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THE ARMS MAKER OF BERLIN
by Dan Fesperman
Knopf , August 2009
384 pages
$25.95
ISBN: 0307268373


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Nat Turnbull, a somewhat burnt-out professor of history at a small United States university, is not especially pleased when he is summoned by Viv, the wife of Gordon Wolfe, his former mentor, to come help get the octogenarian scholar out of jail. After all, Wolfe had done Turnbull's academic career no good at all with his scathing review of one of his monographs. Still, the old man has been busted for the possession of stolen property, in brief, Second World War secret service archives that have been missing for decades. Turnbull may feel he owes Gordon little in the way of loyalty, but he'd love to get his hands on the papers himself.

Before he knows it, Gordon is dead in jail, and the FBI, for reasons that are initially obscure, enlist Nat to vet the papers recovered from Gordon's house and go after certain missing files, files that seem to hold the secret that everyone is interested in safely quarantining. Nat takes off on a two-continent investigation that leads him to the National Archives in Washington DC, to Berlin, to Bern and even to Florida, accompanied by an odd young woman, Bertha Heinkel, who has her own reasons for wanting to get her hands on the secret concealed in the missing papers. Rather a lot of dead bodies follow in his wake.

This somewhat forced thriller plot alternates with scenes set in Berlin just after the first German defeats on the Russian front, when Germans were beginning to wonder if the war had not, in fact, been lost. A group of students inspired by Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and by the White Rose student group in Munich meet clandestinely to plot acts of resistance against the Nazi regime. They are young, earnest, idealistic, and appalled by the world their parents have made. Prominent in the group is Liesl Folkerts, vibrant, passionate, and outspoken, even in social circles close to the centre of the Nazi state. Kurt Bauer, the teenaged son of a major arms manufacturer, falls head over heels in love with her and follows her to Bonhoeffer and to the student meetings he inspires.

When we remember that the real Pastor Bonhoeffer was executed for his part in the attempted assassination of Hitler only a month before Germany was defeated, we can anticipate that these meetings will not end well. But what Fesperman does superbly is to evoke that poignant, sometimes deadly, combination of adolescent idealism, arrogance, and sense of indestructibility that made it possible for them to hope to make some difference in the nightmare of their time and place. These are the chapters that capture the reader, not, unfortunately, the modern narrative which sometimes borders on the incoherent. And, ironically, the most vivid pages in the novel detail an invented history of a White Rose cell in Berlin which the fictional contemporary historian Turnbull does not believe.

It is, I think, unfortunate that Fesperman chose to embed this intriguing foray into a possible, if not actual, past in a sprawling thriller that takes his protagonist up and down the US East Coast and across the sea to Switzerland and Germany. He has an excellent mystery plot that he could have unfolded without the artificial tension of threats to Turnbull's daughter (largely an accessory), failed attempts on his own life, and a powerful Iranian trying to make an arms deal. As well, he evokes the thrill of detection that a dedicated historian may well feel when hot on the trail of an elusive fact. Both elements would, I think, be enough to carry the book, without the involvement of the FBI and mysterious Iranians.

I'm not sure quite what has gone wrong with Fesperman's work since THE WARLORD'S SON. While THE ARMS MAKER OF BERLIN represents a considerable improvement over THE AMATEUR SPY and THE PRISONER OF GUANTANAMO, he is still not fully back to the form of his earlier, and extraordinary, work.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, August 2009

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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