A German Triple Play: Sascha Arango, Anna Maria Schenkel, and Nina George.
Davis, J. Madison
Although the impact of German culture on America is enormous in
education, food, social practices, and many other aspects, only
occasionally have German crime writers made a big splash in American
publishing. In the 1960s, for example, Hans Hellmut Kirst's The
Night of the Generals became a best-seller in translation and was made
into an exceptional movie starring Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif.
Yet this seemed to cause no vogue in German translation and did not pull
even Kirst's other books in its wake. Similarly, Nobel winner
Heinrich Boll's foray into crime, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum
(1975), caused little curiosity in America about German crime writing in
general. Most of the influential German crime writers who have been
translated, like Pieke Biermann ("the Queen of German crime,"
who writes with the viciousness of a George Grosz painting) and Ingrid
Noll (a German thriller best-seller), are unfamiliar to American
readers. Certainly, nothing like the Scandinavian tidal wave of crime
novels has happened for German books.
In 2015, however, three German authors achieved considerable
attention, possibly leading future writers up the steep beach that a
translated author must climb to achieve popularity in the United States.
Sascha Arango, for example, had a brilliant debut with his first novel,
The Truth and Other Lies, translated by Imogen Taylor. He has an unusual
surname for a German, but he is one of their most successful screen and
television writers. He has been nominated for several awards and won the
Adolf Grimme Award in 2012 (an award that might be equated to an Emmy)
for his work on Tatort (roughly "Crime Scene"), a police drama
that is Germany's longest-running television series. Episodes
feature detectives in different cities, as if Law and Order, Homicide,
and Hill Street Blues were all broadcast under the same title. The first
Tatort appeared in 1970, so Arango was making his name in what might be
called a television institution. He has done a number of movies as well,
including adaptations of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry
Finn.
Arango was working on an idea for another screenplay when asked by a
publisher if he wanted to write a novel. His screenplay notes turned
into The Truth and Other Lies, one of the best first novels in any year.
Screen stories, especially crime stories, are naturally visual and
oriented toward action. Usually when screen writers take up fiction,
they are most comfortable exploiting these qualities. Surprisingly,
Arango's novel is a novelist's novel, brilliantly executed.
The psychological mysteries this clever plot contains are far more
engaging than the actual physical action. It is narrated by Henry
Hayden, a sociopathic best-selling novelist who does not write his own
books. His wife, Martha, is the actual author but does not want any of
the publicity that goes with it. When Henry's mistress becomes
pregnant, the plot thickens and murder soon follows. Hayden is a
masterful fraud, making lying an art form--masking dark secrets in his
past as well--but suddenly finds himself on the edge of being exposed.
One is immediately reminded, with pleasure, of the sardonic and dark
ironies of Patricia Highsmith's work. Being exposed as a fraud is a
common nightmare among writers. Stephen King's Secret Window,
Secret Garden, in which an author is harassed by a mysterious man
accusing him of plagiarism, similarly takes up the theme. Henry Hayden,
however, is a much cooler character, who uses his deep understanding of
deception to control others' understandings and suspicions.
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Another German author attracting attention in 2015 was Andrea Maria
Schenkel. Her first novel, Tannod, was a huge success in Europe from its
publication in 2006, selling a million copies in Germany. It won the
Deutscher Krimi Preis for best novel, the Friedrich Glauser Prize for
best novel, and bested foreign authors like John le Carre for the
Swedish Academy's Martin Beck Award. It was offered to US readers
in 2014 as The Murder Farm by Quercus publishers in a superior
translation by Anthea Bell, who has also translated W. G. Sebald and
Stefan Zweig. In 2007 she published her second novel, Kalteis (Ice
cold), and became the only author ever to win the Deutscher Krimi Preis
in consecutive years. It was, of course, her second number-one
best-seller. Despite the size of Ice Cold (140 pages in translation), it
only became available in the US in 2015 but followed The Murder Farm
like a heavyweight boxer's "one-two." Interestingly
enough, she also has some writing credits for German television, which
makes one wonder if while America is supposedly in a golden age of
television, the Germans are converting TV writers to create a golden age
of crime novels.
As with Arango, Schenkel's approach is unusual and original,
though very different. Both of her translated novels are based on true
crimes. The Murder Farm was sometimes superficially compared to In Cold
Blood because it involved the ax murder of an entire family in a rural
location. Schenkel was inspired by an actual crime that took place in
1922 near Regensburg, though she sets her novel in the 1940s. Ice Cold
takes place in the Nazi era and is based on the case of Johann Eichhorn,
who raped more than ninety women and murdered six or more from 1931 to
1938 in Munich. Horrific murders have inspired hundreds of mundane
novels, but Schenkel carefully avoids many of the common tropes of crime
fiction. She incorporates simulated documents (witness statements, for
example). She uses a nonlinear narrative and multiple third-person
points of view.
Ice Cold begins with an official report of the murderer's
execution by guillotine and the order that news of the serial murders is
to be suppressed. Sex murders are not the kinds of thing that are
supposed to happen in the Third Reich, especially Munich, the birthplace
of National Socialism. Schenkel also avoids creating a detective
character who pursues the case. "Figures like that are
vampires," she told interviewer Bob Cornwell, false and incredible.
Her primary objective is to represent crime truthfully, not to dandy it
up into a set of familiar conventions. In certain ways, she makes her
serial killer sympathetic, but not because he is in any way appealing or
flamboyant. Like many real serial killers, he is utterly ordinary, even
at tenth glance. The victim Schenkel concentrates on, Kathie, is
portrayed as similarly ordinary: a farm girl who comes to the city to
work and get away from abuse. She is one of the most convincing
characters I have read for many years, distant from the hagiography that
often accompanies descriptions of murder victims.
The third German writer who has had a breakthrough year in the US
(and elsewhere) is Nina George, whose short story "The Light of the
West" appeared in the special German Crime Writing section of WLT
in May 2011. George is a talented and prolific writer who has not
confined herself to crime writing, having published twenty-six books
(both fiction and nonfiction), more than a hundred short stories, and
over six hundred articles and columns. A high-school dropout, she became
a writer at age nineteen when her grandmother warned her that being a
writer was "no way to get a husband." She has been at it for
over two decades, publishing some of her books under pseudonyms--one of
them, "Jean Bagnol," a joint creation with her husband. Her
writing colleagues have long recognized her talent, although it took
until the publication of The Little Paris Bookshop this year before she
found a large international public. The fantasy of most would-be writers
is to write a book and become an instant success (like Sascha Arango).
Georges experience is more common. Only the truly possessed hang in
there, and in many cases, regardless of talent, pay years of dues
without finally earning the recognition that George has won.
The Little Paris Bookshop was not a crime novel, like many of her
novels, though it contained plenty of mystery. It was translated into
thirty languages--into English by Simon Pare--and debuted at number
sixteen on the New York Times best-seller list in July 2015 and
continued against such competition as Harper Lee's Go Set a
Watchman. It remained on the list until well into September. It tells
the story of Monsieur Perdu ("Mr. Lost"), who styles himself a
book apothecary. He runs a bookshop from a barge in the Seine and
"prescribes" books that will help people get through their
personal crises and problems. He himself, however, has long been pining
over a lost love, keeping her last letter to him unopened. A new
relationship causes the fifty-year-old Perdu to read the letter and
unmoor his barge, setting out on a journey to heal himself. The novel is
filled with characters, including Perdu himself, with peculiarities
reminiscent of those in a Dickens novel. It is a gross and vague
generality to say this, but the book seems very French to me. There is
much of the psychology and pacing that suggests George Simenon's
nonmysteries, and the story evokes the nineteenth-century French
realists in their gentler vein: Maupassant, Daudet, even Balzac. It is a
great prescription for a sunny afternoon.
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All these authors strike that difficult balance between writing that
is entertaining but also serious and substantial, saying much about
human beings and their odd behavior on this planet. But make no mistake:
whatever these three have in common, they are very different in style
and approach. We owe the translators a great deal for bringing out these
qualities and look forward to whatever other novelistic gems Germany may
offer.
Palmyra, Virginia
J. Madison Davis is the author of eight mystery novels, including
The Murder of Frau Schutz, an Edgar nominee, and Law and Order: Dead
Line. He has also published seven nonfiction books and dozens of short
stories and articles, including his crime and mystery column in WLT
since 2004.