The Good German

Rating:
Summary: Berlin after the fall
Review: Joseph Kanon first earned my attention with "Los Alamos". This is a second, intriguing read. "The Good German" offers a look at Berlin in late 1945, recovering from the war. As part of the recovery, people try to assemble their lives shattered by the war. There are the two lovers, one American and one German, separated for four years. There is the German scientist, eagerly sought by the Americans. There are the Russians, stereotyped as intent primarily on rape, revenge and pillage. And then there is the dead American, shot after the fighting, found at the time and location of the Potsdam Conference. This death draws the story together, including the black marketeer, the British journalist, the starving local citizens, and the resurrection that follows deadly combat.

An engaging, entertaining, detailed read, painting vivid pictures of lives drab and destroyed by war.

Rating:
Summary: Great idea, same old storyline
Review: Berlin, 1945 -- the ruins still smoulder and Truman and Stalin meet at the new border. Millions of civilians murdered by the Nazis and a complacent and complicit German population. Displaced persons desperate for anything to eat. Add a reporter with the assignment of a lifetime -- the Potsdam Conference -- and you should have a remarkable novel. Unfortunately, the result here is a collection of tired themes and predominantly cardboard characters that conspire to make 500 pages feel a lot longer.

Jake Geismar, our hip-ly named protagonist reporter who manages to submit perhaps three stories to his editor at Collier's during the course of the entire book, checks into the plush (relatively speaking) press quarters, then it's off to find his old flame and solve a murder that seems less important to the reader than to the author. Black market activity runs throughout, though given the spectres of mass murder and modern war, the document/cigarette/chocolate trade fails to strike a chord.

The issue of who is to blame for the systematic murder of Jewish civilians, the great burning question of the past century and one with eternal relevance, fuels a few heated conversations between our hero Jake and a German scientist implicated in the horrors of the Nordhausen camp. The convenient conclusion is that everyone in Germany was to blame. True? Maybe, but Kanon picks up on this when the mood suits, unwilling to pick at that fresh scab with the conviction it merits.

Given the fascinating and historically important setting, and the plausible pretext of a journalist in Berlin, we are plunged -- or dipped on occasion -- into a mundane and exasperatingly complicated loose-cannon investigator story, complete with the lost-long-ago-found-again girl who swings from stoic bitterness to schoolgirl love, a sexy photographer, a blond and blue-eyed German-American officer, an evil Russian colonel, a corruptible windbag politican, a vengeful Jewish prosecutor and any other sterotype you could want. Especially astounding is the willingness of the scientist to relinquish his wife to Jake with the kind of grudging remarks one would use to protest a stolen weed-whacker or ski rack.

If the characters are wanting for depth, the story usually is not much better. The brief trial of an German-Jewish informant threatens to involve us deeply because the issues are deep and painful, but a ludicrous deus-ex-machina escape and contrived parade chase remind the reader that it is a long way between morsels such as the trial of the "greifer" (who turned in other Jews to save her life). As if the author needed to prove that he could write a plot that would elude even the most patient and dedicated reader, we are treated to 8 or 10 pages of explanation (by our hero Jake) to the effect that even if not everything can be proven, he can lay blame for the murder (of someone the reader does not care about) at the feet of someone else who hardly appears in the story.

Why three stars? Kanon gets high marks for his setting, which intrigues even if the story never gels, and for his style of writing, which could flow along quite nicely given more interesting characters and a less cumbersome plot. I suspect a visit to Kanon's writing room would reveal a plot chart that resembles one of Von Braun's V-2 rocket schematics in its complexity.

Rating:
Summary: The Good Novel
Review: Joseph Kanon's The Good German is a well done, muliti-genred (if that's a word) piece which I found quite interesting. I don't normally read spy thrillers, but the New York Times' review was so glowing, I couldn't resist. I wasn't disappointed. The Good German is part spy thriller, part love story, part historical fiction. It is the story of Jack Geismar, a reporter, returning to post-WWII Berlin in search of the woman he loved before the war. He finds much more than that. An American soldier is murdered in the Russian controlled section of Berlin. Something strikes Jack as simply not right in the story and he tries to get solve the riddle of the murder. Kanon's exploration of Berlin focuses very well on the nuances and grey areas in war, and in particular WWII in Germany. There really aren't many "good" Germans in this novel, just people who were trying to survuve any way they could. Kanon is superb at bringing to light how the presence of the Nazi's clouded good and bad, so that good people did horrible things for seemingly "good" reasons. Or were these good people, were they good reasons? Kanon gives us no clear answer. The Good German is satisfyingly thought provoking in that respect. My few quibbles with the novel are the number of amazing coincidences (which may be standard in the spy thriller, I don't know) and at times the pacing gets a little bogged down. Other than that, The Good German is an enjoyable, well done novel.

Rating:
Summary: A Plodding Trip Down Memory Lane
Review: I just finished The Good German, and I struggled through the last two-thirds of the book, resisting the impulse to just stop reading the damn thing. I have a fascination with World War II, especially the post-war period in Europe. Seeing Kanon kill off the possibilities of mystery, danger, plot, and romance in this book is like watching an ax-murderer at work. Occupied Berlin with its collapsed "civilization", shattered buildings, destitute citizens, and contesting occupying powers, ought to provide a seductive background for mystery and skullduggery. Although Kanon seems to have assiduously studied post-war Berlin, he really hasn't been able to bring the city to life. He can't get his story to leave the ground.

This book fails on so many levels. The characters are poorly drawn and unconvincing. There is no reason to care about any of these people. The plot meanders, staggers, and repeatedly stalls. Internal events simply aren't written effectively enough to be plausible. Finally, this is a confusingly told tale-- it's just not written with enough precision or life to capture the reader's attention.

Too bad this story didn't work. Kanon seems to have put plenty of effort into what he wrote, but the story just drags along, without life or any real sense of intrigue. I'd suggest that readers try Philip Kerr, who writes about the same period and whose efforts in this regard are far more successful.

Rating:
Summary: Preachy, unsophiticated Casablanca wannabe
Review: I LOVED Joseph Kanon's first novel, "Los Alamos," in which phyisicists who were communists helped us build the bomb, but not all were spies. There was irony, atmosphere and a great mystery.

Ever since, however, Kanon has self consiously tried to slop on the irony with a trowel. His last book, "The Prodigal Spy" could have (maybe it was?) been written in 1975. It certainly hearkened back to the old anti-anticommunist thrillers written before Venona was declassified, or KGB documents saw the light of day.

He continues this trend in "The Good German," in which a war weary, hardened journalist is SHOCKED, SHOCKED, that we would use German rocket scientists, despite their war record. At first, you think Kanon is going to consider this action morally ambiguous, as he lays the foundation that underlings had little choice about what they did under Nazi tyranny.

But once things get moving, they get silly, and so does our hero's outrage. Hey, we just spent four years as an ally of the OTHER cruelist regime of the period, but he's stunned we would use a few German scientists?

Some readers have complained at the slow pace, but the stuff where Jake finds his long lost love in the ruins of Berlin is at least better than the silly action plot and simple minded preaching of the last third of the book.

This book really wants to be a post war "Casablanca," but it's not as moral there, either. The lovebirds get to have their caks and eat it to, as hubby turns into super-Nazi in the last act, and this works as sort of a justification for the fact she was cheating on him before the war-- even though he seemed a nice enough guy.

Something tells me Kanon got a lot of flack at Manhattan cocktail parties for admitting the presence of Reds at Los Alamos, and has been doing penance ever since by making anticommunistm seem the illegitimate stance. The problem is, that argument has been settled over the last decade, and NO new scholarship is on his side.

Rating:
Summary: The Good Editor.
Review: Joseph Kanon, The Good German (Henry Holt, 2001)

Josepah Kanon's third novel is a grimly humorous little tale of postwar intrigue. It focuses on Jake Geismar, a wartime correspondent sent back to Berlin to do a series of articles for Collier's. He also has a hidden agenda: find his wartime love, a native Berliner who's gone missing. Complications abound from the get-go, including a professional relationship dangerously close to turning personal, a blowhard Senator, and the head of the nascent war crimes division, all of whom are staying in the same house as Geismar. And they get even more complex from there.
Perhaps "little" isn't the word I'm looking for to modify "tale."

It could have been, though. While Kanon is deft enough at weaving his subplots together, keeping things believable, and providing enough suspense to keep the reader turning page after page, the novel's major failing is a sporadic lack of pace; sections of it, including the interminable beginning, crawl along at the speed of a quaalude-addicted sloth. Pieces of the novel could have been edited far more than they were without bothering plot or characterization in any way. The upside of this is that none of the novel's other slow spots approach the length of Book I, so if you make it through the beginning, sailing should be clear for the majority of the remaining time spent following Jake and friends around postwar Berlin.

Postwar Berlin is not a nice place to be, but we don't expect it to be. Kanon is excellent at adding those details that allow us to develop a feeling of creeping tension even if Geismar is doing nothing but walking down a street in midafternoon. When he's firing on all cylinders (and he is most of the time), Kanon keeps us riveted; it's possible to lose hours at a time in here, even whole afternoons. The plot twists and turns, and Kanon throws us enough curve balls so that, even if we can predict the ultimate resolution of the novel, the stuff between point A and point B is still well worth reading.

Recommended, but be prepared for some slow going, especially at first. ***

Rating:
Summary: Far More Than A Novel
Review: "The Good German", by Joseph Kanon can be categorized by placement in a variety of genres, Thriller, Mystery, Historical Fiction, Love Story, and more. The work is certainly all of these, however I believe much more important is the study of twelve years of human behavior, presented within the context of events primarily following the close of The European phase of World War Two. I don't know that any other conflict has generated more literature than the one symbolized by the swastika, the word Holocaust, and the unprecedented Crimes Against Humanity Trials at Nuremberg. Superficially, the evil of the war is routinely placed with great ease. Even at this level it is hard to take issue with placing the blame on a man, the party he created, and the nation that joined that party, served in the SS, and made the crimes that took place possible. What happened when the fighting stopped, when the shooting war with The Axis ended, and the Cold War with The Soviet Union began? The latter had really begun prior to the first one ending.

The shades of gray that dominated the conduct of The Allies immediately following the end of hostilities, and the repercussions that would follow for decades, is brilliantly set side by side with conduct during the war. Mr. Kanon never minimizes any of the horror that took place; he questions none of the atrocities that were committed. He does bring post-war reality to his tale that cannot be said to match the actions of The Third Reich; he does however absolutely portray conduct on all sides, which traditional history would rather marginalize. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems, and while there were episodes of good versus evil, and events that were black and white, inconvenient shades of gray were everywhere.

Without exception all of the players in this book are guilty of some form of aberrant behavior, which outside of the circumstance of war would never be questioned as wrong. However when placed within the context of World War Two, which was unique for the range and intensity of the evil it spread, do the judgments and answers remain so clear?

A person is put on trial at war's end for collaborating with The Nazi SS; let us say the person facilitated the capture of Jews for transportation to death camps. The jury would probably not spend a great deal of time deliberating this example. Same example with a bit more detail, the person is a Jew who was given the option of pointing out other Jews in exchange for their life and the lives of their family. This offer comes after the ritual sadism of a SS interrogation. How many family members would choose death for themselves and their family? What would the readers of this book choose given the alternatives?

It is true that Nuremberg placed on trial and executed or imprisoned what could be referred to as the, "Marquis Players", of The Third Reich. Nice and neat, black and white. At war's end there were brilliant scientists that lead the world in rocketry, aircraft design, and a host of other sciences. If they had been placed on trial persons like Werner Van Braun would not have been working for NASA, he very likely would have been dead, or would have been in Spandau Prison. The Scenario that was viewed with more trepidation was these truly gifted minds would spend years on Soviet soil advancing Soviet capabilities, and that was not viewed as a risk worth taking. The result was each country that could, rounded up as many of these scientists as possible, together with their papers and families, we gathered ours and brought them to the US. Viewed as a strictly pragmatic choice, the decision to utilize these people with disregard for their wartime activities can be defended with ease. The defense also requires that ethics, morality, humanity, call it what you will, must be tossed over the side like so much ballast on a sinking ship. The selective enforcement of justice and the contortions of logic that these decisions demand, are the core of this work. The presentation is little short of brilliant.

Replace the word German in the title with person, and you are much closer to the core of this book. Right and wrong is defined on a case-by-case basis, and is infinitely fluid. What Mr. Kanon has done is brought this conduct to bear on every level. Twisted decisions are as much a part of personal relationships as they are at the conference table at Potsdam. Deception is as routine between family members as it is with Stalin and whomever he speaks with. Every decision is reduced to only having to be justified for the moment it is contemplated. Once made, the past is shunted aside, and the future is clean. This expediency is as flawed long-term as it is without justification when made. The love story aspect is riddled with deception, crime, and repugnance. Yet you will likely be hoping for a happy ending for two of the participants. Take the same event out of the context of post World War Two Berlin, and the sympathy dissolves.

Joseph Kanon has written a remarkable book that deals with one of the darkest periods of human behavior. He does this without rancor, without preaching, without offering only two colors to place each decision in. To write such a work not only pays tribute to the mind of the author, but also the adroitness with which he presents very real moral labyrinths. I found myself at once wishing this was a pure scholarly history book, and at the same moments being pleased with the novel form the author chose. His format allows for more dispassionate reasoned contemplation because it is a novel, and not a heavily footnoted documentary. Either method would likely bring the reader to the same end, however Mr. Kanon's is much more user-friendly.

Rating:
Summary: "The Good German" is Almost Great
Review: Jospeh Kanon is rapidly establishing himself as the master of the historical thriller. "The Good German" is his 3rd entrant in that genre, following "Los Alamos" and "The Prodigal Spy." Simply stated, Kanon's 3rd book is his 2nd best -- nearly as good as "Los Alamos," but not quite. The book is set in Berlin, 1945, at the time of the Potsdam conference. At times the action seems a bit forced and in other places the plot drags a bit ... but not much; I quibble, suggesting only that it does not quite match "Los Alamos," a truly superb book. "The Good German" still is riveting. You actually care what happens to the main players in the drama, focused on Jake Geismar, the protagonist, a war-weary correspondent seeking both (1) to solve a murder mystery involving a Russian general, a jaded old German cop, and some American occupiers of dubious morality, and (2) to resolve an old romantic triangle with Lena, his pre-war lover, and Emil, her mathematician husband who worked for the Nazis. What is true, what is moral, who is responsible for what ... big questions lurk under, or at, the surface throughout. This book captures the horror of war in general and of the Holocaust in particular. You see how regular people react to the unimaginable; the picture is often not pretty -- but you feel that the images of life, death, love, revenge, greed and more that you take away are real. Definitely read this book.

Rating:
Summary: Look back in anger...
Review: A thoroughly captivating read about a piece of history that has been largely swept under a convenient carpet. I confess that I had never actually thought what it must have been like in Berlin just after the war -most histories seem to end with April 1945 & pick up again (with a strong US emphasis) at the Berlin Airlift. Here Kanon gives us a somewhat nightmarish answer to the old question "Where do you go when the record is over". The strengths of the book are mainly the glimpses we get of the destroyed city and its inhabitants (both The Girl and The Father-in Law are well portrayed) and the moral ambiguousness of everyone involved, the weaknesses oddly enough are the hero -who is just TOO good to be true-and the actual murder mystery around which the plot turns. By about 2/3 of the way through I had given up caring about just "whodunnit" & by the end I had to check back to the begiining to sort out just who was who, but this didn't really matter. I felt like I had been given new insight into the price of victory and new questions that begged further research. I strongly reccomend reading THE ROCKET AND THE REICH as a non-fiction companion to this novel, but even withoutmuch background, I doubt that you will find this book easy to put down or to forget. Finally, as a scientist I found that the book raised again important questions about the "purity" of science and the endless temptation of a moral vacumn. We got teh A4, von Braun and eventually the moon. What did we lose?

Rating:
Summary: The Good German
Review: Joseph Kanon truly captures the horror of WWII as seen not only through American eyes but also through the eyes of Germans and Russians in the hell that was Berlin. The mystery genre is a mere prop for the morality play acted out by the characters who are well developed and all less than perfect. From the protagonist,a journalist who had an affair with a German scientist's wife to the "greifer," a Jewish informant,there is an air of tragedy which somehow works to illuminate the terrible choices available. Nonetheless, there is redemption and order to this convoluted plot which, again, is less than perfect, but engaging and satisfying. I felt that the historical backdrop with all of the competing moral isssues made this a different and significant novel.