Berlin Noir

In this seminar we will read and discuss two detective novels set in Berlin in the late 1930s. Our first novel, Goldstein, by German author Volker Kutscher, features Berlin Police Inspector Gereon Rath in 1931, before Hitler was legally appointed as chancellor and proceeded to turn Germany into a dictatorship in 1933. (Babylon Berlin on Netflix covers the first two in Kutscher’s translated series.) Rath “babysits” a Jewish-American gangster named Goldstein who is a tourist in Berlin amidst Communist and Nazi street brawls, competing organized crime rings, and a series of murders. Our second novel, March Violets, by Scottish fiction writer Phillip Kerr, is set in 1936, when Hitler and his totalitarian apostles are sponsoring the Summer Olympics while quietly building up armaments to launch WWII. Kerr’s protagonist, Bernie Gunther, a former Berlin cop turned private eye who is hired to retrieve a stolen diamond necklace, is plunged into a milieu of organized crime and power struggle between Gӧring and Himmler.