A German Requiem

Philip Kerr

3 ideas

1. Bernie Gunther's failed defense of Becker

   In 1947, ex-detective Bernie Gunther, back from a Soviet POW camp, is paid by a Soviet officer to go to occupied Vienna and try to clear his former police colleague Emil Becker, a black-marketeer charged with murdering American officer Captain Linden. Gunther traces the killing to a network of SS veterans who helped wanted Nazis fake their deaths and escape, which American intelligence was quietly shielding, but Becker is hanged before Gunther can save him.

2. Cold War intelligence recycled Nazi perpetrators

   The book argues that denazification was undercut as soon as the Western Allies valued anti-Soviet intelligence more than justice. Former SS and Gestapo men became assets because they held networks and knowledge about the East. The occupiers therefore had an interest in protecting the people they were officially hunting.

3. Scarcity turns morality into currency

   The novel shows ruined Berlin and Vienna as economies where cigarettes, penicillin, papers and bodies are traded. Ordinary people make small compromises to survive, such as a wife fraternizing with American soldiers for goods. Read this way, collaboration and corruption in the occupation look like rational responses to the incentives of scarcity rather than exceptional villainy.

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