Hello everyone
At first glance, Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels are police procedurals set in the 1930s and 1940s.
There are murders and missing persons. There is a dogged detective, who has problems with authority, but who nonetheless heads out in a grubby raincoat and a battered hat onto rain-slicked streets and into smoke-filled rooms. But you soon realize that there’s another dimension and that these novels are a more profound inquiry into what it means to remain human when the world around is becoming barbaric.
Meet Bernie Gunther
The inhumanity and the moral wretchedness come from the location: Berlin. More specifically, Berlin when the Nazis are in power.
Bernie Gunther works as a police officer and a private eye (his role changes over the series). He is tasked with resolving crimes that range from petty theft, through bribery, to high-level state-sanctioned murder. He is undeniably flawed: a drinker, a chain-smoker, and haunted by personal failures and the shadow of his own past actions.
But for all his flaws, Gunther is defiantly not a Nazi.
flawed, but not a Nazi
The power of Kerr’s work lies in how it strips away the myth of the good guy hero to reveal a desperate struggle for survival.
Gunther’s internal moral compass rejects the repugnant National Socialist creed, yet he lives within its suffocating apparatus. This creates a perpetual state of anxiety where, to navigate this world, Gunther must demonstrate compliance while being repulsed by those who adhere to the ideology as a matter of spiritual purity or who treat the situation as an opportunity to further their own greed.
In this toxic ecosystem, neutrality is impossible; one must choose sides or be consumed.
Time and Place
Gunther operates within the Nazi machine—he understands something of the nature of the National Socialists and he chooses to remain. In modern parlance—and with modern sneering judgement—he is Nazi-adjacent and takes no action to lessen or remove that adjacency (for instance, by leaving the country).
Worse, even though he is not a party member, even though he works in plain-clothes, Gunther takes an SS rank because the Berlin criminal police have been absorbed into the SS apparatus.
Nonetheless, Gunther (and his adjacency) must be judged by what he knew at that time, not what we know now.
So, for instance, when in The Pale Criminal, which is set in 1938, Gunther is recruited to rejoin the police, he does not know that the future for Germany includes World War Two and the horrors of the Final Solution and The Holocaust. And while he realizes that the man who recruits him, Reinhard Heydrich, is a committed Nazi, Heydrich has yet to become one of the architects of the Final Solution.
Why do Nazis Like Gunther
In the context of the times, many of Gunther’s actions can be rationalized, if not fully condoned.
But why do the Nazis keep a non-believer in their inner circle? Why choose a man to solve their crimes who does not share their worldview?
The answer is coldly pragmatic: Gunther is tolerated—valued, even—because he is competent.
Reinhard Heydrich has no interest in ideological purity when he needs a problem solved; he wants results. Gunther’s stubborn, old-fashioned police instincts, his refusal to frame convenient suspects, his insistence on finding out what actually happened—qualities that would mark him as a dangerous nonconformist in any other context—make him invaluable to Heydrich, the rising man in the Nazi establishment.
usefulness is the only protection
In the Nazi world, usefulness is the only protection available to a man who does not believe.
The Question
What Kerr does, across this sprawling fourteen-novel canvas, is ask a tough question: what does a good man do when the system he inhabits will destroy him and everyone he loves at the first sign of genuine resistance?
To survive, Gunther kills and makes accommodations that sicken him. He looks away when looking away is the only alternative to dying. And then, he lives with his choices. The brilliance of Kerr’s construction is that Gunther never quite slides into either heroism or collaboration.
The novels are, in the end, a meditation on survival: its costs, its indignities, and its stubborn, irreducible worth.
Seek Out the Novels
If you haven’t come across Kerr and the Gunther novels, seek them out. Given that the series sequence does not follow chronological order, you can start anywhere, but I’d begin with the first published novel, March Violets.
Sadly, Kerr died in 2018 so there will be no further novels. However, a TV adaptation is currently being filmed.
That’s me for this month. I’ll be back in May.
Until then
All the best
Simon