Prague Fatale

Prague Fatale is another Bernie Gunther novel by Philip Kerr. This is my second Kerr novel and the third one reviewed in the blog. I think East Coast Don captured the right title for the genre, “Nazi noir.” The story takes place during 1941 and the scene switches back and forth between Berlin and Prague. Kerr has created a wonderful character in Bernie Gunther, a Berlin police detective who is not a member of the Nazi party, who knows that Hitler and the rest of the Gestapo brass are criminals, and is terrified of his boss, Reinhard Heydrich, the Reichsprotector for Bohemia (The Czech Republic). In real history, Heydrich was assassinated by the Czech resistance movement in 1942, and this historical fiction novel starts out just nine months before that event.

Bernie’s wife died 20 years earlier from the influenza, only months after their marriage had begun, and in this story, he falls in love with a beautiful woman, Arianne Tauber, who turns out to have a dark history. This love starts during the dark days in Berlin during the war, at a time when Bernie is nearly suicidally depressed, as are so many of German citizens. Life was bleak, and Kerr wrote, “Berlin felt more like the capital of a banana republic that had run out of bananas, as well as almost everything else you could think of.” Before all the Jews had either fled, gone into hiding, or been forcibly removed, Kerr noted, “To survive as a Jew in Berlin in the autumn of 1941 was to be a person of courage and strength.”

Bernie was called by Heydrich to come to Prague to be his personal bodyguard and then to solve a murder that happened to one of Heydrich’s adjutants. He decided to take Arianne with him for desperate romantic interludes, but that decision proved to be one born of a man in lust rather than one who was thinking clearly. Perfectly capturing the irrationality of his situation, Kerr writes these lines for his protagonist, “Investigating the murder of one young SD officer who had almost certainly participated in the murders of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Latvian Jews, Gypsies and other ‘undesirables’ struck me as absurd, of course. A mass murderer who’d been murdered. What was wrong with that?.... Investigating a murder in the autumn of 1941 was like arresting a man for vagrancy during the Depression.”

 I am impressed with Philip Kerr’s writing, and if you’re a WWII junkie, then his writing is meant for you. This book is far more than just an excellent crime novel. Nazi noir, indeed.