Berlin Noir Read online

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  Introduction

  PART I: STRESS IN THE CITY

  DORA

  by Zoë Beck

  Bahnhof Zoo

  I Spy With My Little Eye

  by Ulrich Woelk

  Moabit

  The Beauty of Kenilworth Ivy

  by Susanne Saygin

  Schöneberg

  LOCAL TRAIN

  by Max Annas

  Neukölln

  PART II: COPS & GANGSTERS

  CUM COPS

  by Kai Hensel

  Altglienicke

  THE INVISIBLE MAN

  by Matthias Wittekindt

  Friedrichshain

  OVERTIME

  by Miron Zownir

  Kreuzberg

  Valverde

  by Ute Cohen

  Grunewald

  PART III: BERLIN SCENES

  Heinrichplatz Blues

  by Johannes Groschupf

  SO 36

  Kaddish for Lazar

  by Michael Wuliger

  Charlottenburg

  FASHION WEEK

  by Katja Bohnet

  Mitte

  ONE OF THESE DAYS

  by Robert Rescue

  Wedding

  DOG TAG AFTERNOON

  by Rob Alef

  Tempelhof

  About the Contributors

  Bonus Materials

  Excerpt from USA NOIR edited by Johnny Temple

  Also in Akashic Noir Series

  Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition

  About Akashic Books

  Copyrights & Credits

  Introduction

  Berlin, Year Zero

  Berlin does not make it easy to write noir fiction—or perhaps Berlin makes it too easy. Noir tradition casts a long, influential, and even daunting shadow.

  Alfred Döblin’s and Christopher Isherwood’s works, some of Bertolt Brecht’s plays, the Morgue poems by Gottfried Benn, M by Fritz Lang, and many other narratives from the first third of the twentieth century, all of which are tinged with noir, set high intellectual standards, and literary and aesthetic benchmarks that are hard to surpass. Perhaps this is why Berlin barely existed as a setting in noteworthy crime novels after the Second World War, with a few exceptions such as Ulf Miehe’s Ich hab noch einen Toten in Berlin (1973) and some other disparate texts. For Anglo-Saxon authors, Cold War Berlin was more interesting: John le Carré, Len Deighton, Ted Allbeury, and Ross Thomas all knew better than most German crime writers how to turn the divided city into a story, and even today’s “historical” Berlin crime wave, set against papier-mâché backdrops from the 1920s and 1930s, was ushered in decades ago by the British writer Philip Kerr. It took until well into the 1980s and 1990s before Berlin was inscribed onto the crime fiction landscape of unified Germany—by authors like Pieke Biermann, Buddy Giovinazzo, and D.B. Blettenberg, even though their works defied strict crime fiction classifications.

  In the proud tradition outlined above, this legacy is continued in Berlin Noir: neither Döblin nor Benn, Brecht nor Lang, for example, catered to any crime fiction formats. They merely steeped their literary projects in a great deal of noir. And so it is with most of the stories in our anthology: they do not necessarily follow the usual patterns of crime fiction, but regard noir as a license to write as they wish, a certain way of approaching the city, and a prism through which its nature is viewed.

  As Franz Hessel, the flaneur and spiritual brother of Walter Benjamin, once noted: Berlin is a city that “is not,” a city that “is always on the move, always in the process of changing.” Stagnation, you could say, leads to death, as illustrated by Robert Rescue’s story included in this volume, “One of These Days.” Written in a style that might best be described as stoic madness, it is set in the heart of Wedding (paying homage, as it happens, to a real-life bar called the Mastul), a traditionally working-class district that has increasingly become the target of gentrification. In “Heinrichplatz Blues,” Johannes Groschupf’s elusive hero suddenly vanishes after years of having drifted (to the delight of many women) through the bars of Kreuzberg’s Heinrichplatz, a setting that is now a veritable tourist hot spot. Nothing ever remains the same—but what does remain in this case is a mystery and the echo of a bygone libertarian lifestyle.

  This famed lifestyle is, in turn, an echo of the roaring twenties, the first age of sexual emancipation, which was experienced in the “laboratory of modernity” and has now been abbreviated into the raunchy-sounding product “Babylon Berlin.” Sodom and Gomorrah, in Ute Cohen’s toxic, modern-day story “Valverde,” has degenerated into a dull game played by the rich—and not necessarily beautiful—in chic, exclusive Grunewald. There is no hint of emancipation here, but inevitably greed, profit, and exploitation, which only an insane work of art can adequately express.

  There is play with smoke and mirrors in the hip district of Mitte, which is itself increasingly transforming into an artificial hot spot of luxury and fashion, much to the ire of the long-established population. Even if the hipsters are progressive, politically correct, and ecologically minded, well-known capitalist practices emerge as soon as the surface is scratched. And in Katja Bohnet’s “Fashion Week,” they also reek.

  Naturally, Berlin is also a place where people lose their minds: what really goes on in the head of Dora, the eponymous character in Zoë Beck’s story—one who is practically invisible too, as it happens—remains unclear. What can be said for certain is that some aspects of modern life are not easily endured, even if a person’s background is, at first glance, solidly bourgeois. Dora, in any case, appears to favor the sexual violence she endures as a homeless woman around Zoo Station than the straitjacket of a “normal” existence. And if the urge to impose “normality” arises, obsessive tidying can quickly veer from the neurotic to the psychopathic, as Susanne Saygin’s story “The Beauty of Kenilworth Ivy” shows. Here, a marauding killer in Schöneberg tries to clean up the city by eliminating representatives of the “bourgeois”; this, in her view, is the only way to protect social diversity in the botanical biotope of Berlin—by weeding out these undesirables once and for all. What an evil paradox. The frustrated film critic in Ulrich Woelk’s “I Spy with My Little Eye” has long since lost touch with reality and logic; he just doesn’t know it yet. His perceptions of what is real and what is illusion have been radically tampered with by the cinema, alienating him from the foundations of his own existence. As he tries to write a “human interest” story set in a run-down area of Moabit, it is clear that he is living his life through the movies, even when he . . . But why not just read it for yourself!

  And when it comes to the much-vaunted subject of identity, the labyrinthine possibilities that Berlin offers are not easy to navigate. Upright man by day, killer by night, to paraphrase Karl Marx. A cruel strategy of survival in Friedrichshain, perhaps, a district particularly tyrannized by party tourism, especially around Boxhagener Platz. To get to the bottom of it all, it may be a good idea to have an outsider look at the goings-on in Berlin, as the Italian investigator in Matthias Wittekindt’s “The Invisible Man” dares to do.

  * * *

  Berlin is a relatively peaceful city, at least compared to other capitals around the world. This is partly because organized crime—which is just as endemic here as elsewhere—observes strict rules that aim to inflict as little collateral damage on bystanders as possible. Which does not mean that cops and gangsters do not appear in Berlin Noir. Kai Hensel’s satirical story “Cum Cops,” about the unusual rehabilitation of a police officer from conservative Altglienicke, is based on actual events: In summer 2017, a Berlin police unit became the laughing stock of Germany when it was sent back to the capital from Hamburg follow
ing a scandal involving public sex and heavy drinking. The Berlin unit had been deployed there to assist with the expected G20 summit riots. And the consequence in Hensel’s story is a fatal reverse thrust.

  Blood is also spilled in Miron Zownir’s story “Overtime,” about a clash between corrupt cops and genuine gangsters. The fact that this story moves back and forth between Kreuzberg and Neukölln is not supposed to suggest that these two districts have a particularly high crime rate: Berlin’s fifteen districts are mere political entities, whereas specific neighborhoods are the socially relevant entities—and in these neighborhoods, huge differences in lifestyles and crime exist. That’s why Max Annas’s Neukölln introduces us to a completely different kind of world than Zownir’s. And Annas’s characters, although certainly not squeaky-clean Germans, are part of the fairly standard diverse population of a big city. The guy in the (metaphorical) sack in “Local Train” is not happy about this. That’s why he belongs in the sack.

  What’s left is history. It is omnipresent in Berlin at every turn; the city is saturated in a history full of blood, violence, and death. The echoes of the Nazi era can still be felt in Michael Wuliger’s “Kaddish for Lazar,” even though the relationship between Jews and Germans is highly contemporary and ironic in this story, and felt especially keenly in the “new West,” particularly Charlottenburg. Rob Alef’s “Dog Tag Afternoon,” on the other hand, deals with the consequences of the Second World War—more precisely with the 1948/1949 Berlin airlift, which had more to do with Germany’s Western connections than many other actions by the Western Allies. History forces its way up into the present from a past that can’t be buried, surfacing at the exact spot in Tempelhof where American and British aircraft punctured the Soviet blockade.

  Berlin, as we want to show, is a “SynchroniCity” (Pieke Biermann), a city of the most disparate and diverse simultaneities, firmly attached to the rigging of its political and literary history and always moving forward in the present. And noir, in its very essence, does that too. In this respect Berlin Noir is a snapshot; and as I write this today, I fully expect that everything will look completely different in just another year’s time.

  Thomas Wörtche

  Berlin, Germany

  February 2019

  PART I

  STRESS IN THE CITY

  Dora

  by Zoë Beck

  Bahnhof Zoo

  Take a look at her. Even if it’s hard.

  You won’t want to look at her because she stinks and is filthy from head to toe. You think you know what you’ll see but take a look anyway.

  Don’t wait for the woman from the rescue mission to help her to her feet and prop her up so she doesn’t fall over again, then bring her to the homeless shelter where she’ll have to cut the clothes off her body, wash her, and give her something new to wear. The clothes aren’t new, of course, just castoffs from strangers, but they’re new to her. She’ll wear them for a day or two and then they’ll have to be cut away again, because she won’t be able to take them off: they’ll be so stiff with filth and grime and blood and sperm and vomit that the only way to remove them will be to cut them from her body and throw them away.

  They know her here; they know how it is. They’re happy when she shows up. Sometimes a person from the rescue mission finds her and brings her in. Sometimes she screams and lashes out for hours and they have her taken to the clinic, at least for a few days until she discharges herself or simply disappears. Here they hope she’ll stay longer in the hospital until she’s fully recovered and healthy, if there is such a thing. Ever since someone from the mission saw her by chance after she’d been in the hospital for five days in a row, and told everyone that he didn’t recognize her at first because she looked so young and beautiful, that’s what they all want here.

  So, take a good look at her. Somewhere under the dirt and the stench, it’s still her.

  * * *

  In her early twenties, she took her meds. Not always, but there were stable phases. Sometimes entire months went by without incident. A year and a half ago, I remember that we thought everything was going to be fine and that our lives and hers would return to normal. We thought: She’ll take her meds for a while longer, and then this whole topic will be a thing of the past. We longed for normality. As if anything had ever been normal. A year and a half ago, when we’d been lulled into a sense of security, the call came from one of her friends.

  “Come here immediately,” he said. “Just come, now.” Then he hung up.

  I heard voices in the background, loud and confused. Students, I figured, the cafeteria. I was in the library not far away, and I jumped on my bike. When I reached the Math Institute, one of the nightmare scenarios that I’d been trying to block from my mind was taking place in front of the building.

  Dora was standing on the steps leading up to the entrance. In each hand she was holding a glass bottle, which she aimed like weapons at other students who were gathered at the bottom of the stairs. At the same time, she was yelling: “I’ll kill you! You fuckin’ Nazis!”

  I felt sick—not because I was afraid she’d really do her classmates harm, but because I saw that she had wet herself and didn’t seem to have noticed. I saw a guy standing at the edge of the group who was taking pictures with his cell phone.

  As a big brother, you have responsibilities and you have to make decisions. My decision was to take the guy’s cell phone first, then grab my sister. The guy didn’t want to hand over his phone just like that, so we scuffled a bit, but the others barely noticed. Then I put his cell in my pocket, latched onto my sister’s arm, and dragged her into the building. There I grabbed her bottles, put them by the door, led her to the toilet, and told her to clean herself up. If you spoke English to her, it worked just fine. Another student rested his hand on my arm and handed me her backpack. I thanked him and looked for her meds inside the bag, but only found a month-old prescription. Luckily, I also found her gym bag, which I handed to her in the bathroom so that she could change. She was still cussing Nazis, but sounded a little calmer and at least didn’t want to kill anyone anymore.

  We went to the nearest pharmacy in the village of Dahlem. In the Luise beer garden, I gave her one of her pills, saying they would protect her against the Nazis. As always, she was suspicious at first, but eventually swallowed it. It would take a few more hours until the voices in her head went quiet, and a couple more days until she was stable.

  * * *

  When you look at her, remember how young she is. You’ll think she’s at least twenty years older than she actually is. That’s because of all the dirt on her haggard face. Her hollow cheeks. Her empty eyes. She hardly eats, and drinks instead to block out the voices, and when she gets hold of some money, she sometimes buys drugs—any old kind. She doesn’t care as long as they’re stronger than the voices.

  Dora heard the voices for the first time in South America. At least that’s what we think. We weren’t with her, and she never said much about it, but the friend she was traveling with during the semester break thought so too. This is what we figured: somewhere, somehow, she took the wrong drug. She’d had almost no experience back then, and it must have triggered something in her brain. The doctors we spoke to said that she must have been going through the early stages of her illness for a long time and it would have eventually happened anyway.

  After returning from South America, she seemed really stressed. She was always turning around, startled, spoke in a low voice, and refused to use the telephone. She took the radio and television out of her room and locked away her computer and cell phone. Blacked out her window. Talked to herself.

  We brought her to see the best doctors and made appointments with the most renowned therapists. She regularly took her prescriptions until a therapist told her that she didn’t have to if she didn’t want to. Three weeks later, she started hunting for Nazis in the backyard. We brought her to a different therapist and sued the man who talked her out of taking the meds. There were bad p
hases, but also good ones. She was able to carry on studying and heard the voices less and less often. She even used a laptop and warmed to the Internet again.

  In the past, it had been one of her obsessions. In the past: before South America, the period that the doctors kept digging up for some kind of explanation. In the past, Dora had taken pictures and posted her every move online. She didn’t do anything without telling the whole world where she was and why, what she’d eaten and drank, why she was laughing and with whom. Her Instagram account had several thousand followers. She was a minor celebrity. She used to be outspoken, cocky even, and our brother Bela called her an attention junkie. If she’d had a musical streak like him, she would have made a perfect diva. He, on the other hand, always hid behind his double bass.

  In the bars on Ku’damm she was a real hell-raiser, but her favorite hangout was the Lang Bar in the Waldorf Astoria. She’d gather there with the admirers who could afford to join her. Or with those who’d do anything to post a selfie with her. She herself wasn’t afraid of approaching real celebrities at the Lang to take photos with them, with the Memorial Church or Zoo Palast cinema in the background. On summer nights, she would sit on the rooftop terrace and snap shots of herself and her followers with the floodlit construction sites around Zoo Station as a backdrop. She loved it there.

  * * *

  That’s why she often sleeps there, under the railway bridge next to the bakery. If you look around, you’ll see very few women. They try to stay off the streets at night. Or they look for nooks and crannies where they can’t easily be found. Most try to find a place to stay—in homeless shelters or women-only facilities. Some go home with any old guy and stay for as long as they can stand it; they let the guys do whatever they want with them, just to have a roof over their heads. Shame is often greater for women than men—shame, but also fear of sleeping on the streets. Because they are attacked more often. Because they are raped. I’ve done my research.

  Dora feels no more shame. She has nothing left to protect or hide. She sometimes spends the night in shelters and the like, but whenever we look for her she’s mostly here; and when the rescue mission contacts us, we’re often told that they found her just around the corner. They know her and they know us. Once she disappeared for several weeks, and no one around here could tell us where she was or when she’d last been seen. We asked around in all the shops and dive bars, even showing her photo to passersby. We called hospitals and every single emergency shelter. We made inquiries with the police. Finally, we stood, exhausted, in front of the Zoo Palast and Bela burst into tears. I could tell he thought she was dead. No one would contact us, he said. No one would recognize her. Perhaps she had been buried in some anonymous grave. The glass pane reflected the brightly lit Waldorf Astoria. I left Bela and crossed the street, let angry motorists honk at me, made it to the other side unscathed, and stormed into the lobby of the luxury hotel. I asked about my sister. Showed photos. Looked into their helpless faces. She was a regular here, I said, up in the Lang Bar. They’d long since forgotten her.