There is a certain beauty and trusting to fortune in rushing into a library to return a book and deciding to check out another while one’s son is practicing soccer. Such was the case with my discovery of Philip Kerr’s The One from the Other. In reading this, the latest of Kerr’s ongoing saga of the German private investigator Bernard Gunther, I realize I have entered a story that takes place in 1949, but began many years before with Kerr’s “Berlin Trilogy”, which is made up of his novels, March Violets (1989), The Pale Criminal (1990), and A German Requiem (1991). I did not, however, suffer from having not read these earlier books and The One from the Other is self-contained.
The book’s title is derived from a quote attributed to German Lutheran theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, that would eventually transmogrify into the ubiquitous “Serenity Prayer” — “…and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.” This prayer is important when considering that Gunther is returning to private investigation after several years of running his ailing wife Kirsten’s hotel in Dachau. It is four years after VE day and Gunther and Kirsten move from Munich to Dachau to help her father run his hotel.
In the wake of the end of the war and war crime trials, Kirsten’s father commits suicide and Kirsten is institutionalized, catatonically paralyzed by schizophrenia. Gunther decides to sell the hotel, borrow some money and return to the only thing he knows, investigative work. Curiously while he was never a member of the Nazi party, Gunther, a member of Berlin’s KRIPO (Kriminalpolizei) in the prewar era, was obliged to become a member of the notorious SS, a fact that haunts the investigator.
The One from the Other focuses on a series of missing-Nazi cases Gunther accepts as he renews his private investigator’s license. In a dizzying series of seemingly unrelated scenes the circumstances clear somewhat when Gunther is savagely assaulted, has his little finger traumatically removed, and subsequently convalesces at mysterious private estate, with equally mysterious caretakers. Gunther, almost unwittingly, becomes a pawn in a medical experimentation conspiracy involving Germans, Jews, and a lot of money.
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