A Man Without Breath (Bernie Gunther)
*Starred Review* As we learn more about what Bernie Gunther, the Berlin cop turned PI turned reluctant SS member, really did in the war—particularly his experiences on the bloody, atrocity-riddled eastern front—a common theme emerges: staying alive. Bernie despises Nazis, of course, but he’s no friend of the Communists, either, and, for that matter, the British just happen to be bombing the hell out of his hometown. It’s 1943—after Stalingrad—and every ordinary German, in the service or not, knows the war is going badly. Bernie is just hoping to survive the end game when he is sent to Smolensk, where evidence has surfaced of the massacre of Polish officers by the Red Army in the Katyn Forest. The German propaganda machine, led by Joseph Goebbels, could use a good story, and this has the makings of one. Bernie’s job is to monitor the exhumation of the mass graves, try to find witnesses to the atrocity, and feed reports to Goebbels. But there’s a problem: there’s a murderer in Smolensk who seems to want to kill everyone with something to say. And then there’s the matter of a new plot to assassinate Hitler fomenting among the Wehrmacht’s old guard. Bernie, naturally, is caught in the middle of it all, with no horse in the race except solving the case in front of him and saving his own skin. Once again, Kerr vividly captures the excruciating moral ambiguity of Bernie’s position, driving home the point that cynicism is the only sane reaction for a man on the wrong side of history. Superb as always. --Bill Ott