Berlin Noir: March Violets / The Pale Criminal / A German Requiem
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Werner Seldte.
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Laser Oppenheimer,
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Gert Jeschonnek.
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March Violet
Andrew David
EPONYMN!!!!!!?
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Columbus Haus.
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Prime Minister.’ ‘Goering?
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Sachsenhausen.
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a bowl of Quaker Quick Flakes (‘For the Youth of the Nation’)
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Everyone in Germany was somebody different before March 1933.
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the Queer Squad, the Department for the Suppression of Homosexuality:
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Neumann,
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Frau Stock
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my order of pig’s knuckle with sauer...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Andrew David
Yucl
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Beobachter,
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‘Wet as a poodle, Max,’
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Charles Lindbergh
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‘Not so loud, Bernie,’ he said, twitching like a rabbit. ‘You’ll get me shot.’
Andrew David
Good I'm not the only one who thinks this dude is a bit too open
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Muller,
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Kapp Putsch.’
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Berlin. I used to love this old city. But that was before it had caught sight of its own reflection and taken to wearing corsets laced so tight that it could hardly breathe. I loved the easy, carefree philosophies, the cheap jazz, the vulgar cabarets and all of the other cultural excesses that characterized the Weimar years and made Berlin seem like one of the most exciting cities in the world.
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That was Berlin under the National Socialist Government: a big, haunted house with dark corners, gloomy staircases, sinister cellars, locked rooms and a whole attic full of poltergeists on the loose, throwing books, banging doors, breaking glass, shouting in the night and generally scaring the owners so badly that there were times when they were ready to sell up and get out. But most of the time they just stopped up their ears, covered their blackened eyes and tried to pretend that there was nothing wrong. Cowed with fear, they spoke very little, ignoring the carpet moving underneath their ...more
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since the skin was sodden and peeling away on the hands and feet, like gloves and socks.
Andrew David
Yum
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I had no more reaction than if I had been looking in the window of my local ‘German’ butcher’s
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Andrew David
Nice touch
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Sometimes I was surprised at the totality of my own indifference to the sight of the stabbed, the drowned, the crushed, the shot, the burnt and the bludgeoned, although I knew well how that insensitivity had come about. Seeing so much death on the Turkish front and in my service with Kripo, I had almost ceased to regard a corpse as being in any way human.
Andrew David
One wonders ever so slightly if there's a latent comment here about the ability of anyone to become desensitized And then that this is part of how something like nazism can come about
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‘The last time I came across body odour this bad, a horse was sitting on my face.’
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I’m not much interested in The Past and, if you ask me, it is this country’s obsession with its history that has partly put us where we are now: in the shit.
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Against the far wall was a large pump-organ painted to look like a graveyard, with crypts and graves yielding up their dead, at which a hunchback was playing a piece by Haydn.
Andrew David
Whhhhhat.?
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Hauptsturmfuhrer
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Half the time I find myself presenting the forensic evidence of a homicide to the very people who committed it.
Andrew David
Ack
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Loud songs do not a patriot make.
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Arthur Nebe,
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‘But isn’t that how Hitler got elected in the first place: too many people who didn’t give a shit who was running the country? The
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who controls Kripo. It gets very confusing when
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But come to think of it, political parties were always big on salutes in Germany: the Social Democrats had their clenched fist raised high above the head; the Bolshies in the KPD had their clenched fist raised at shoulder level; the Centrists had their two-fingered, pistol-shaped hand signal, with the thumb cocked; and the Nazis had fingernail inspection. I can remember when we used to think it was all rather ridiculous and melodramatic, and maybe that’s why none of us took it seriously. And here we all were now, saluting with the best of them.
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swanktail,
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Max Schmelling.
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Emil Jannings,
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BdM, the Women’s League,
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Josef and Magda Goebbels
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lady wife.
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‘Do you like jazz?’ she said, changing the subject. ‘Oh, it’s all right, it’s not negro jazz. I love it, don’t you?’ Only non-negro jazz is permitted in Germany now, but I often wonder how they can tell the difference.
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At least until Hermann’s first wife died. By then I’d been seeing him for some time.
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Hjalmar Haupthandler
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‘There are an awful lot of dead people in Germany looking very serious.’
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spoon-ears.
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‘Open up. Police,’ said a voice. ‘What do you want?’ ‘To ask you some questions about Ilse Rudel,’ he said. ‘She was found dead at her apartment an hour ago. Murdered.’
Andrew David
Surprise.!
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Putting my whole weight onto it I hoped to break a rib, but instead there was a muffled, fleshy report as it fired again, and I found myself covered in his steaming blood.
Andrew David
Real surp!
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Walther Kolb,
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Oberinspektor Tesmer,