A Man Without Breath

This book is set in 1943 and former criminal detective Gunther is now part of the German War Crimes Bureau, which ironically is charged with uncovering and prosecuting the perpetrators of war crimes (ignoring of course the many such crimes committed by the Nazi regime). Amid rumours that the Soviets may have committed atrocities against Polish officers early in the war, Gunther is despatched to Russia to investigate the discovery of human remains in the Katyn Forest. Gunther soon finds himself caught between the need to uncover the terrible atrocity that has occurred at the site, the desire of Joseph Goebbels to create pro-Nazi propaganda around the event and a plot to assassinate Hitler. Oh and there is a psychopath on the loose.
This show more is perhaps the 8th or even the 9th Bernie Gunther novel that I have read. I have not read them in chronological order and, in fact, there is no need to as each is self-contained and requires no prior knowledge of what has happened previously (chronologically speaking). I think that this one may be my favourite yet. The writing is superb, the character is now familiar and full of depth and in A Man Without Breath Gunther is different, subdued. Rightly so, as he is in a nasty spot forced to investigate a disgusting crime committed by the Soviets whilst being at times menaced and hampered by the Gestapo and SS, and at other times assisted, whilst being hunted by a killer. Gunther isn't wise-cracking and womanising this time, he's troubled and unhappy. The way in which Kerr changes the mood for each outing if his character is wonderful. Once again, expertly researched to work a complex whodunnit narrative into a historical context. show less

>Putting a smart talking, wise-ass detective, Bernie Gunther, to lead a criminal investigation for the Nazis seems like a non-starter, but Kerr continues on his quest of a dozen books to convince us it was possible. Even probable, because the typical Berliner in Kerr's world fits this Raymond Chandler image. Disgruntled Germans and educated Slavs gave Gunther operating room. His skills as a cop gave him a license to kill when the Nazis really wanted to know who did it.

I am still not convinced.

>Kerr crafts an oppressive, sinking, stinking work: armies giving no quarter, civilians shot routinely in slaughter-house numbers, bones rising from the ground with the spring thaw, and Prussian officers taking their schnapps as though nothing had show more happened.

>The book is not fun. This competition between the NKVD and Gestapo for most evil group-villain has a winner: The NKVD by the skin of someone's teeth, someone buried a two years ago with a bullet hole in his head. The action is messy and gory; even the love interest is contaminated with the flesh of the recently disinterred dead.

>I do not know why I enjoyed it. Probably because it made history feel real--History that I knew but never tried to feel. Probably never should try to feel. show less

This is the ninth book in Kerr's Bernie Gunther series, and it does not disappoint. For those of you not familiar with these books, they are mystery/thrillers written in the noir style and set in WWII Germany. We first meet Bernie in March Violets which takes place in the 1930s as the Nazi Regime is coming to power but prior to the outbreak of war. The first three books in the series have been grouped into the omnibus edition entitled Berlin Noir, and through them we get to see Bernie at three different stages during this era - pre WWII, during WWII, and after WWII. The other books in the series go back and fill in the gaps. Bernie Gunther makes an interesting hero because like all of us, he is flawed. He wants to play by the rules but show more understands that doing so will get him killed. There is also the fascinating dilemma of whose rules to play by - he is not a member of the Nazi party and yet he finds himself constantly drawn into the fray. Why? Because Bernie used to be a cop, a very good cop who chose to retire and pursue the life of private detective when he saw what was happening to the police force under the current regime. He loves his country, but he does not love the Nazi party, so it is a slippery slope that he must traverse.

In the latest book, A Man Without Breath, we find Bernie in Berlin in March of 1943; he now works for the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, but he won't be there (in Berlin) for long. He is dispatched to Smolensk, Russia by non other than Propaganda Minister Chief Goebbels to investigate a mass grave that has been found in the Katyn Forest. Seem suspicious? Goebbels is hoping that this mass grave will be found to be full of Polish officers that were mass murdered by the Russian secret police (the NKVD). Goebbels wants to use the information to sever ties between Russia and the Allied forces. Oh the irony! Bernie finds himself in the unenviable position of procuring and presenting the evidence without disturbing any other...um...similar sites that were not created by Mother Russia. And in the meantime, there are other bodies piling up. German and Russian bodies. Seems like Bernie will also have to deal with a murderer on the loose, but how and why are the victims connected?

I really liked the latest entry in this series. It was fast paced and interesting, and the plot twists just kept coming. I also think that Kerr does an excellent job of placing these fictional stories within the historical framework. I would love to add a few quotes to this review, but I received this book as an Early Reviewer book, and the publisher has asked that the proof not be directly quoted in case of any changes to the writing before publication. That's too bad because there is some delicious stuff here. And Bernie! Oh, Bernie, if we ever meet up, I hope that you are on my side! Highly recommended. show less

World War II is entering its final stage, the German army having suffered defeat at Stalingrad and Germany poised for a Russian offensive. In Poland, former Berlin policeman Bernie Gunther has been ordered to oversee an exhumation of a gravesite containing the remains of thousands of Polish officers purportedly killed by the Russians, in an effort to extract propaganda value from Russian atrocities. With this grim background, Gunther finds a more immediate peril, a serial killer who is ruthlessly eliminating local civilians and soldiers, not randomly, but with a purpose. As Gunther tries to identify the murderer and uncover his motive, the killer seems always one step ahead, eliminating witnesses.

Author Philip Kerr has interwoven real show more people and his fictional plot skillfully. While one may wonder whether historical figures really would have behaved the way Kerr has them act in this book, it rarely makes a difference in the plot progression. Only one character, Colonel Rudolf von Gersdorff, seemed to me to be a paradox, a subtle conspirator against Hitler on one hand and a naïve, loose-lipped amateur on the other.

The setting of A Man Without Breath is incredibly grim and the characters exhibit little humanity. It’s not just the killer who is ruthless. Few of the cast would hesitate to murder in order to advance their own aims. Most of them do just that. It’s an amoral world where life is cheap. I found it to be unrelentingly depressing, and while it’s a tale well told, I found in the end that I’d rather not have read it. show less

This is an Early Reviewer copy. Thank you.

If Bernie Gunther was a circus performer he would be juggling flaming torches while riding a unicycle on a tightrope across the Grand Canyon. That is the image I keep getting when I think of everything that is going on in this book. And Kerr manages to tie the plot strands together, leaving an intriguing few for later use.

This novel covers a bare two months, March 1 to May 3 1943. Bernie is now opted to the War Crimes Bureau where he can do what he does best, investigate crime. The WCB is a curious institution. It is famously apolitical in Nazi Germany and composed mainly of Prussian judges who focus on the trees, not the forest, and have managed to maintain a degree of integrity, at least in show more their own eyes. It is a tolerable niche for Bernie who loathes the Nazis and loathes himself even more when he is conpelled to use his talents in the party service.

On March 8 he is given his new assignment. Near Smolensk, a mass grave of possible Polish soldiers has been discovered in the Katyn Forest. The WCB wants Bernie to investigate the crime scene and determine if these are indeed Polish soldiers and who murdered them. The WCB believes the victims were slaughtered by the Russian NKVD after the Russians occupied half of Poland and at the time Stalin was still allied with Hitler. It would be just much easier for the Soviet Union if there was no Polish opposition when the occupation became permanent after the war. And, the WCB hoped, the world would view Germany as not the only brutal force in Central Europe. Judge Johannes Goldsche, Bernie's boss, does caution him to tread carefully. If he should come across mass graves NOT filled with Polish bodies, it would be best to not mention this. No use upsetting the Gestapo.

Bernie is not thrilled with going to Smolensk, especially when he is "asked" by Joseph Goebbels to slant his investigation so that the Nazi can use the results for propaganda purposes: the godless communists murder innocent Polish prisoners and the truth is revealed to the world by the vigilant German investigators. In fact, the proceedings should be witnessed by an impartial group of outsiders, possibly the Polish Red Cross and forensic experts from neutral countries. Time the Allies faced the crimes of their buddy Stalin. And do wind up the investigation as soon as possible since there may be a chance that the 6th Army may have to leave Smolensk to regroup after the defeat at Stalingrad . If the Russians return before the investigation is satisfactorily completed, all evidence of their crime would be lost.

A straightforward assignment for Bernie, even if he has to be careful not to "discover"' anything embarrassing for the present Germany regime. But nothing is ever simple in Bernie's life anymore. As soon as he arrives in Smolensk he gets involved with the murder of two Russian soldiers and the torture murders of a Russian doctor and his family, a plot to assassinate Hitler who will be visiting in a few days, the disappearance of a key witness to the mass murders, a prostitution ring, and various attempts on his life. All in Smolensk in two months. And there is the smell and the mosquitoes and the soul-searching and even a little love....

Bernie Gunther remains one of the best characters in modern detective and historical fiction. He is a decent man in an impossible society trying to do a policeman's job because he still believes murderers should be made to pay for their actions. Bernie has to make tough choices in order to avoid the mantraps of Nazi authority and sometimes he has to do bad things for what he believes may be a greater good. He is still clinging to self-preservation, but is almost to the point where he just doesn't give a damn and almost welcomes a bullet. What a fascinating man. show less

This was my introduction to the Bernie Gunther series, and after reading this (ninth) novel, I'm likely to go back and start reading the series from the beginning (though maybe not right away).

A Man Without Breath isn't a typical police procedural, where the one thing that really matters to the reader and the author and the detective is "Whodunnit?" Any "mystery" is almost beside the point in this murder-filled nightmare world where the detective is a Nazi-hating German former homicide cop in the midst of World War II. In many ways, this is crime fiction at its best. It constantly makes the reader think, not about a fictional puzzle, but about real evil.

The book seemed a little too long, but every time my interest started to flag, show more something else exciting occurred. The characters were sometimes difficult to keep sorted out, and some of them were almost cartoonishly good or villainous. But what Kerr does so well is use history and all those true murders to create compelling noir crime fiction. When Bernie Gunther laments "thousands" of Jews killed by the Nazis, or does whatever it takes to protect those plotting to kill Hitler, we know what he doesn't: things in his world are even worse than he thinks. show less

It's 1943, and Bernie Gunther, former Berlin homicide cop, is now an investigator for the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau. Yep, you read those last four words right. During World War II, there actually was a German organization for investigating war crimes. Bernie, however, with all the cynicism and black humor of a Berliner, is keenly aware of the absurdity of the Bureau's practice of turning a blind eye to the systematic torture and murder of Jews, Gypsies, communists, Slavs, homosexuals and other designated enemies of the Reich. Instead, the Bureau focuses on investigating war crimes by the Allies and, occasionally, one-off criminal acts by German soldiers--like rape, murder and torture committed without benefit of an officer's show more order.

Bernie is sent to Smolensk, precariously held by the Germans, when corpses are discovered buried in the nearby Katyń Forest. Those bodies turn out to be Polish army officers, executed by a shot to the back of the head, and the more the German troops dig in the forest, the more bodies they find.

Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels (whom Bernie likes to call "Mahatma Propagandhi") spots a potential publicity coup: show the world that this massacre was perpetrated by the Soviets and drive a wedge between the democratic Allies and the USSR. Goebbels orders Bernie to coordinate an international commission's visit to Smolensk to witness the digging and autopsies and, of course, to help the publicity along.

Bernie's workload becomes heavier when two German soldiers are brutally murdered late one night after a visit to the local brothel in Smolensk, and other murders follow. Bernie's various investigations force him into contact with a number of Wehrmacht officers, nearly all of whom are aristocrats and seem to be related by blood, marriage or social connection. This is a double whammy for Bernie, who dislikes both military authority and class superiority. Naturally, he refuses to show any deference to the officers, even including those whom he figures out are part of the various plots to assassinate Hitler.

Bernie's insubordination and wisecracks have a tendency to make the local command less than cooperative with his investigations; not that this is a new phenomenon for Bernie. After knowing him only a couple of days, one member of the visiting committee says: "Trouble is what defines you, Gunther. Without trouble you have no meaning." True, but I like Gunther's own view of himself: "[F]or the last ten years[,] [t]here's hardly been a day when I haven't asked myself if I could live under a regime I neither understood nor desired. . . . For now, being a policeman seems like the only right thing I can do."

This is what the Bernie Gunther series is all about. Philip Kerr is a master at portraying the flawed hero doing the best he can in a corrupt and perverted time and place. As Bernie recognizes, you sure can't get much more corrupt and perverted than Nazi Germany and World War II. The only hope is, as Bernie tells himself, as long as you can draw breath, you have a chance of turning around whatever nastiness you've been involved in. So who is the Man Without Breath; the man who has lost that chance?

During this now nine-volume series, Kerr puts Bernie at ground zero at some of the notorious landmarks of the time. In this book, there are several, including the discovery of the Katyń Forest Massacre, a real event in which the Soviet NKVD killed over 14,000 Polish military officers as part of its "decapitation" policy, which systematically obliterated those who might lead resistance against them, including aristocrats, intellectuals and military elites. Kerr also includes references to the Gleiwitz Incident, the faked Polish attack on a German radio station, which the Nazis devised to justify their 1939 invasion of Poland; the Rosenstrasse protest, which I describe in a historical note below; some of the previously-mentioned officer class's attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler; and the horrific medical experiments on communists carried out by fascist doctors in Civil War-era Spain.

I read a lot of World War II fiction, and a common mistake is for the author to put every bit of his or her research on the page, which often kills the pace and flavor of the story. Having read all of the Bernie Gunther series, I can say that Philip Kerr never makes that mistake. His knowledge of World War II history is prodigious, and he works it seamlessly into his compelling fictional stories. Just read the Author's Note at the end of the book and marvel at all the real events and characters he's blended into this story without the least scent of a musty textbook creeping in.

I recommend A Man Without Breath to anyone who enjoys World War II fiction or books about characters trapped in morally compromising circumstances. I'd give it 4.5 stars; there is some very occasional clunky writing.

Historical Note: An intriguing event Kerr describes is the Rosenstrasse protest. In March, 1943, the Nazis rounded up the last 10,000 Jews left in Berlin (at least those not in hiding), with the intent to transport them and declare Berlin judenfrei. About 1700 of these, the ones who were married to Aryans, were separated and placed in temporary holding in the Jewish community center building on Rosenstrasse. For a week, the wives and families of the Rosenstrasse prisoners demonstrated outside, loudly demanding the release of their loved ones, despite SS soldiers' threats to arrest and even shoot the demonstrators. Amazingly, at the end of the week, the prisoners were released, by Goebbels' order, and nearly all of them survived the war.

This event shows the sensitivity of the regime to bad publicity and forces us to ask what horrors might have been avoided if only the German people had risen up against Nazi actions earlier. For a thorough and fascinating history of the Rosenstrasse protest, I recommend Nathan Stoltzfus's Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany. show less