This book was off to a good start with me based on the synopsis alone - I love fiction based either during or after the second world war, so in that sense, that was a star earned from the start.However, it turns out that this is a really excellent, cleverly written book.It tells the story of Jake Geismar, an American journalist who, in the years before the war, was based in Berlin, and in that time had an affair with the wife of a German rocket scientist. After the end of the war in Europe, he comes back, officially to cover the Potsdam Conference, but really to find his pre war lover. Whilst at Potsdam, he sees the discovery of the body of an American officer, dragged out of the river whilst carrying a huge amount of money.This leads into a multithreaded story involving him tracking down what happened to the soldier whilst trying to find his pre-war lover, whose husband turns out not to be dead as first thought, but to be very much alive, and wanted by both the Russian and American forces.This book is much more than that, though. The bigger question it poses - hinted at by the title - is that of what constituted a "good" German in the days immediately following the war, and who got to decide exactly what "good" meant?We have the subplot of a jewish woman on trial by the occupation forces for having acted as a "greifer" - a Jew who guaranteed her own survival so long as she identified "U boats", jews hiding from deportation by walking around Berlin all day. At first, we are to think that she deserves all she gets, but as the story pans out, we start to question whether she was really guilty of anything more than other Germans - or indeed Americans and Russians - in the story.We have the rocket scientist who, despite being non political, could be seen as complicit in the use of slave labour at Nordhausen. Then there is the friend of Geismar's lover, who was happy to pander to Nazis and is equally happy to pander to the occupation forces just to survive.There is the lone US lawyer, a Jew dilligently chasing down those guilty of war crimes, working for an administration which doesn't really care about finding the small cogs in the machine who have blood on their hands. The US politician whose only concern is to find the rocket scientists to get them back to the US to exploit their huge knowledge.In all this, who is "good" and who is "bad"? That is what this book is about, and it asks the question very eloquently,A very intelligent, well written, highly readable book.
Great story, beautifully told. It presents a very sophisticated and nuanced view of German war guilt and the things people did to survive under the Nazis. The descriptions of Berlin in the summer of 1945 are so atmospheric it's like being there. They made me nostalgic: I was there in the summer of 1958 when there was still a lot of war damage. It's probably the most exciting city I've ever been in, maybe because it was still quite dangerous then, with soldiers pointing rifles at anyone who approached the center of the street that marked the border between East and West Berlin where The Wall was built a couple of years later. We exchanged marks on the black market, spending them on cameras, art books, and theaters. Our head professor and poli sci professor escorted a group of us 63 American college students and got a bunch of new gray hairs. They showed us the city including a massive war memorial to the Russian soldier (in the Russian sector of course), the Brandenburg gate and Checkpoint Charlie, a refugee camp, the Voice of America studio, the Free University, etc. We went to a night club called The Eggshell in a basement. We could ride the train into East Berlin (one girl got turned around and had a very hard, scary time getting back), where we saw the 15-or-so-story buildings, one room thick, with weed-filled vacant lots behind, and only two or three big black limos on the street. In the American sector, construction was going on 24/7 and the streets were packed with vehicles.Anyway, this book brought it all back and then some; most of the time while reading it I could have thought it was fact, not fiction. Plenty of plot twists and a very satisfying ending. Please pardon my rambling!
What do You think about The Good German (2006)?
I have to admit, I did not finish this book which is unusual for me. I got 2/3 of the way through and couldn't go on. There was really nothing that kept me wanting to come back to see what was happening I think primarily because there was little character development so I couldn't identify or really like any of the characters. However, there were many characters! So many that I wish I had taken notes at the beginning of the book. A murder takes place within the first chapter but I really could not develop an interest to see who the murderer was so I had to abandon the book after much struggling to continue. I think I'll just watch the movie - ha!
—Margaretanne
Kanon can just flat out write. It's that simple. But for better or worse, I put off reading this one after being severely disappointed by the movie version. Bad mistake on my part, and I've finally fixed it after getting enough nudges from friends who know how much I like Kanon's previous work. So now that I've read it? Great story, great narrative, great pacing, great setting. Yes, there is a pattern there. Dialogue is about the only area where he doesn't excel, but it's not as if the lines spoken are all clunkers, or anything. And Kanon can set a scene and evoke a setting as well as anyone writing today. Still, I was disappointed in the end by the ultimate motivations of the murderer (too prosaic for my tastes) and I was hoping for a plot twist involving the female lead.
—Jim
This is a noir novel about an American reporter, Jake, who, during WWII, gets out of Germany just in time. When the war (against Germany) is over, he returns to Berlin to cover the talks between Truman, Churchill and Stalin. But he is really searching for his lover, a German woman he left behind.He finds her, ill and near death. But that isn't the real story. As he's covering the conference, a dead soldier is pulled from the water. An American who'd been on the plane with Jake and who now has a bullet hole through his head. Everyone--Russians and Americans--tries to cover up the murder, but Jake won't let it go. With the help of a German ex-policeman who has his own horrible war story, he follows up clue after clue, trying to figure out what happened and why the soldier is dead.As Jake picks his way through the shattered city, his memories of the way it was before the war show us the toll of the Allies' bombardment. All the way through, he constantly compares and contrasts streets, cities, vistas, people.In the end, he finds out what's going on. And we are drawn to mourn the damage one warped dictator can wreak against an entire race and an entire country.Great read.
—Cheryl
