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The Arms Maker of Berlin

by Dan Fesperman

3.61 · rating details · 181 ratings · 44 reviews

This powerfully suspenseful new novel from Dan Fesperman takes us deep into the early 1940s in Switzerland and Germany as it traces the long reach of the wartime intrigues of the White Rose student movement, which dared to speak out against Hitler.

When Nat Turnbull, a history professor who specializes in the German resistance, gets the news that his estranged mentor, Gordo...more

Hardcover, 384 pages

Published August 4th 2009 by Knopf

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The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré

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Dec 16, 2009

Cliff rated it

Shelves: novels

A spy story cum historical novel cum mystery in which a history professor becomes involved in revealing the wartime transgressions of a German industrialist. The historical figures Allen Dulles and Dietrich Bonhoeffer participate in the story.

The story consists of two parallel narratives - one follows the professor as he unravels the mystery, the other fills in gaps in the professor's knowledge by describing the historical events as they happened. Since the greatest pleasure in rea...more

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Dec 06, 2009

Charles Matthews rated it

“Intelligent thriller” is almost an oxymoron, given that the whole purpose of the genre is to ... well, you know, thrill. I mean, nobody reads Dan Brown for serious insight into the history of Christianity and the politics of the Roman Catholic church. (Well, they shouldn't, anyway.) All that ingenious plot-twisting and hair's-breadth-escaping from deadly intrigue tends to annihilate anything like thought.

Which may be why novels like Dan Fesperman's are so rare – or at any rate not a...more“Intelligent thriller” is almost an oxymoron, given that the whole purpose of the genre is to ... well, you know, thrill. I mean, nobody reads Dan Brown for serious insight into the history of Christianity and the politics of the Roman Catholic church. (Well, they shouldn't, anyway.) All that ingenious plot-twisting and hair's-breadth-escaping from deadly intrigue tends to annihilate anything like thought.

Which may be why novels like Dan Fesperman's are so rare – or at any rate not as popular as Brown's, or James Patterson's, or any number of other masters of the nonstop page-turner. Fesperman just can't help drawing on his experience as a journalist covering foreign conflicts, most recently for the Baltimore Sun. And that experience puts the meat on the intricate bone structure of his thriller plots. You come away from a Fesperman novel not only abuzz with the exhilaration of the chase, but also aware that you've absorbed something of the complexity of the world's conflicts, grown more keenly aware that they're are a lot more complicated than politicians and ideologues make them out to be.

Fesperman's “The Prisoner of Guantánamo,” for example, gave the reader a glimpse of the culture of that notorious place of incarceration, more vivid and subtle than anything you'd find in news reports, and it did so in the guise of a murder mystery and a spy chase. “The Amateur Spy” took us to a crossroads of Middle Eastern terrorist intrigue and discovered something that's easy to forget: Human beings with the essential traits of being human – hopes, ideals, needs, desires, as well as cruelty and weakness and fallibility -- dwell there.

The typical Fesperman hero is a guy with a certain amount of expertise and often a shadowed past who finds that experience and expertise aren't always quite enough to keep him out of trouble. Usually, as in any good thriller, there's a beautiful woman involved, one who is almost certainly not what she seems. So it is with with “The Arms Maker of Berlin”: Nat Turnbull, mild-mannered history professor, finds himself in cahoots (and bed) with a mysterious and alluring German woman, Berta Heinkel, as they try to locate some documents that may have led to the death of Turnbull's mentor, a retired, alcoholic and recently disgraced historian.

These documents are not just a Hitchcockian McGuffin, the gimmick that drives the plot, but they're also a portal into the history of Germany in the twentieth century. They have to do with the dark past of Kurt Bauer, a German industrialist best known to the public as a manufacturer of household appliances but also ... well, the title kind of gives it away. And what puts Turnbull into thriller-style jeopardy is not only that Bauer, described by one character as “a man whose little black book could help someone build the next nuclear weapon,” may be aiding and abetting some bad guys (i.e., Iranians), but also that the United States intelligence agencies have a pretty strong interest in not letting the truth about Bauer be known. As a historian, Turnbull is dedicated to uncovering the truth, but the FBI, which hires him to lead them to the documents, would just as soon keep it covered, alternately abetting and thwarting Turnbull's search.

While the story of Turnbull's sleuthing unfolds, Fesperman also flashes back sixty-odd years to the story of young Kurt Bauer, who at 17 falls in love with a pretty girl, Liesl Folkerts, who belongs to an anti-Hitler group known as the White Rose. For Bauer, love trumps politics, and that leads him to do something that has grave consequences, an action recorded in the documents Turnbull is looking for. Both stories – Turnbull's and Bauer's – are deftly told, the fiction underpinned with historical details and populated with real human beings such as the German anti-Hitler theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the American spymaster Allen Dulles. And Fesperman's fictional characters, particularly Kurt Bauer, are smartly imagined and subtly drawn.

But what truly animates the novel is Fesperman's awareness of how the calamitous history of Germany in the twentieth century continues to inform current events. From Turnbull's point of view – and Fesperman's – the “cast of players” is “Modern Germany made flesh, in all its macabre and tragic grandeur.” “The Arms Maker of Berlin” doesn't have quite the breathless immediacy and headlong action of Fesperman's ripped-from-the-headlines terrorism tales, “The Prisoner of Guantánamo” and “The Amateur Spy”, which makes it less successful as a thriller. But on the intelligence side of the “intelligent thriller” conundrum, it's a stronger and subtler, and perhaps more satisfying book.

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Nov 19, 2009

Tony rated it

Shelves: novels

"Workmanlike" is probably the adjective that best fits this thriller, which hopscotches back and forth between the present and WWII. The story is appropriately convoluted for the genre, involving a naive anti-Nazi resistance group in Berlin, the impending collapse of the Third Reich, OSS activities in Switzerland, and how all these connect to the present. And rest assured they do -- as Dr. Nat Turnbull, a semi-distinguished professor of modern German history at a small liberal-arts col...more"Workmanlike" is probably the adjective that best fits this thriller, which hopscotches back and forth between the present and WWII. The story is appropriately convoluted for the genre, involving a naive anti-Nazi resistance group in Berlin, the impending collapse of the Third Reich, OSS activities in Switzerland, and how all these connect to the present. And rest assured they do -- as Dr. Nat Turnbull, a semi-distinguished professor of modern German history at a small liberal-arts college, discovers when he is hired to track down some old OSS files hidden by his mentor at the college.

Turnbull (like pretty much every character in the book) is a stock figure, he's the anonymous academic who gets sucked into a great intrigue with national security implications (paging Dr. Jones, Dr. Indiana Jones to the front please, your country needs you to fight Nazis). It seems these old missing files have something to do with present-day nuclear weapons proliferation, and since the FBI apparently doesn't have the expertise to find them, they enlist Dr. Turnbull. This is a pretty flimsy way of setting up a kind of "everyman" protagonist, and it only continues to be unconvincing as the story moves along. But you just have to accept the premise and move on if you want to have any hope of enjoying the book.

What follows is a treasure hunt that takes Dr. Turnbull all over the place, from Baltimore to the National Archives outside Washington, to Florida, Switzerland, various parts of Germany, and so on. Tagging along with him for parts of this quest is his unreliable ally, a mysterious German academic with her own agenda. Meanwhile, alternating chapters take us back to wartime Germany and the relationships among members of a feeble resistance cell. The historically-set material is much more interesting than the contemporary chapters, as we get a real sense of how certain parts of German society were trying to position themselves for the inevitable Allied victory. Alas, the characters of both eras are types rather than people, and there is plenty of quite creaky dialogue throughout.

The story is full of twists and turns and deceit, all of which work perfectly well but somehow feel rather formulaic. You could spend your whole life reading nothing but thrillers revolving around Nazi Germany, so it takes a lot to stand out. (For example, this book has little of the detail that bring Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir trilogy to vivid life, nor do they have the striking atmosphere of Alan Furst's excellent spy novels). The book tries gamely to provide that big twist at the end that readers expect from thrillers, unfortunately I saw it coming a mile away (in the first third of the book I had a pretty good idea that an assumption had been made regarding a certain character that would be revealed at the very end to be untrue, and I was right). In the end, I can't say I'm glad I read it, but neither can I say it's not worth reading. It's a serviceable thriller that passes the time pleasantly enough, as long you keep your expectations lowish.(less)

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Jun 08, 2010

Zohar - ManOfLaBook.com rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: 2009

The "Arms Maker of Berlin" is a very intriguing novel about a history professor named Nat Turnbull. The story begins with the professor being abducted from his office by the FBI who wants him to recover missing OSS documents from World War II concerning his mentor. The documents have to do with a resistance cell in Berlin called the White Rose and an industrialist millionaire who would like those files to disappear.

The plot takes place in current time, as well as Nazi Berli...more

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May 30, 2011

Kandice rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: action-adventure, books-read-in-2011

I enjoyed reading this book. It had a mystery, intrigue, surprises - everything I'm sure a good spy novel should have. It was well written and well researched, and you cared what happened to some of the characters (unfortunately mostly the peripheral ones, in my opinion). But I'm not a huge fan of political intrigue and spy novels, especially those having to do with any war. I read this book for a book club, and while I did enjoy reading it, I probably won't read another book by this author ...more

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Nov 10, 2010

John rated it

This spy novel is set in the present day and in World War II Germany and Switzerland. Dan Fesperman shows us what was unfolding then as his present-day characters -- particularly a historian named Nat Turnbull -- use documents, interviews and a big expense budget provided by the FBI to try to figure out what happened. I enjoyed the World War II segments best, particularly because one of the historical characters in those chapters was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He plays a small but significant role in ...more

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Dec 28, 2009

Chris Wolak rated it

Shelves: mystery-thriller, world-war-ii

A real page turner for me. Recommend it to those who like WWII and Cold War era spy novels. This one bounces back-and-forth between the 1940s and "today" in Bern, Berlin, and the U.S. Our hero is Nat Turnbull, a History professor who gets mixed up in a high-stakes mystery that just exploded around his mentor. FBI agents, a beautiful history professor who grew up in Communist East Germany, Iranians, resistance fighters and old Nazis round out the cast. Fesperman brings to life the ...more

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Jan 21, 2010

larry rated it

I've read all of Mr. Fesperman's novels and I'm afraid he's running out of steam. His first two, set in Sarajevo are great as is the Warlord's Son. But the last few, Prisoner at Guantanamo and Amateur Spy and finally the Arms Maker feel increasingly perfunctory. Arms Maker in particular has weak unsympathetic main characters and a villain whose evil feels pretty pedestrian in the scheme of things. That and discussions of academic intrigues and research papers make this all feel like inside baseb...more

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Sep 10, 2009

Richard Lollar rated it

Recommends it for: Anyone interested in the OSS, end of the war in europe, Swiss/german/US relationships 1929-1945.

Recommended to Richard by: I read a review.

Present day: our hero, the historian is approached by the FBI to help out his mentor. Mentor is in jail for stealing valuable WW ll German archives. He dies mysteriously.

Past: we read how the story actually started in 1941, and the truth behind it. But is it universal truth, or just the truth as someone knows it? Do they have the big picture?

I found it a fascinating tale with a minimum of violence and explosives, although there are several deaths involved in the story.
...more

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Feb 08, 2010

Jim rated it

Shelves: deutschland, historicalish-fiction, thrillers, fiction

It was OK. It's got a Nazi-connected mystery, a professor/amateur investigator as protagonist, and modern intrigue dating back to the aforementioned mystery. Plus, there are some Iranian spies running around (although they don't do much).

On the face of it, it sounds like a good read, but I found it kind of flat. Granted, it picks up the pace in the last third of the story, but all in all it left me disappointed. This is especially true, considering the quality of Fesperman's first bo...more

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Aug 13, 2010

Judy rated it

Good historical mystery set in the current age as well as flashbacks by the bad guy to wartime Germany. I couldn't put the book down even though the characters are not endearing nor particularly well developed, i.e., I didn't really care what happened to them. I just wanted to know what all the hoopla was about with the missing OSS files that had come to light. Author has won awards for his other books. His photo gives me the creeps.

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Jan 25, 2011

Chip rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: mystery-thriller

Disappointing, particularly in comparison to The Small Boat of Great Sorrows. Cardboard and often unrealistic characters, and a very formulaic and again somewhat unrealistic plot. Seemed like the book form of an average at best Hollywood blockbuster style spy thriller with the typical "everyman" protagonist. I might as well have watched National Treasure.

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Jan 09, 2011

Adrian rated it

· review of another edition

Recommends it for: yes

More toward Dan Brown than LeCarre. The swiss part is quite superficial dealt with as the author is not creating a captivant atmosphere.
Nat charactere is not very convincing, portraing him as a kind of Indiana Jones during novel action and more as a academic historian/novelist in the past kind of a major discrepancy.
Entartaining reading in the end.

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Nov 17, 2010

Evelyn rated it

I'm a huge fan of WWII espionage novels, and in my opinion this is one of the best I've read. Well constructed, gripping, smart, full of terrific historical details, believable characters and numerous plot twists, most of which are truly surprising and not signaled by the author early on. Highly recommended

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Jan 28, 2010

Jennifer rated it

Entertaining, not incredibly substantial historical detective story, concerning lost OSS files from the end of WWII. Funny to be reading this and Lords of Finance at the same time, both with Hitler on the peripheries, but to very different effect.

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Dec 26, 2010

Tess Mertens-Johnson rated it

felt his book had great parallels from the past to the present. It moved that way, well, not like some books that are almost like a tennis match. The author seemd to have done his research and gave a detailed setting of history in the past setting.
It kept my attention and interest through out the book.
Interesting twist at teh end

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Jul 13, 2010

Norris Battin rated it

I am a WWII spy-thriller geek, especially those set in Europe with lots of bad Nazis and good OSS types. I particularly liked the Bonhoeffer background as I am about to begin a recent biography of the pastor.

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Apr 02, 2011

Donald Linn rated it

Sorry, this one didn't work for me at all. Breathlessly written, pedantic in tone and with a plot and characters that defy belief, the story bumbles along without any particular purpose.

Deeply disappointing.

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Feb 21, 2011

Angela rated it

· review of another edition

An interesting story for a while, but it ended pretty abruptly. It was kind of depressing and a little too involved with this small group of war protesters in Berlin.

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Jan 03, 2010

Caroline rated it

I dug this book but felt it kind of petered out at the end. Still will be reading more of his books. He presented the story and the characters deftly and nothing felt like a cheap ploy.

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Apr 23, 2011

James Kidd rated it

· review of another edition

Good espionage thriller. It has WWII stuff, modern day thriller stuff and some intellgence stuff. (that's some stuff then!) Works for me. Or rather, mostly worked for me. As a whole, just not quite as good as it could have been - not quite engaging or gripping enough, but a good read nonetheless.

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Nov 27, 2010

Carrie rated it

The book really moves but the plot is too farfetched for my taste. It didn't help that I hated the voices on the audio version.

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Jun 20, 2011

Emily Beckham rated it

I listened to this on my iPod while running. It was a good modern day mystery, while incorporating scenes from WWI.

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Apr 26, 2011

Enrique Arroyave rated it

A bit slow in the setup but a page-turner once that is completed. Plan on reading the other books by this author.

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Mar 07, 2011

Stephen Bank rated it

For those who love historical fiction on World War II, this is a must read. The 'White Rose' was a real resistance group during the War and many of it's members paid the ultimate price. Nat Turnbull is a research historian digging into the past to look for missing documents from his recently deceased mentor, Gordon Wolfe. The book touches base with real people and alleged conspiracies.The pace is fast and swings back and forth from Germany of the 40s to the present in order to connect the dots...more

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Aug 09, 2011

Bj added it

An enjoyable book. The ending is a little predictable but a good vacation read.

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Oct 24, 2009

Laura rated it

Recommended to Laura by: l.a.starrett@gmail.com

Have read them all, starting with Small Boat of Great Sorrows (which remains my favorite).

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Sep 23, 2009

Marlene rated it

I enjoyed this spy/thriller, and I would have given it another star if there had been a little more 'thrill' to it. Well written, great plot, interesting, sympathetic characters, but not enough THRILL!

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Dec 29, 2010

Robyn rated it

This was a light read - good if you like conspiracy and WWII resistance stories.

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Sep 30, 2009

Jim rated it

pretty good book and interesting setup of clues concerning WWII spying

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About Dan Fesperman

Dan Fesperman is a reporter for the Baltimore Sun and worked in its Berlin bureau during the years of civil war in former Yugoslavia, as well as in Afghanistan during the recent conflict. His first novel, Lie in the Dark, won the CWA John Creasey Award for best first crime novel in 1998.

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* Vlado Petric Mystery

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