Soul Survivor: Philip Kerr’s A Man Without Breath

My piece  from  Critics at Large

Somebody has to give a damn, otherwise we are no better than the criminals themselves.
– Bernie Gunter speaking in The Pale Criminal

Scottish writer Philip Kerr’s ninth Bernie Gunther novel, A Man Without Breath (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2013), has all the familiar trademarks of its predecessors: impeccable research and textured detail, an ability to weave history with a mystery, and to some extent, the unabashed sass and defiance of authority by the chief protagonist, the onetime homicide detective in Weimar Berlin. In The Pale Criminal (1990), Gunter displays that barbed wit when mocking Hitler’s Mein Kampf: “That funny old book they gave free to all newlyweds? It’s the best reason to stay single I can think of.” That hard-boiled sarcasm is one of Gunter’s weapons as an anti-Nazi German who never abandoned his belief in the democratic values of the Weimar Republic. He valiantly struggled to retain some semblance of his own humanity amid the inhumanity and immortality of National Socialist Germany, the Eastern Front during the Second World War, and postwar Vienna, Argentina, Cuba and Germany.

Gunther’s idiosyncratic moral code not deter him from dispensing rough justice or complying with the orders of the powerful men in Hitler’s inner circle that he despises. In The Pale Criminal, he executes a man responsible for the deaths of several young women. In A Man Without Breath, he kills a man who threatened to expose an assassination plot against Hitler, and he feels badly about it. In 1936 Berlin, the setting of March Violets (1989), he is caught in a power struggle between two Nazi rivals, Herman Goring and Heinrich Himmler. Reinhard Heydrich, second in command under the Gestapo chief, Himmler, offers the arrested Gunther a deal. He can save his life by going undercover into the hell of Dachau to interrogate a fellow prisoner, a safe-cracker who knows the whereabouts of politically sensitive documents that could incriminate Goring. (The indescribable horror of his experience in Dachau enabled Gunther to appreciate the “true strength of the grip that National Socialism had in Germany.”) In Prague Fatale (2011) it is 1941 and Heydrich, the newly-minted Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, fears – with good reason since he is known as Hitler’s Hangman – that he could be assassinated and remembers Gunther. Despite Gunther’s Republican politics, Heydrich values his investigative skills as a detective and orders him to Prague to uncover the Czech spy within his inner circle and track down “terrorists” who are resisting Nazi domination. Gunther has no alternative but to accede to Heydrich’s commission. Yet Gunther could display a creative insubordination when negotiating the moral cesspool of the Third Reich. As an SS Lieutenant who is entrusted with presiding over a massacre of civilians, he requests a transfer to the front, is refused because of his age and time in the trenches during the Great War but is sent back home to be assigned to the War Crimes Bureau, a public relations exercise that will strike most readers as an oxymoron. 

The Ethics of Forgiveness in The Storyteller

My piece from Critics at Large

Simon Wiesenthal

In the Epilogue of That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden, Encompass Editions, 2013, I wrote that “not a single SS officer arrested after the war demonstrated any remorse.” I had not yet encountered a perpetrator seeking forgiveness from a victim until I read The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness (1969, 1997) by the late concentration camp survivor and Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal. He recounts that when in the camps he was once assigned to hear the death-bed confession of a SS officer in the hope that he, a Jew, would offer the dying man absolution. Although the young man appeared to show remorse over the crimes in which he had participated in the East, he was also self-centered, as he repeatedly indicated that he was too young to die, and more offensively, he contended that Jews died quickly, whereas, he was suffering a slow death. Wiesenthal offered compassion by holding his hand and by listening, but he remained silent throughout this ordeal. He left without saying a word. That meeting unsettled him and disturbed his equilibrium when he debated with camp inmates the morality of forgiving this man. Two years later, his companions are all dead but that encounter with the SS officer continued to preoccupy him and invaded his dreams as he talked about it again. After the war, he visited the young man’s mother to hear her story about her “good son” who would never have committed the crimes that she had heard about. He decided not to compound the woman’s sufferings by disabusing her. Wiesenthal came to the conclusion that the only individuals who could offer forgiveness were those who had directly suffered from a perpetrator’s actions. He also noted that twenty five years later at the Stuttgart trials only one of the accused acknowledged his crimes and showed contrition; the rest challenged what the victims said and, according to Wiesenthal, only regretted that there were survivors to testify against them.

The Courage of Soviet artists who refused to be silent

Periodically, I will be releasing on this site material that did not survive the final cut from both volumes of That Line of Darkness. Below is a selection from the Soviet section of Vol. II The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden, Encompass Editions, 2013.

Dimitri Shostakovich

In the midst of capricious terror and the flagrant disregard for truth, due process and human life, the voice of humanity had not been totally silenced. During these nightmarish times, there were extraordinary individuals who allowed their art to register feelings that could not otherwise be expressed. Dimitry Shostakovich, perhaps the most important Soviet composer of the twentieth century, had his Symphony No. 5 premier performance in Leningrad in November 1937 during the height of the purge of the Party. For almost two years he had lived with the fear that he could be another victim because of a savagely hostile Pravda review of his opera, The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk after Stalin attended a performance. The unsigned editorialist of “Muddle Instead of Music” accused him of being an “aesthete” and a “formalist,” and hinted that “it might end badly” for him. Sleeping with a suitcase beside his bed, he clearly encoded into Symphony No. 5 his fear, sadness and grief, feelings that the audience at the premier performance obviously shared as they openly wept during the funereal slow movement indicating that almost everyone present would have suffered the loss of loved ones or friends during one of the waves of recent terror. Notably absence in this symphony was the sarcasm and irony that had featured in much of his earlier compositions, and to rehabilitate himself, he adopted the heroic classicism that is most evident in the electrifying climax which was followed by a noisy thirty-minute ovation. Whether the slow movement induced as one contemporary critic noted a “numbness” and “torpor” that might have sunk the composer had the finale not saved him, or as some later critics[i] contended, his oeuvre was charged with subversive messages revealing the composer to be a bitter dissident with a disdain for the system, misses the significance of this music. 

What he intended to convey in his art is irrelevant because symphonic music lends itself to multiple meanings, a richness which explains why it was so highly valued by the multitude of listeners in the Soviet Union.[ii] The extravagant mea culpa that he expressed in public also cannot be taken seriously because of the extreme duress that he experienced. It is most likely that the shy, polite Shostakovich expressed in his art his deeply felt fears that included the loss of his teaching position at the Leningrad Conservatory, the effects of being publicly insulted and shunned and the grief of losing loved ones to the terror. But as a survival strategy, he incorporated the upbeat triumphal march of the Soviet state that concludes Symphony No. 5 in order to ingratiate himself with the “Party musicologists” who expected him to write melodic songs. Perhaps Shostakovich was correct when he later asserted that Stalin kept him alive because he liked his film music.  

Upcoming Book Launch: Meet the Author

On March 7, 2013 between 6 PM and 8 PM, 

the launch for this book was held at Ben McNally bookstore (Bay and Richmond) in Toronto

Max Beckmann: The Night

Nina Marchenko: Children of Holodomor

Excerpt from That Line of Darkness: Vol. II

              Encompass Editions http://www.encompasseditions.com 
    This piece also appeared in Critics at Large

When you cross over that line of darkness, it’s hard to come back. You lose your soul.
–Former CIA officer. Quoted by Jane Mayer

Gothic is a mode—perhaps the mode—of unofficial history.
–Literature of Terror by David Punter.

Gothic texts frequently chart the trajectory of individuals who suppress or lack the capacity to empathize with others. Similarly, when individuals in the larger world succumb to an ideological virus, neither experience nor reality can disrupt their single-minded quest to achieve utopia. Their narrative often includes sanctioning the emotional humiliation and the physical assault upon people they consider non-persons. If intended victims are regarded as vermin or parasites that must be eliminated, moral restraints to cold-blooded violence are atrophied, if not abandoned. The Gothic mode employs filters—the demonization of the other, the double or a sinister duality, psychic vampirism, the obsession with bloodlines—to explore how individuals and groups inspired by an ideology or opportunism can lose their moral compass and descend into a gray if not dark zone. In Gothic fiction ethical codes “operate at best in distorted forms.” The same can be said of totalitarian states and the militant Islamists. In a chapter from The Dictators titled, “The Moral Universe of Dictatorship,” Richard Overy argues that the Nazis and the Stalinists adopted an extreme moral relativism that subsumed individual conscience into the collective will, one that was driven solely by ideological imperatives. Just as moral elites like the church and the law were co-opted or destroyed by Nazi and Soviet ideology, the original meaning of the Quran is lost, even repudiated by the actions of militant Islamists.

A Historian on a Tour

I recently returned from a tour of the Black Sea and felt compelled to write a few reflections about the benefits of being a historian while being on tour of the sites that ring this region. I say this in recognition that in the places visited, for reasons either historical or contemporary politics, the official spiel of the guides was carefully designed to provide a positive message about the place and one that would not offend the customers—in short something innocuous. Controversial topics should be either avoided or played down. A tourist was at a disadvantage if he had not sufficiently read relevant literature prior to the trip in order to deconstruct what he was hearing. I should state at the outset that this venture was not a study trip although three lecturers enhanced the experience.

Panel from the Panorama at Sevastopol

The guides provided a plethora of historical data, especially from more distant times, because I think it is safer. In the Ukraine we visited three locations: Odessa, Sevastopol and Yalta, and in Russia toured Sochi. Given that the publication of That Line of Darkness: The Gothic Spirit from Lenin to bin Laden, Encompass Editions, 2013 will soon be released, these places held considerable interest. A walking tour in Odessa of the area built in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century introduced Catherine the Great’s New Russia. Standing at the top of the famed Potemkin steps did evoke the famous massacre scene with the tumbling baby carriage from the 1925 classic Battleship Potemkin. We did hear that the city was named one of the “hero” cities because of its endurance during the shelling of Odessa during World War II when its citizens resisted the Romanians, the ally of Nazi Germany. But the material presented appeared sanitized and highly selective given that a sizable number of Ukrainians collaborated with the Romanians and most of the population spent the war safely evacuated to the east. In addition, the Romanians established control of the city and the region, and conducted a reign of terror against the Jews. For the full horror of this period, I would highly recommend chapters nine and eleven from Charles King’s excellent Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (2011). In Sevastopol, a brief mention was made of the resistance to the Romanians during the war but the primary focus was on something more distant—a Russian campaign during the eleven-month siege in 1854-55 during the Crimean War by Allied forces. A city highlight is a panoramic painting featuring four thousand human figures, three-dimensional relief models of defense fortifications and guns of a one-day successful attempt to repel an attack by British and French troops, an example of Russian courage and tenacity in the face of foreign aggression, although that sentiment was never overtly expressed. The stated message at the panorama was that a million died in this pointless war and nothing was accomplished. Not quite true since the Treaty of Paris established that no warships would be allowed to patrol the Black Sea, a provision that had the imprimatur of international law. (The Russian fleet's destruction of their Turkish counterpart prompted the British and the French to come to the support of the Ottomans because they feared that the Russian navy would seize control the Dardanelles and threaten western commerce.) None of this was mentioned by the guide. But her point about the human devastation from that war is well-taken. I am reminded of Clare Clark’s novel The Great Stink that features a traumatized veteran, an engineer who welcomes the opportunity to work on the construction of the sewer system because he hopes the work will help him to forget his ghastly Crimean War experience and yet he slashes his arms and thighs when he cannot maintain the routines of a “normal” life.

Reflections on Popular Fiction and Brain Research in the late Nineteenth Century

Periodically, I will be commentating on research books that came out after the publication of  That Line of Darkness: The Shadow of Dracula and the Great War, Encompass Editions, 2012. In this way, I and the reader can have an ongoing conversation about the book. 

Ferrier's detailed brain map of a dog

In 1881 the British physiologist, David Ferrier, went on trial for violating the Anti-Vivisection Act by performing experiments on two live monkeys without a permit. His defenders, principally neurologists, argued that the detailed cortical maps, that resulted from his experiments on the brains of animals and from autopsies, had saved lives of those who had suffered from brain tumors, strokes and cracked skulls because surgeons were now able to pinpoint the specific damaged tissue. His opponents, mainly middle-class women, contended that Ferrier’s experiments had caused unnecessary cruelty to animals. But the implications of his work caused greater consternation. If there were little distinction between the brains of human beings and animals – Ferrier made clear there was not – an electrical stimulus could be a substitute for human volition or consciousness and turn human beings into automata or soulless beings. Although the case eventually collapsed against Ferrier, the controversy lingered in the public memory and deeply affected the creative work of Gothic novelists who kept abreast of the latest scientific research. Among them were Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells and Bram Stoker, three of the subjects in Anne Stiles’ groundbreaking and stimulating monograph, Popular Fiction and Brain Research in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2012).