Of Mice and Mitlaufers: The Myth of The Good German

I once read somewhere that the only person who has had more written about them than Jesus was Hitler.  While I am not sure how anybody came to this conclusion, it can’t be denied that there has been a lot written about Hitler.   The historical record has provided ample information about Hitler’s birth, life, and death.  However, the actual person who was Adolf Hitler can never be fully understood. In many senses it doesn’t even really matter where a person like Hitler came from or what made them the way they were.  The Italian chemist, writer, and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi summed it up best:

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.”

While people like Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and the rest of the Nazi high command were undeniably evil people, they would not have been able to reign down the destruction they did on Germany without the consent of the Deutsche volk.  Without the everyday citizenry falling in line, Hitler would just be another madman yelling at a cloud.  Of all the horrors of the Third Reich, the worst may well be that it led an entire society to either close its eyes or pretend not to know of the atrocities being committed in its name. 

In Joseph Kanon’s The Good German, the protagonist, Jack Geismar, asks more than once “what happened to these people?” The people he means are the rank-and-file Germans. The mitlaufers. The beat cop, the baker, the maid, and the rest of typical society.  Jake is working for Collier’s magazine in Germany to cover the Potsdam peace conference between the big three: Churchill, Truman, and Stalin.  The story begins in July 1945 and the scene in Berlin is not pretty. On Jake’s way to Potsdam, he takes a military plane accompanied by colleague, Liz, who travels with a gun on her hip; an oily Congressman named Breimer; and an airsick soldier named Tully.  Jake was previously a correspondent in Berlin in 1941 and as he descends into Potsdam he cannot believe the desolation and destruction that has befallen the city.  

The Big Three at Potsdam redraw the post-war map

While reporting on these three beauties holds some allure for Jake, he really is back in Berlin to seek out his old girlfriend Lena, whom he was having an affair with behind the back of her mathematician husband, Emil.  Jake’s philosophizing about why Germany ended up the way it did begins early in the novel.  He openly ponders with his colleagues what Mr. and Mrs. Goebbels and Eva Braun saw in Hitler to make them not only kill themselves at wars end, but in the case of Magda Goebbels, murder her five children as well.  His colleague answers in the only sensible way “who would ever listen to Hitler?”

On Jakes first day of covering the Potsdam conference, the proceedings are interrupted by the washed-up body of an American soldier.  This soldier turns out to be Tully from Jake’s plane.  There is a bullet in his head and $10,000 dollars in cash on him when he is discovered.  The story of the dead body becomes a far more interesting one to Jake, and he immediately begins to ask questions.  Jake’s initial questions lead him to finding out that Tully was part of Berlin’s vast black-market underground.  Jake looks into the black-market connection and meets an ex-German police officer named Gunther whose Jewish wife was betrayed by another Jewish woman acting as an informant, or greifer, for the Gestapo. Gunther is a functioning alcoholic but knows the ins and outs of the black-market dealings between the American, British, and Russian sectors of Berlin. 

During one of Jake’s conversations with Gunther, he spots one of Lena’s old friends with a GI and eventually follows her to an apartment.  Jake reunites there with Lena who is suffering from an infection due to a botched abortion.  Gunther helps Jake find a doctor, a camp survivor, who helps Lena get well.  Lena tells Jake that she was raped by a Russian soldier whom she subsequently murdered shortly after the attack.  She also informs him that she believes her husband Emil to be dead. 

Emil was last seen working with Werner von Braun on the German V2 rocket program. Lena, and even Jake, consider Emil a good man and don’t believe he would have been involved in any of the German atrocities.  As the novel unfolds, we learn that Emil was forced to join the SS to continue his research.  We also learn that Emil is alive and possibly being held by the Russians who collared him with the assistance of the dead GI, Tully.

Jake begins a long, circuitous effort to find Emil (at Lena’s request) and solve Tully’s murder.  This leads Jake to butt heads with a Russian party leader named Vassily as well as the Congressman Breimer and his flunky Capt. Schaeffer. As it turns out, the Americans want Emil as part of what would come to be known as Operation Paperclip. Paperclip brought many former Nazi scientists to the US to help prepare for the next war.  The rest of the novel focuses on the maneuvering to get Emil out of Russian hands.  The question for Jake is where does Emil belong?  If he is taken by the Russians, he will likely be executed after his usefulness is done.  If he is brought to America, it would be a slap in the face of everything the US fought against.  Lena is skeptical of Emil’s involvement in anything criminal and claims he was just a scientist working for his country.

Near the end of the novel, Jake undercovers that not only was Emil working on the V2 rocket program but was overseeing experiments that involved Jewish prisoners.  Jake hatches an audacious plan to rescue Emil from the Russians.  Chaos ensues and Emil ends up captured by Schaeffer and Breimer who brush off Jake’s moral concerns by saying “the war is over.”  Jake lets them know about Emil’s camp experiments, but they again do not care.  Lena however is finally finished with Emil and feels she doesn’t owe him anything anymore.

With Emil off to America, Jake can now focus on who killed Tully and he wraps that up in the last few pages.  The mystery of who killed Tully was not really the driver behind the novel, so it is wrapped up neatly and quickly.  Jack and Lena then decide to stay in Berlin and start a new life together. 

This is a long book.  Almost 500 pages.  There are also dozens of characters to keep straight.  The novel could have easily gotten by without so many of them.  It is hard to sustain interest in a mystery story of this length.  Many mystery novels are about 300-400 pages for a reason.  By page 300, you are ready for the reveal.  By page 400, you can see the light at the end of the tunnel. By page 500, you don’t really give a fuck anymore who did it.  Obviously, there are exceptions to this rule, but the longer a mystery is, the less interested you will be in solving it.

The Good German comes awfully close to losing the plot thread several times.  There were a few times that I was genuinely confused about what was going on.  However, the book is saved by the questions it asks.  The ex-policeman Gunther is a character you can relate to, and you want to see a happy ending for him.  To Jake, Gunther is a good German. However, he formerly served as a policeman in Nazi Germany and upheld the laws of this monstrous regime even though he was secretly hiding his Jewish wife.  Is he a good German?  The answer is ambiguous.  The woman who informs on Gunther’s wife is Renate.  She is Jewish but working for the Gestapo.  However, she is only working for the Gestapo to prevent her mother and son from being sent to one of the deathcamps.  The more Jews she finds, the longer her family stays safe.   What is her moral guilt?  Emil is a scientist who is only devoted to numbers.  Though he must join the SS and oversee horrid human experiments to further his scientific career.  To Schaeffer and Breimer, he is a good German, since he isn’t a major offender, and he can help the US in a future war against Russia. At one point Emil angrily asks Jake “what would you have done in the same situation?”  That is the question all the characters are faced with in the novel.

The novel does a lot of things right.  It asks what is the responsibility of the individual when the rule of law has been subverted to oppress and kill the enemies of the state.  Do you put your head down and keep painting houses, baking bread, or sweeping streets?  Do you stand up and risk your life by saying “this is not right?’ Few had or have that moral courage.   The novel does an interesting job in discussing the merits of the Allied De-Nazification program as well. As one character wryly points out, “how do you de-nazify a country where even the mailman was a Nazi.” This question necessitates certain gradations of guilt.  How guilty did you have to be to earn de-Nazification?  What is the scale you use to weigh the crimes of the Third Reich? Unfortunately, the more useful you were to the post-war landscape, the more chance your crimes could be washed away. 

German women leave a cinema after being shown footage of the extermination camps at Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen

For all the positive aspects of the book, there is one area of The Good German that is puzzling.  All the Russian characters are described as “savages” or “godless” or “animals.”  The few Russian characters with dialogue don’t do much to dispel the thoughts of the Allies.  It is curious that a novel that devotes much of its length to showing that not everyone is all bad or all good, simply dismisses the entire Soviet Union.   History has shown that the Soviet Union had an oversized role in winning WWII.  It is also suffered a disproportionate share of deaths as a result of the atrocities committed by the Germans following the invasion of the Soviet Union. The German advance, known as Operation Barbarossa, greatly accelerated Germany’s anti-Jewish policy and it is estimated that it led to the deaths of almost 1.5 million Jews, not to mention almost 27 million Russians in total.  The losses suffered in the East fueled Soviet hatred of Germany and there is no doubt that the Red Army committed their own atrocities upon the German populace once they arrived in Berlin.  However, it would have been interesting to see a more nuanced portrait of the Russians as opposed to the stereotypical drunken, raping, savage.

In the end, there are no answers to most of the questions posed by the novel.  “What happened to these people” Jake asks in the beginning of the book. Upon first reading, you may be tempted to think he is taking only about the Germans.  However, after thinking about it, it seems more apt a question to all parties involved.