Weimar and Nazi Germany in Contemporary German Historical Crime Fiction THOMA S W. KNIE SCHE Brow n Univ ersity In his seminal study From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (1992), Anton Kaes provided valuable insights into the «Politics of Representation» (3) and the culture of memory, culminating in the assertion that the «past is in danger of becoming a rapidly expanding collection of images […], available in an eternal present by pushing a button on the remote control. History thus returns forever - as film» (198). In this article, I would like to discuss yet another turn in the return of the repressed and the working of repetition compulsion or Wiederholungszwang: the return of history as crime fiction. Crime fiction by contemporary authors who use Weimar and Nazi Germany as the backdrop for their stories has been enjoying increasing popularity since the late 1980s. Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir trilogy, published right around German unification between 1989 and 1991, 1 was particularly successful. Other mystery authors writing in English about this particular part of the German past include J. Robert Janes, David Downing, Alan Furst, and Paul Grossman. In Germany too this variety of historical crime fiction represents a growing segment of the market. Bernhard Schlink’s first mystery novel, co-authored with Wolfgang Popp, about the Nazi past haunting the present and featuring Gerhard Selb, appeared already in 1987, and additional installments to the series were published in 1992 and 2001. Other authors such as Robert Hültner, Ulrich Ritzel, Bernward Schneider, Robert Brack, Gunnar Kunz, Uwe Klausner, Elisabeth Herrmann, Susanne Goga, Rainer Gross, Uta-Maria Heim, and Mechthild Borrmann followed Schlink’s lead and used Weimar or Nazi Germany as the setting for their crime stories, in some cases writing not just one novel but a whole series using the same protagonist(s) in every subsequent book. Given that the culture of memory is a complex phenomenon, that Erinnerungskultur or Geschichtskultur, Geschichtspolitik and Geschichtsbesessenheit come in many different forms and have found articulation in a variety of media, from public debates to history channels on TV, one could ask: Why write historical crime fiction about prefascist and fascist Germany? A preliminary response could offer three possible reasons. Weimar and Nazi Germany 117 First, crime fiction sells and history sells. So why not combine the two? This may sound trivial but, at least as an opening argument, it has some justification. For a sizable reading audience this combination is sufficient to make the genre more than palatable. Crime fiction is what people read, it can make history accessible in new ways and reach audiences which scholarly historiography or other media that talk about history do not normally reach. Also, one should not forget that a lot of German history, not just that of the 1920s through the 1940s, is being reworked, or, perhaps one should say, represented in historical crime fiction today. It has been argued that this trend, including novels that are set during the Weimar Republic, provide «a nostalgia for a time before the evils of Nazism» (Campbell 142). This may explain the mass appeal of this kind of writing. Secondly, and more specifically, framing the individual cases of crime (what can be called «small scale crime») within the larger context of Weimar and Nazi history inevitably refers to the criminal structures of society itself («large scale crime»); every criminal act that is committed in the context of right-wing or fascist activities refers the reader to the basic injustice of society and the political system as a whole. The reader is therefore confronted with the continuing challenge of how to deal with this past, a problem which Adorno had discussed in his essay on «Vergangenheitsbewältigung» (1959) and which Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich have called the «Inability to Mourn» (1967). Addressing those key twentieth-century issues could be called the «didactic» dimension of historical crime fiction writing. An excellent example that displays this double reference to microand macro-style crime is provided by the title of Volker Kutscher’s fourth novel of his Berlin series, the first of which I will discuss in some detail below. The title of the fourth «case» is Die Akte Vaterland (2012). The «case file» is named after the crime scene of a murder, the «Vergnügungspalast» «Kempinski Haus Vaterland,» a pleasure palace on Potsdamer Platz that existed from 1928 to 1943. However, the title also resonates with the implication that «Vaterland» is not only the setting for the specific murder under investigation in the novel but for a much larger crime for which the case file has never been closed. Thirdly, historical crime fiction set in the 1920s to the 1940s depicts crime within a criminal society where the understanding of what crime is becomes itself problematic. A crime by definition is an antisocial or anti-civilized act. In a society that is itself undergoing a process of decivilization (as in prefascist and fascist Germany), the concept of «crime» itself becomes a problem. The clearest indication of that in historical crime fiction are upright (nonor anti-fascist) policemen who start to doubt what they are doing, who no longer know what their role in society is. The very notion of a civilized society, 118 Thomas W. Kniesche of social stability, of what it takes to destabilize and to defend the civil order is at stake here. When historical crime fiction is read in this light, the focus is on the social and political dimensions. 2 Given the abundance of crime fiction writing about the Weimar and Nazi past, a number of further questions could be asked: Does historical crime fiction contribute to our knowledge of the Weimar and Nazi past? How does historical crime fiction compare to the historiography of this historical period? Does historical crime fiction provide something that historiography cannot? Can historical crime fiction enhance our understanding of the past? Volker Kutscher’s Der nasse Fisch (2007), Christian von Ditfurth’s Mann ohne Makel (2002), and Andrea Maria Schenkel’s Kalteis (2007) more or less implicitly claim that the historiography of Weimar and Nazi Germany is in some way deficient, that it needs to be complemented - and that historical crime fiction is the medium to do that. However, this rhetoric of deficiency needs to be examined within the wider contexts of recent developments in historiography and contemporary scholarship on the historical novel. In turning to the three novels just mentioned, I will in each case first indicate the specific subgenre of historical crime fiction to which the novel belongs. After briefly summarizing the contents of each respective novel, I will point out in which way it tries to demonstrate how the historiography of the Weimar and Nazi period becomes problematic and needs to be complemented. This will establish how the rhetoric of deficiency works in these texts. Finally, I will examine briefly how these texts relate to the paradigm of Alltagsgeschichte (history of everyday life) and where they should be located within the continuum of contemporary historical fiction between the documentary historical novel and historiographic metafiction. This classification will show to which extent the novels under consideration here can actually contribute something new to our understanding of the past and how we conceptualize reconstructions of that past. As a «history from below» (Eley ix), Alltagsgeschichte has been called «a radically new paradigm of social historical research» coming out of Germany (Crew 395). By focusing on the everyday experience of ordinary people, Alltagsgeschichte has introduced a new critical perspective into historiography. The historical crime novels under consideration here mirror this point of view from below: they feature protagonists and minor characters belonging to the middle class and the lower strata of society. The stories of these fictional characters are embedded in broader historical contexts, such as the period immediately preceding the Great Depression in 1929, rape and serial killings in the early and late 1930s, and the Nazi «Aryanization» of Jewish property during the 1940s, but the focus is always on the everyday life of these ordinary people. While it is true that Alltagsgeschichte has been ac- Weimar and Nazi Germany 119 cused of participating in mythologizing German suffering during World War II by avoiding contextualizing and analyzing the stories of ordinary people within a critical and theoretical framework (Crew 402), the analytical potential of Alltagsgeschichte cannot be overlooked. It has made major contributions to criticizing the tendencies of traditional historiographies to create master narratives that claim to fully explain history’s complexities and to provide closure to intricate questions and moral dilemmas. 3 On the level of narrative analysis of historical crime fiction, these concerns are addressed by examining where the novels under consideration here should be placed in the continuum of historical fiction between traditional historical novel writing with its claim to give fictional and entertaining accounts of what really happened in history, and, to invoke the other extreme, the critical and self-reflexive stance of historiographic metafiction, in which the very possibility of knowing what happened in history is put into question. 4 Volker Kutscher has written five novels revolving around his protagonist, Kommissar Gereon Rath. Kutscher’s novels are each between five and six hundred pages long and span a narrated time of only a few months, respectively. Each novel ends with the URL «www.gereonrath.de.» This reference can be interpreted as a signature to each novel and encourages readers to visit the website where they will not only find information about the author and his other books but also a wealth of historical and critical sources for his writing. In other words, the website does not only advertise, it is also meant to prove that an enormous amount of historical research has gone into writing these novels. The author thus tries to show that he has done his historical homework, referring the reader to novels such as Alfred Döblin’s Berlin, Alexanderplatz or Erich Kästner’s Fabian, movies such as Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin - Die Sinfonie der Großstadt or Fritz Lang’s M, and to relevant web links, museums, biographies, documentaries, and historical research. In short, the author claims to have looked at everything literature, popular culture, and historiography has to offer on the period he is using as the setting for his novels. Assuming thus a position of knowledge, the author can then proceed to provide that which has been left out, which has either not been covered at all by the historical record or which has not been exposed appropriately and forcefully enough. We shall see below what that might be in the case of the Gereon Rath novels. These novels belong to what John Scaggs has called «straight» historical crime fiction, that is, «crime fiction that is set entirely in some particular historical period, but which was not written during that period» (125) or what Achim Saupe has described as a «historischer Kriminalroman» or 120 Thomas W. Kniesche «historischer Thriller» where both the «Aufklärungsgeschichte» and the «Verbrechensgeschichte» are set in the past (267-70). As is often the case in historical fiction, the fictional story of the novel is embedded into authentic events and the fictional characters join historical personalities such as the charismatic director of the Berlin Mordkommission, Kriminalrat Ernst Gennat, or the vice president of police, Dr. Bernhard Weiß. The fact that Weiß was Jewish plays a major role in the novel, for example when one of Rath’s colleagues, who has just left the police force to concentrate on a writing career, complains to his readers about the «Verjudung des Polizeiapparats» (Kutscher, Der nasse Fisch 292). The first novel in the series, Der nasse Fisch, introduces the protagonist Gereon Rath, a provincial police officer who has just been transferred to Berlin. Each of the three parts of the novel is provided with exact dates spanning the period from 28 April to 21 June 1929, thus creating a sense of historical accuracy and reliability. Rath experiences the street fighting in communist neighborhoods called the «Blutmai» of 1929. The political atmosphere of the time is captured in great detail and the antagonism between the police and the communist masses in the Arbeiterviertel of Berlin is given much attention in the opening chapters. In addition, throughout the novel the different social backgrounds of the police officers, their various political connections and shifting loyalties are constantly brought up, so that the influence of the political parties, the military, the Reichswehr, and of such groups and organizations as the SA, the Stahlhelm and others on the supposedly apolitical police force becomes obvious. The story is narrated from the point of view of Gereon Rath in free indirect discourse, but includes passages told by an omniscient narrator and long stretches of dialogue. In Genette’s terms, the narrative oscillates between zero focalization and internal focalization. Rath’s position as the focalizer in the story is rendered problematic when he himself becomes involved in criminal acts. He exchanges favors with one of the bosses of a «Ringverein» - a criminal organization in Berlin - and accidentally kills a suspect which he then covers up. As it turns out in the end, the numerous murders and widespread machinations that comprise the story of the novel are all related to a scheme concocted by corrupt police officers and members of the military to use an intercepted shipment of gold smuggled out of Soviet Russia to arm right-wing paramilitary groups such as «Stahlhelm, Scharnhorstbund, Wiking und wie sie alle heißen» and also the SA (Kutscher, Der nasse Fisch 541). A journalist, with whom Rath discusses the case at the end, claims that those paramilitary groups, «supported by the military and financed by the arms industry,» Weimar and Nazi Germany 121 would then train their members as future combatants and provide the armed forces with enough personnel for the next war. This brings us to the question of how historical crime fiction complements historiography, how (relatively) small scale crime in fictional form reflects historical events that can be called criminal in the sense of destabilizing the social and political order and, ultimately, in the case of Germany, the civic order itself. At the conclusion of the novel, the involvement of the masterminds of the plan to provide the SA and other right-wing groups with arms from the police force and the military, two police officers who are members of the Stahlhelm, and a Reichswehr general, is swept under the carpet - for political reasons. Gereon Rath is disgusted by this turn of events which he calls a farce - he actually uses the far more accusatory term «Schmierenkomödie» (Kutscher, Der nasse Fisch 542) - and decides to publish his own account of what happened. So Rath writes everything down - «[d]ie ganze Geschichte» - from the point of view of the SA-Mann Schäffner, a minor player who didn’t know what was really happening (538), and gives this account to his friend, the journalist Weinert. In writing down «what really happened,» Rath’s act mirrors the writing of the novel itself. The fictional character becomes an author and the real author turns into a historian. If the official account of events is a «Schmierenkomödie,» then only Kommissar Rath knows the whole truth. By writing a semi-fictional account of the whole story, which he then gives to a journalist who will supposedly publish the truth, he refers to the writing of the novel itself. Historiography has been compromised, it has been manipulated for political reasons, and only the historical novel presents what has really happened. While what I have called the rhetoric of deficiency, the notion that not all aspects of everyday life and the history of institutions (in Kutscher’s case, the police force) have become part of collective memory, does apply, the underlying trust in the possibility of historical knowledge and the belief that it is achievable to get it right, to arrive at a correct and comprehensive historical account, is not being revoked. In Der nasse Fisch (and the other novels of the series) Kutscher offers a complement to the historiography of prefascist and fascist Germany with a didactic turn. The readers are supposed to learn more about this period than historical scholarship can provide. The narrative elements and structures of the novel remain within the boundaries of the «realistic historical novel» (Ansgar Nünning 262-67), though. The fact that the police detective and protagonist engages in various illegal activities does not render him an unreliable focalizer. With the possible exception of Rath’s authorship of a counterhistorical narrative, the novel does not feature any metafictional elements or other indicators that would foreground the 122 Thomas W. Kniesche epistemological and ontological complexities of historical knowledge. His story of what really happened, written from the point of view of a simple man, mirrors the efforts of Alltagsgeschichte to provide a view on history from below. 5 Christian von Ditfurth’s novels featuring Josef Maria Stachelmann also comprise a series of - so far - six cases, published between 2002 and 2011. Unlike Kutscher’s novels, however, von Ditfurth’s Stachelmann mysteries reveal crimes committed in the present as a consequence of criminal activities in the past. This type of historical crime novel has been called «transhistorical crime fiction» in which «a contemporary detective [is] investigating an incident in the more or less remote, rather than very recent, past» (Scaggs 125). This variety has also been labeled «retrospektiver historischer Ermittlungsroman» (Saupe 292) and has been deemed of particular interest because of its closeness to postmodern fiction and because it shows the proximity of the detective and the historian (Vera Nünning 14). A number of very popular novels written by German contemporary authors such as Bernhard Schlink, Mechthild Borrmann, Rainer Gross, and Elisabeth Herrmann fall into this category. Whereas Volker Kutscher’s first Gereon Rath novel is set in Weimar Germany, Stachelmann’s first case is concerned with the Nazi past. What makes the Stachelmann novels particularly interesting is the fact that the protagonist is a historian. Josef Maria Stachelmann, ailing from several organic and mental afflictions, is not only a classic antihero, he is also dissatisfied with his job performance and disillusioned with his profession. Although he investigates his first case with the help of a former friend who is now a Kommissar with the Kripo in Hamburg, it is Stachelmann who will ultimately solve it, not without risking his own life in the process. Since one of the detectives in this novel is a historian, the reader is introduced to the world of academic historiography in Germany, with its petty rivalries among faculty members, their pecking orders, their exhibitionism, with mostly indifferent and sometimes hysterical students («Alicia»), but also with the pressure on young scholars to position themselves in the field and to produce cutting-edge research. 6 With elements of the police procedural, the thriller, and the campus novel, this historical crime novel belongs to one of the hybrid genres so typical for contemporary fiction. The plot of the novel contains two related story lines. On the one hand, an unknown killer is murdering the family members of a prominent and popular Hamburg real estate magnate (the «Mann ohne Makel» of the title). On the other hand, somebody is assassinating everybody who seems to acquire too much knowledge about the past of the victim’s family. The identity of Weimar and Nazi Germany 123 the serial killer can be deduced by the reader rather early in the novel: He is a Jewish survivor who was on a Kindertransport and who kills the descendants of a high SS-officer who was responsible for the deportation of his parents. The identity of the second killer is a surprise and is only revealed at the end, though. All the killings that take place in the present are related to events that happened during the Nazi reign in Hamburg, and it takes a historian-as-detective to uncover them. And what Stachelmann uncovers in the course of his historical investigation is this: a group of SS-men in Hamburg, a «Nazi-Mafia» (von Ditfurth 372) had pursued their own kind of «Aryanization,» or, as Stachelmann puts it, «was Historiker später als wilde Arisierung bezeichneten» (268). Instead of turning over their Jewish victims’ property to the government, they stole it for themselves, thus enriching themselves at the cost of the state. Although the tax authorities protested against this kind of chicanery, the SS-officers prevailed because they were well connected among the upper echelons of the Nazi state. In the course of his investigation, Stachelmann visits the German Federal Archives in Berlin and breaks into a copy center where he finds letters pertaining to his case. One of the letters, dated July 1941, spells out how the SS-members of the «Nazi-Mafia» were able to hold on to their spoils: Die betreffenden Erwerbungen der verdienten Kameraden sind rechtlich nicht zu beanstanden. In dieser heldenhaften Zeit, in der die Schutzstaffel unermesslichen Herausforderungen im Kampf gegen unsere Feinde im Äußeren wie im Innern ausgesetzt ist, grenzt es an Wehrkraftzersetzung, dieses überflüssige und ehrabschneidende Verfahren weiter zu betreiben. Der RF-SS hat zugesichert, die Sache dem Reichsfinanzminister vorzutragen. Außerdem wurde die Stapo-Leitstelle Hamburg angewiesen, auf die dortigen Finanzbehörden einzuwirken. (296, italics in the original) This quote, clothed in Nazi jargon and containing several threats against those who want to uphold the law (which was itself already a manifestation of racism and a step towards the upcoming genocide), demonstrates what I discussed earlier: relatively small scale crime reflects the criminal foundations of society as a whole, and, in this case, crime is no longer punished but is part of the breakdown of the civic order itself when even Nazi Germany’s own laws are subverted and become meaningless. What is the role of crime fiction vis-à-vis historiography here? Not only is the protagonist a disenchanted and disillusioned historian who has lost faith in his academic field; in the course of his research he also discovers that the tax files on «wilde Arisierung» were never published. This, in turn, hampered historical research: 124 Thomas W. Kniesche Die Forschung kam nicht so recht voran, auch weil der Bundestag 1988 die Schutzfrist für Finanzamtsakten verlängert hatte. Sonst wäre der braune Morast aus den Kellern der Finanzverwaltung auf die Straße gequollen. Vielen war die Erkenntnis unerträglich, dass die Besitztümer der Juden nicht in deutschem Namen geraubt wurden, sondern von deutschen Finanzämtern, wie das Recht es befahl. Es war der kleine graue Beamte, der nichts als seine Pflicht tat, vor 1945 und danach. (von Ditfurth 268) The continuity of «before 1945 und afterwards,» compounded by legislation enacted as late as 1988 made it impossible for historical research to do its job. The realization that «[d]as Recht,» the law itself, was not only complicit, but that it was instrumental in robbing the Jews of their property was unbearable, intolerable, insufferable («unerträglich»). It would have been precisely the result of a scholarly endeavor, an insight or recognition («Erkenntnis») that would have uncovered what was «unerträglich.» Under such circumstances, historical scholarship becomes impossible. There remains only one thing to do: write a historical novel. And as if this strategy or act of writing needs some kind of reaffirmation or signature, the author ends the novel with «Nachbemerkungen» in which he not only thanks his collaborators but he also adds this final remark: «Natürlich habe ich die Personen und Ereignisse in diesem Buch erfunden, sofern sie nicht zeitgeschichtlich verbürgt sind. Das wäre vielleicht nicht nötig gewesen, wenn alle deutschen Finanzämter ihre Akten aus der Zeit des Dritten Reiches offen gelegt hätten» (von Ditfurth 381). What Gerard Genette has called «paratexts» are just as important in von Ditfurth’s novel as in Kutscher’s Der nasse Fisch (and, as will be shown below, in Andrea Maria Schenkel’s Kalteis). In his afterword, von Ditfurth claims that he had to invent a story because certain files have never been made public. If that is the case, however, historians are powerless. Time and again the fictional historian Josef Maria Stachelmann asserts that access to historical documents is essential for finding the truth: «In den Akten lagen Wahrheiten. Nicht immer in Reinform, aber wozu war er Historiker, wenn er nicht Wahrheiten aus Papier herausfiltern konnte? » (von Ditfurth 343). To extricate truth from documents is the trade of the historian. But if that fails because the documents are not available, only the writer of novels can provide historical truth. To prove his point, von Ditfurth applies a threefold textual strategy. First, he uses paratexts to employ extraliterary evidence: certain files have never been made available by the authorities after the war, so historians are helpless. Secondly, Stachelmann is used intradiegetically as a focalizer to reflect on this reality when his thoughts about the action of the German parliament are presented as evidence for the coverup. And, thirdly, after Stachelmann had obtained copies of letters show- Weimar and Nazi Germany 125 ing the involvement of some of the suspects he is after, a copy center where these documents are processed burns down and a substantial part of the archival evidence is destroyed. Later, Stachelmann receives a letter from the Bundesarchiv, telling him that «Wir müssen davon ausgehen, dass es von den meisten verbrannten Akten keine Kopien gibt» (317). Thus, by extraand intradiegetic narrative techniques, the novel drives home von Ditfurth’s point. Only the historical (crime) novel can provide us with a full picture of the past. With its strong referentiality concerning historical events and historiography, its constant shifting between the present and the past, and, most of all, by featuring a disillusioned historian as protagonist, Der Mann ohne Makel is an example of «revisionistischer historischer Roman» (Ansgar Nünning 268-76). In this novel, the feasibility and reliability of historical research are constantly challenged. By using a professional historian as focalizer and protagonist, the author questions the viability of historiography as such, without, however, taking the ultimate step of condemning history as an academic discipline that is useless. The final word on Stachelmann’s profession will remain ambivalent, though. In the following novels, he will succeed in finishing his Habilitationsschrift on the concentration camp Buchenwald, but eventually he will give up his academic career and will become a private investigator specializing in historical cases (at the end of the fourth novel of the series). This can be interpreted as saying that while historiography as such may not be a pointless undertaking, our knowledge of the reign of National Socialism in Germany and our ability to understand the Holocaust will remain problematic. After the bestselling and critically acclaimed Tannöd (2006), with which the author had exploded onto the scene of German crime fiction, Kalteis (2007) was Andrea Maria Schenkel’s second novel. Kalteis tells the story of a serial killer who committed his crimes between 1931 and 1939. Although Kalteis is another example of «straight» historical crime fiction, it differs from the previously discussed texts as it spans the last years of the Weimar Republic and the first six years of the Third Reich. The story is presented from a multitude of perspectives and remains within the temporal framework of the narrated past - with one important paratextual exception which I will discuss below. Katharina Hertl («Kathie»), the victim whose story unfolds in the course of the novel, resembles the heroine of Irmgard Keun’s Das kunstseidene Mädchen (1932), who comes from the provinces and fantasizes about making it in the big city (Boa). This dream goes horribly wrong, however, and Kathie becomes one more casualty in a long list of young women who attract the killer’s attention. 126 Thomas W. Kniesche The novel starts with the end. In a secret court memo («Aktennotiz») dated 29 October 1939, an anonymous bureaucrat decrees that the culprit Josef Kalteis is to be executed without delay. In Nazi terminology, Kalteis falls under the category of «Volksschädlinge,» but he is also a German, an Aryan, and a member of the Nazi party. The circumstances of his crimes and all files and reports about the case have to be kept out of the public view. This is to insure that neither the reputation of his place of residence - Munich, «die Wiege der Bewegung» - nor the good name of the party or the Nazi movement as a whole be damaged. Since «Verbrechen dieser Art» could only thrive on the «maroden Nährboden» of the decadent Weimar Republic, this proves that «[d]ie Demokratie, ein Krebsgeschwür» was «eine Brutstätte asozialer Elemente.» In the new Germany, this cannot be tolerated: «Die deutsche Volksgemeinschaft ist gesund und soll auch weiterhin gesund bleiben» (Schenkel, Kalteis 5). Although we don’t even know at this point what crime or crimes the perpetrator was convicted of, the rhetoric of Nazi biopolitics reveals what is at stake. Whatever has happened must under no circumstances become known to the public because it would undermine the regime’s claim of building a better Germany. The first scene of the novel is a masterpiece of narrative discourse. While Kalteis is waiting in his cell for the executioners to collect him time seems to freeze, 7 although several hours go by on just a few pages. His thoughts, his fear and inner emptiness, are narrated in free indirect speech, thus revealing his consciousness during the last hours of his life while the third-person narration subtly indicates that he is the helpless object of the proceedings. After his execution by guillotine, a short and laconic passage states that it took only seventeen seconds to put him to death. The disparity between the timelessness of Kalteis’s last hours and the swiftness with which he is dispatched to his death demonstrates the stark contrast between the terrified individual’s last moments of life and the urgency with which the authorities want to get rid of him. This urgency is borne out by the nature of his crimes. He was a serial killer who raped, killed, and mutilated young women. 8 The existence of such an individual among the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft is a scandalon in the original sense of the word: that which cannot be acknowledged because it represents a stumbling block or, in biblical Greek, a temptation from which the community must be protected. What comes to the forefront here is once again how the crimes of an individual reflect the crimes of the society at large. A rapist and serial killer amongst their midst presents the Nazi authorities with a serious problem. Whereas such individuals were supposedly thriving in decadent democracies, they have no place in Nazi Germany. Reality was, Weimar and Nazi Germany 127 of course, quite different. What is important, though, is that the individual serial killer is just mirroring the true nature of the Nazi regime itself, thus the need for secrecy in dealing with the case. The fact that Josef Kalteis is a «true» German and a member of the Nazi party underlines the parallel. Kalteis, with his pleonastic name, embodies the essence of National Socialism as a death cult, its utterly cold disregard for human life and dignity. Kalteis is different from both Der nasse Fisch and Mann ohne Makel since the focus is not on the process of digging up the past, on teaching us about parts of German history that were either not known at all or not represented appropriately enough in collective memory. Notorious German serial killers of the 1920s and 30s are well represented in public discourse even today - from Fritz Haarmann to Peter Kürten and beyond. Just adding another case to the list could hardly have been the point of writing this novel (although it certainly profited from our fascination with the topic). If the novel does not subscribe to the rhetoric of deficiency, that is, if its main purpose does not consist in filling in gaps in our historical knowledge, what, then, does Kalteis contribute to our understanding of the past? Andrea Maria Schenkel attached a list of sources at the end of the novel, among them a doctoral dissertation on the case of a «Sittlichkeitsverbrecher» (published in 1942) and a historical study entitled Die Bestien des Boulevards: Die Deutschen und ihre Serienmörder. The fictional character of Kalteis is based on that of Josef Eichhorn, whose case is discussed in this book (Boa 356). Her main sources, however, are collections of police reports and interrogation records («Vernehmungsprotokolle») of the case featured in her novel or similar cases (Schenkel, Kalteis 187). The list of sources is a paratext showing that Kalteis is a semi-documentary novel in which the author combines authentic material with fictional accounts. The effects of this kind of literary structuring of previously available material are profound. The constantly changing points of view and the montage of historical material with fictional passages in first-person direct speech and third-person free indirect discourse produce a chilling account of violence against women and how it is covered up by a regime that is itself fundamentally violent. The main focus in Kalteis is on the process of remembering and reconstructing the past. By presenting a multitude of accounts in a non-chronological order, this process is shown as fragmented and discontinuous. The question is not what happened (this is told at the beginning of the novel), but how we can know about it. The justice system of the Nazi state is satisfied with platitudes that merely confirm its preconceived notions of democracy’s shortcomings and Nazi racial purity. Going beyond such dogmatism requires a fundamentally different approach. The structuring of the novel implies that only a textual ren- 128 Thomas W. Kniesche dering that mirrors the fragmented bodies of the serial killer’s victims can arrive at a meaningful alternative to dogmatic historical accounts. As a «metahistorischer Roman» (Ansgar Nünning 276-81), 9 Kalteis is not so much concerned with what happened but rather with how to narrate the past. The three novels discussed here offer a continuation of Alltagsgeschichte as historical crime fiction (as opposed to historical scholarship). While they have in common a view on history from below, they differ substantially in their underlying notions of the reliability of historical knowledge. Both Kutscher’s Der nasse Fisch and von Ditfurth’s Mann ohne Makel claim to fill in gaps in historiography and collective memory, but they do not doubt the viability of historical knowledge as such. Kutscher’s Der nasse Fisch is a historical police procedural that shows how a democratic institution that is charged with protecting the public and defending the civic order is attacked from outside and undermined from within. The novel is based on the premise that the official records (about corrupt police officers in late 1920s Berlin) were falsified; therefore, historiography lacks the sources it depends on. Christian von Ditfurth’s Mann ohne Makel tries to demonstrate that, since certain official records were lost or suppressed, only the writing of a historical novel can educate the public about an important aspect of the Nazi past. Andrea Maria Schenkel’s Kalteis, however, foregrounds the process of remembering and reconstructing the past itself. The structuring of the text and the literary techniques the author employs encourage readers to question the very concept of historical knowledge. Historiography itself becomes a casualty - just as the victims of the Nazi serial killer. Looking at the range of critical positions these three historical novels submit, it should have become clear that they make valuable contributions to our understanding of Weimar and Nazi Germany, not only by complementing our knowledge of these historical periods but also by reflecting on the methods and theoretical underpinnings of historiography. Historical crime fiction thus manifests a certain skepticism about historical truth and contributes to undermining a belief in the possibility of knowing «how it really was.» Notes 1 The series was expanded by six more «Bernie Gunther» novels, published between 2006 and 2013. The fact that the initial three novels were published at the time of German unification was probably no coincidence but this issue cannot be discussed in detail here. 2 These three criteria can also be used to discuss the quality of historical crime fiction representing the Weimar and Nazi past. Authors and texts to which only the first Weimar and Nazi Germany 129 point applies count on the mass appeal of crime fiction and the German history boom but do not provide any kind of critical reflection on this history and how we deal with it. Writers who include issues addressed by the other two criteria should be considered of a higher caliber and their novels of higher literary quality. This is an aspect of historical crime fiction that cannot be further examined here. 3 Although Alltagsgeschichte had been declared dead by the mid-1990s, it continues to provoke discussions among historians and has, at least according to some scholars, «entered the mainstream of historical writing» (Steege et al. 377). 4 The «continuum» or typology of historical fiction is described in Ansgar Nünning 256-91. I can only provide a very brief overview of this fascinating topic here. The question of how historical crime fiction relates to the various modes of historical fiction writing merits a much more detailed and in-depth study that cannot be undertaken within the limited space of this article. 5 In a review of Kutscher’s most recent Rath novel, Märzgefallene (2014), the function of the novel as a complement to historiography (here in the form of «Geschichtsunterricht») and the focus on «Alltag» are stressed: In this novel «bekommt man beiläufig etwas mit, das der Geschichtsunterricht selten vermittelt hat, ganz gleich, wie oft die NS-Zeit auf dem Lehrplan stand: ein Gefühl dafür, wie sich die Machtergreifung im Alltag vollzog und auf das Denken und Reden der Menschen auswirkte» (Schaaf 49). 6 Christian von Ditfurth was himself trained as a historian. 7 In a podcast interview from 2007, the author discussed this effect and claimed that she wrote the novel just because of the first scene (Schenkel, «Podcast-Interview»). 8 One is reminded of Fritz Lang’s famed movie M, eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder (1931), but there are also important differences between the movie and the novel. 9 Ansgar Nünning discusses the structural similarities between the detective novel and the metahistorical novel. With its revelation of the identity of the perpetrator at the beginning, Kalteis does not strictly adhere to the pattern of the traditional detective story, but Schenkel’s novel does feature «mindestens zwei ausgestaltete Zeit- und Erzählungsebenen» (277), the decisive structural characteristics of both genres. Works Cited Boa, Elizabeth. «Warring Pleasures and their Price: Sex in the City in Irmgard Keun’s Das kunstseidene Mädchen and Andrea Maria Schenkel’s Kalteis.» German Life and Letters 62.3 (2009): 343-58. Campbell, Bruce B. «Justice and Genre: The Krimi as a Site of Memory in Contemporary Germany.» Detectives, Dystopias, and Poplit: Studies in Modern German Genre Fiction. Ed. Bruce B. Campbell, Alison Guenther-Pal and Vibeke Rützou Petersen. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014. 133-51. Crew, David F. «Alltagsgeschichte: A New Social History ‹From Below›? » Central European History 22.3/ 4 (1989): 394-407. Ditfurth, Christian von. Mann ohne Makel. Stachelmanns erster Fall. 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