This time around, Expatica’s reviewer, Ruth Zein, explores a Pierre Frei’s mystery novel set in postwar Germany and finds herself captivated by his victims.

On the first Thursday in July 1945, the 1st US Airborne Division rolled in from the Brandenburg Gate over Hitler’s East-West Axis through the devastated Tiergarten and symbolically took possession of its sector. The army set up its headquarters in the suburbs, near the end of today’s U3 line, at the ludicrously named OMGUS (the Office of the Military Government of the United States) where "the polished corridors were redolent with the unfamiliar smell of Nescafe and Virginia cigarettes." Their 400 phones were disinfected weekly because "the Americans feared germs more than Communism."

One U-Bahn stop away, in a fenced off square mile around Onkel Toms Hutte, the Americans lived in requisitioned housing, shopped and went to the movies. Here, in this tightly controlled neighborhood, the Onkel Toms Hutte killer is stalking blue-eyed blonde German women working for the Americans.

One summer day, 15-year-old German, Ben Dietrich, jumps on to the U-Bahn tracks to grab an empty cigarette pack and finds the first victim, Karin Rembech. Blonde, blue eyed, nervy, she worked in the dry cleaners’ shop. Before the war, she had been a famous movie star.

At the moment each woman loses consciousness, the author flashes back to a defining moment in their lives and follows them to their last breath. He repeats this pattern five times. Most writers would have turned the process into a mindless routine but Frei uses the device to create fascinating women who adapted as the Nazis changed the world around them.

Beyond the physical characteristics that unite them, Frei’s women are modern in the mold of Coco Chanel, outspoken and gutsy like 1930s movie stars, pragmatic in wartime, yet underneath it all, hopeless romantics.

Rembech, who became a star of the leading German studio UfA, was mucking out the chicken coop in a small town on the border of Thuringia when she met screen stars and future mentors Erik Winter and Nadja Horn, touring with their latest play. Of course, Winter became her first lover and took her to Berlin but she left him after she seduced director Conrad Jung and starred as Queen Louise of Prussia. Reinvented as Verena van Bergen, she dares to challenge Dr. Goebbels himself in his role as propaganda minister and head of UfA.

Aspects of the movie industry from major roles to back office positions flow through the novel, underlining the traffic from Germany to Hollywood and back again. During the last days of the Weimar Republic, the German film industry ranked fourth, behind the United States, England, and France. One of UfA’s most famous movies and also Germany’s first talkie, The Blue Angel (1930), made Marlene Dietrich an international star. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, some 1500 film industry professionals, including Marlene Dietrich, fled to Hollywood, forcing a Swedish import, Zarah Leander, to become the new cinema headliner.

After the war, Rembech was forbidden to work as a movie star because of an unintentional indiscretion. She finds a job with the dry cleaner at Onkel Toms. This woman, like each of the others, is a few hours away from a happier life when she is murdered. Rembech’s last thought as she was attacked by a figure wearing a motorbike cap and protective goggles: "I hate death scenes."

The investigation into the murders is headed by police inspector Klaus Dietrich, father of Ben, the teenager who found the first body. The Dietrich household copes with the ordeals of daily life in postwar Berlin with humor and imagination. Not for them the Berlin noir of Philip Kerr, whose private detective Bernie Gunther usually wakes up "feeling hollower than a dug-out canoe," careens from one battle to another and whose main interest in women is the way they look walking away from him.

Capt. John Ashburner, the U.S. Military Police liaison with Klaus Dietrich, develops into a more interesting man through his relationship with Jutta Weber, another blue-eyed, blonde, courageous woman who worked for the Americans and who was also a target for the serial killer. When the Americans requisition housing around Onkel Toms Hutte, Ashburner is assigned the house Weber and her husband had shared before he was killed in Poland. She knocks on his door one day and asked to retrieve family photos left behind.

The intensity of Weber’s relationship with Capt. Ashburner parallels the final stages of apprehending the killer. As Dietrich’s ingenious tracking device fails, the captain’s wife flies in from Indiana and Weber runs away from him.

Ultimately, the novel is about confusion and madness that went on during the postwar period in Germany as much as it is about the characters and the serial killer. Pierre Frei, author of Berlin, grew up in the neighborhood that is the backdrop of this book during World War II. Before traveling the world as a freelance foreign correspondent, he published short stories as a teenager in Onkel Toms Hutte. I imagine him as 15-year old Ben Dietrich, who dealt with the rationing and shortages by pulling off petty black market scams to finance a Prince of Wales check, double-breasted suit, symbol of "a world in which everything was all right, where there were elegant people and enough to eat."

And Frei’s talent at creating intriguing characters is equally matched by his tight plotting skills. During the last few chapters, as the chase heated up, I wished I had paid more attention to details. All the clues needed to identify the killer were present in plain sight but not so obvious when interspersed with red herrings.

Translated from the German by Anthea Bell

Copyright Expatica April 2008