falling floodlight, and it’s no accident. When another missing actress turns up dead, her vocal cords symbolically sliced out, there’s no room left for doubt.
Rath is determined to find the culprit, but quickly finds himself in knots, investigating several cases at once, mostly in secret. His boss has sidelined him, so his work on Betty Winter’s death is largely on the quiet. A studio boss also wants him to find a missing person, but unofficially. Meanwhile, Rath’s father, a prominent policeman, has asked him to look discreetly into a blackmail plot against the mayor.
At this stage in the Gereon Rath series, the growing Nazi threat is being held in reserve, with a sub-plot about the death of SA martyr Horst Wessel confined to the periphery; but its presence helps incubate a sense of dread that will doubtless get stronger still in future instalments. The book’s length works against it: it isn’t really outstanding or unique enough to merit a 500-plus page count. But the way Kutscher evokes a specific place and time through its fashions, cars, customs and attitudes makes The Silent Death a particularly atmospheric and immersive thriller.
Volker Kutscher, Edinburgh International Book Festival, Mon Aug 21.