Keywords

This chapter examines the historical crime fiction novel Greeks Bearing Gifts (2018) by Philip Kerr, which is the next to last volume of his Bernie Gunther series.Footnote 1 Philip Kerr (1956–2018) was one of the leading authors of a particular style of historical noir, including his Berlin Noir trilogy (1989–1991), which introduced his detective, Bernie Gunther. In his fourteen novels featuring Gunther, Kerr offers what we might see as hard-boiled epic, (re)telling the history of Germany and to an extent Europe from the end of the Weimar Republic, through World War II to the first fragile years of post-war reconstruction and of course the separation of the German state. In Greeks Bearing Gifts, Kerr deals thoroughly with the years following the German Occupation (1939–1944) and the Civil War (1943–1949) in Greece and especially with the extermination of the Jews of Thessaloniki by the Nazis and their Greek collaborators, as well as the violent sequestering of their property, which continued after the war.

In Greeks Bearing Gifts, Bernie Gunther travels to post-war Greece, in 1957, in order to solve a case which involves the traumatic memory of the aforementioned ‘Greek Shoah’. As Gunther gets deeper into this case, he gradually hears about and as such unearths the traumatic memories of the country’s Jews. These memories were censored after the war by the Greek state and also by the city of Thessaloniki, for reasons of national unity and local reconciliation, mainly in order to promote a historical memory of the unity of the Greek people against the Nazi penetrators, but also due to the anti-Semitism of some of the city’s residents. Gunther’s attempt to bring into the light the violent crimes of the Nazi and their Greek allies is based on his democratic and humanist ideals and as a way of opposing this ethnocentric propaganda. To be more exact, Gunther’s anti-nationalism leans towards a particular humanist account or understanding of Marxism that we will unpack further in the final parts of this chapter. These elements of the narrative connect Kerr’s novel with the recent efforts in Greece to re-examine these violent and tragic events in the context of a larger continent-wide effort to think through the ongoing effects of violent conflict in the twentieth century.

Our analysis of the novel assumes that its main subject is the Greek Shoah, the memories of it by those who survived, and the effort of those in the present to reveal the truth. Bernie Gunther undertakes the role not only of the detective, the solver of the crime, but also of the historian; the common feature that links these two identities is a both cerebral and painful investigation of the past. However, this dyadic role, of the detective and the historian, is a crucial feature of historical crime fiction, for which Greeks Bearing Gifts stands as a representative example. Thus, for this chapter’s theoretical context, we eclectically combine ideas and theories drawn from academic studies on crime fiction and historical fiction. In addition, we also turn to historical studies concerning the novel’s subject, the extermination of the Jews of Thessaloniki during the German Occupation of Greece.

In contemporary historical crime fiction, historical memory—that of the individual, which is personal and unofficial, and also the collective and official or public version—is not steady and immutable, but rather is always implicated in political, social and ideological conflicts. Christine Berberich notes, “rather than merely solving the crime, novels such as these reflect on how history has been passed down and commemorated, and how that engages with individual choices both in the past and in the present” (6). Thus, in historical crime fiction, the past proves not just to be a social construction, something that is subject to change and revision, but also a site whose meaning is contested, and where the struggle to assert meaning crystalizes divisions between the dominant social, political and economic strata, on the one hand, and the cultures and mentalities of the various minorities, on the other (Berberich). As Kate M. Quinn points out, “indeed, any marginalized group or minority may find the crime genre offers an ideal vehicle to challenge past assumptions from the perspective not just of the present but even from the standpoint of an imagined future” (316–317).

As an elaborated example of historical crime fiction, Greeks Bearing Gifts is based, on the one hand, on the tradition of detective fiction and, on the other, on the genre of the historical novel, whose socio-political dimension was highlighted by Georg Lukacs in his classic study of this subject, The Historical Novel (1955). In the final chapter of this book, Lukacs turns his attention to the last incarnation of the genre, which he calls “the historical novel of democratic humanism”, or—to be more accurate—“the historical novel of militant anti-Fascist humanism” (261). Here Lukacs analyses the work of writers such as Anatole France, Romain Rollan, Heinrich Mann and Alfred Döblin, who tried to oppose the rise of totalitarian regimes in interwar Europe, through the literary genre of the historical novel. In Greeks Bearing Gifts this revelation of the historical truth regarding the extermination of the Greek Jews of Thessaloniki and its censorship in the following years is based on the same humanist, democratic values; these ideals are expressed by Bernie Gunther, who hides them behind the typical cynicism and irony of the hard-boiled detective.

Generally, in Kerr’s novel this legacy of “the historical novel of democratic humanism” is intertwined with the elements of the crime fiction genre. Tzvetan Todorov in his study on detective fiction has delved into the distinction of two timelines in the crime novel: the story of events that constitute the crime and the story of the detective’s retrospective attempt to solve it (Todorov). Based on Todorov’s theory, Ellen O’Gorman claims that the crime-solver adopts the identity of the historian by forming an interpretation of the historical past in contrast with the official and hegemonic one, according to his/her ethical code (Gorman 22–24). In Greeks Bearing Gifts, Bernie Gunther gets involved personally and sentimentally in the investigation and dangerously follows his inner moral code (Major 3–4), in order to bring to justice former Nazis and their collaborators who were not convicted of the horrific crimes they committed against Greek Jews. Without a doubt, the novel is characterized by didacticism, as Kerr’s clear goal is to inform especially non-Greek readers about the events of the ‘Greek Shoah’ and moreover to urge them to support the contemporary efforts carried out by both academic and public historians to bring the historical truth into the light. However, this didacticism is detached from any simplistic moralistic approach. This is mainly accomplished via flashbacks of the long history and the tragic fate of the Jews of Thessaloniki, which are carried out by the fictional characters who inform Bernie Gunther about the case. The narrative is based on these individuals’ subjective and experiential view of these historical events and are filtered through Gunther’s determining perspective.

This literary technique could also be considered as an example of ‘historiographic metafiction’ in that it draws attention to both the limits of fiction and history—how the blurring of fact and fiction contributes to an awareness of the historicity of fiction and the fictionality of history. Linda Hutcheon discussed a group of postmodern novels, mainly from the United States, as representative examples of ‘historiographic metafiction’ and she connects this term to the concept of ‘interdiscursivity’, referring to the interaction of various discourses (e.g. literary, scientific, philosophical and journalistic) in postmodern fiction: “One of the effects of this discursive pluralizing is that the (perhaps illusory but once firm and single) centre of both historical and fictive narrative is dispersed” (12). She refers to Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which also combines the historical novel and crime fiction, with a definitive postmodern view. So, ‘historiographic metafiction’ could speak to or about the style of historical crime fiction (Chioti 18–19). In Greeks Bearing Gifts, the discourses of literature and historiography are in constant interaction, through the framed flashbacks which go beyond the given limits between an objective historical past and a subjective personal memory.

However, it is important to note that in Kerr’s novel this move between history and memory is limited by the aforementioned turn towards historical and political didacticism. In turn, this pedagogical tendency is limited by the popular and entertaining dimension of the crime fiction genre, to be more exact by the features of suspense, violence, mystery and irony which dominate the hard-boiled style.

The Historical Context: The Jewish Community of Thessaloniki and the Memory of the Greek Shoah

In recent years, more intense and organized efforts are being made to unearth and re-examine the violent and tragic events of the extermination of the long-standing Jewish community of Thessaloniki by the Nazis during the German Occupation of Greece. As such, there is an important collection of traumatic memories of the inhabitants of this northern Greek city, which for decades were not only silenced but also censored. The core of the Thessalonian Jews consisted of descendants of those expelled from Spain in 1492 and those who arrived in the city in waves of immigration from Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth century. In 1912, when Thessaloniki was integrated into the Greek state, the Jews of the city already had a long-standing social, political and cultural presence; they were numerous but also divided politically and along class lines. They were a distinct population group in a city that after 1912—and especially after the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922 and the arrival of Greek refugees from Anatolia—was gradually dominated by the Greeks on an economic, political, social, cultural and therefore ideological level.

The German Occupation (1941–1944) and the extermination of almost all the Jews of the city by the Nazis led to the catastrophic homogenization of what was previously a fairly diverse population and crucially a seismic change in its social structure. In 1940, the city’s Jewish population was 50,000, or about 20% of the total population, which numbered 260,000; less than 5% of Thessaloniki Jews survived Auschwitz. Already in 1942 the Nazis launched the plan to exterminate all the Jews of Thessaloniki and seize their institutional and personal property, due to their obligatory participation in a fake registration process. The anti-Semitic Christian collaborators rejoiced at the expulsion of the Jews and even benefited financially. Their number is probably far larger than was initially acknowledged by the reassuring myth of absolute support of the Greeks of Thessaloniki for their Jewish fellow citizens. The famous treasure of the Jews—that is, the money and jewels that this community had amassed and with which it believed it could ensure its survival—had in fact been largely looted by the Nazis. However, part of this treasure wasn’t found by the Nazis, who abandoned the city and Greece in 1944, having been defeated in the war (Mazower; Fleming).

Only 900 Jews from Thessaloniki survived. Most of the camp survivors wanted to achieve their immediate repatriation. The collapse in their economic fortunes and the forced seizure of Jewish property in Thessaloniki by the Nazis and their local collaborators created extremely unfavourable living conditions for the survivors. The confiscated Jewish houses after the departure of the Nazis often passed, legally, into the ownership of Greeks, while their businesses also passed into new hands. Thus, several families of survivors were forced to emigrate to Palestine or the United States (Benveniste). The extermination of the Jews of Thessaloniki was almost total and represented one of the highest relative ‘eradication’ rates in Europe. For many decades this tragic event was completely silenced by both historians and the state. In Greece, as in other European countries, after the war, survivors of the Thessaloniki Shoah spoke only to each other, as there were no ears willing to listen to them. In Greece, the silence is related to the fact that the winners of the Civil War included many of those who had collaborated in the deportation of Jews or those who benefited from their extermination. At some point, however, survivors around the world began to write and talk about their Shoah experiences in order to pass their stories on to their children, and as a dynamic response to those who wanted to deny that the eradication and extermination had taken place. Thus, narration became a way of dealing with this trauma and preserving the memory of what had happened.

In Greece, interest in the study of the Shoah began in the early 1990s, following delays to a trend that had already emerged in the rest of Europe. This effort has been pursued both by academic and public historians, as well as by journalists and film directors. The most important fruits of this effort are the documentary Salonika City of Silence (2006), directed by Maurice Amaraggi, and the historiographic study The Holocaust in Thessaloniki: Reactions to the Anti-Jewish Persecution, 1942–1943 (2021) by Leon Saltiel. The film could be considered as a more artistic and emotional approach to the subject, focusing on the city of Thessaloniki, as an important landmark interwoven with memory, which is both personal and collective: a lieux de mémoire, according to Pierre Nora (1999). On the other hand, the book is a result of Saltiel’s long academic journey to excavate the Holocaust of Thessaloniki. Kerr’s novel is another example of this re-examination of the collective traumatic experiences of the Thessalonian JewsFootnote 2 but one that assumes the form of a detective novel while at the same time bending the form of the genre to accommodate its complex and difficult subject matter.

Greeks Bearing Gifts

Before moving into an analysis of the novel’s main ideas, it is necessary to provide a brief summary of the plot. We are in 1957. The now ex-private detective Bernie Gunther, hidden behind the fake identity of an employee in a large German insurance company, travels to Athens to investigate the sinking of a naval vessel belonging to the German Siegfried Witzel, a former Wehrmacht soldier who remained in Greece after the German Occupation. However, after an encounter between Gunther and Witzel, the latter is found by the former brutally murdered. Gunther is drawn to the investigation of Witzel’s assassination, excavating the violence and dirty secrets of the German Occupation which have been buried in the post-war era. Witzel’s murderer is an ex-Nazi officer, Alois Brunner, who has returned to Greece to find a part of the hidden properties of the Greek Jews who were exterminated by the Nazis in Thessaloniki in 1943. Brunner, a smart and ruthless but now paranoid man who has not given up on his Nazi past in the slightest, is pursued by the German and Greek authorities, and also by Mossad, which has sent its agents from Israel to Greece. As the plot progresses and becomes more and more complicated, the Greek police, Mossad agents and other minor but significant characters become entangled around Gunther and his investigation.

It is important to note that some of the characters that appear in the novel are real historical figures, who played a significant role in the extermination of the Greek Jewish community of Thessaloniki during the German Occupation. Alois Brunner (1912–2010) was in charge, under Adolf Eichmann, of the deportation of Jewish people from many countries, particularly Greece. After World War II, Brunner was hunted by the German and the Israeli states and also by Interpol, but he escaped arrest until his death, in Syria (Jewish Virtual Library). Of course, Kerr combines real-life events with imaginary elements to construct a literary representation of Brunner and other significant Nazi figures including Max Merten (1911–1971), a German prosecutor and Nazi officer who was also responsible for the transportation of Greek Jews to Auschwitz. After World War II, Merten was actively involved in the political life of West Germany. In fact, in 1957 he returned to Greece to testify at the trial of his interpreter, Arthur Maisner, during the Occupation (who also appears in the novel). After many turbulent events, involving the Greek government and also the authorities of West Germany, Merten managed to escape trial by the Greek courts (Hassid). In Kerr’s novel, Merten appears as an old friend of Gunther, a turn of events which helps Gunther to find a new and profitable job in a respected insurance company. However, Mertens’ involvement in the case is far deeper and more complicated. The involvement of real historical figures in the novel gives it a charge or frisson of authenticity and raises a set of fraught ethical questions about the relationship between the real and fictional and what fiction can hope to do or achieve vis-à-vis more standard approaches to history and historical truth. At the end of the novel, and to acknowledge this issue, Kerr has added a section with accurate historical information for each of the real-life characters who have participated in the plot.

As mentioned above, the main part of the novel is dominated by a series of accounts told from the perspective of secondary characters who not only help Gunther to solve the case but also, and more importantly, tell us about the long history of the Jews of Thessaloniki. These flashbacks also convey the traumatic experiences of this community, facing extermination by the Nazis and the seizure of their property in collaboration with a section of the Greek population. In order to maintain the literary character of the narration and to avoid didactic historical retrospective, Kerr focuses not only on the idiolect but also on the overall personality of the person speaking. For example, in the following excerpt, Gunther’s colleague in the insurance company and informal guide to the labyrinth of modern Greek city life, Achilleas Garlopis, adds the following comment after his account of the history of the Thessalonian Jews:

Anyway, I don’t want to embarrass you, sir, with a lachrymose tale of Jewish suffering in Greece—you being a German n’all—so, to cut a long story short, most of the Jews in Thessaloniki were deported to Auschwitz in 1943 and gassed to death. (147–148).

The sharp satirical tone is a key element of the noir style of both literature and cinema. In this excerpt this feature appears in the form of an unorthodox and critical view on the Shoah and its position in both personal and historical memory, one that might be called ‘Holocaust impiety’ (Berberich; Auer).Footnote 3 The excerpt also shows, in a satirical manner, the difficult relationship between the Greeks and the Germans, especially during the initial post-war years. In addition, this ironic view both reflects Gunther’s hard-boiled persona and suits the wary, cunning, cynical but nevertheless likeable character of Garlopis.

The tragic fate of the Jews of Thessaloniki is also pursued in a monologue given by the Greek police lieutenant Stavros Leventis, whose professional hostility to Gunther is also matched by grudging respect for his doggedness and his capacity to find answers when none would appear to be forthcoming:

I won’t detain you, Commissar, by trying to explain how, over the many centuries, so many Jews in the diaspora, fleeing one persecution after another, ended up in Salonika; nor will I take up your time to explain what happened between the two wars and how Salonika became Thessaloniki and Greek, but in this most ancient city where change was a way of life, everything changed when the German army arrived and, I’m sorry to say, that change became a way of death. The alacrity with which the Nazis began to take action against Salonika’s Jews was astonishing even to the Greeks who, thanks to the Turks, know a bit about persecution, but for the Jews it was devastating. (187)

At this point, Leventis connects this collective traumatic experience with his individual life story, namely, his failure as a young Greek policeman to apprehend and punish a Nazi officer who murdered a rich Jew, Jaco Kapantzi, in cold blood. Kapantzi was killed because he provoked the Nazi officer during the train journey to the concentration camp, but Leventis reveals that Kapantzi has helped his father before World War II. The following excerpt is representative of his personal involvement in his fate:

Perhaps this will sound strange to you now, Commissar. ‘Why bother?’ I hear you say. After all, what’s the fate of one man when more than sixty thousand Greek Jews died at Auschwitz and Treblinka? (...) And the point is this: Jaco Kapantzi was my case, my responsibility, and I’ve come to believe that in life it’s best to live for a purpose greater than oneself. And before you suggest there’s something in this for me, a promotion, perhaps, there isn’t. Even if no one ever knows that I have done this I would do it because I want to do something for Greece and I believe this is good for my country. (189)

Thus, in Leventis’ retrospective narrative, the historical dimension is deeply intertwined with the personal one and the antifascist, humanist perspective with an inner moral code. This is a representative example of how ‘historiographic metafiction’ is utilized in the novel. Though in Greeks Bearing Gifts this postmodern technique is not free and open in a parodic way, it is limited by a very specific political purpose: the revealing of the censored story of the Thessalonian Jews.

These flashbacks, which blur the barriers between history and literature, operate as crucial elements in Gunther’s attempt to solve the case and also as excerpts of a censored and suppressed historical truth. The most critical of these flashbacks is narrated by an Israeli Jew with Greek roots. Bernie Gunther meets the Mossad spy, Rachel Eskenazi, who has come to Athens to catch Alois Brunner. Eskenazi speaks about her life in Thessaloniki as a Greek Jew, about her capture by the Nazis and her transportation to Auschwitz; finally, she informs Gunther that, though her relatives died there, she escaped death just by chance, but not without avoiding a nightmarish experience. In the personal story of the Israeli spy, we follow the fate of all the Greek Jews of Thessaloniki. The tone of her narrative is as serious and tragic as the one told by Leventis and also sharp and realistic. In fact, in this narrative, the boundaries between traumatic personal memory and the tragic historical experience of an entire group become almost invisible. The meeting between Gunther and Eskenazi takes place in the Panathenaic Stadium, an important monument of Ancient Greek civilization. This place evokes a set of particular historical memories, from the original ancient Greek Olympics to the first modern Olympic Games of 1896, which took place in this stadium, but also the Olympics of 1936, organized by Hitler’s government in Berlin. As such, the Panathenaic Stadium stands as a complex and multifaceted lieux de mémoire.

The multifarious character of Eskenazi’s narrative also refers to two fundamental elements of the crime fiction genre and especially the noir style. These elements are directly linked with the representation of the Shoah. Firstly, a feeling of suspense is dominant, as an invisible sniper lurks in the shadows, poised to press Gunther into helping the Israeli secret agent. According to Todorov, suspense is a key feature of the style of crime fiction which he refers to as ‘noir’ (the ‘thriller’, in the English translation), in which “everything is possible, and the detective risks his health, if not his life” (47). The second fundamental element is the use of black humour, which operates to both undercut and emphasize the aforementioned tension and seriousness. When Eskenazi warns Gunther that a sniper has him in his sights, Gunther muses:

I said nothing but I was suddenly feeling very uncomfortable, like I had a persistent itch on my scalp and all the Drene shampoo in the world wasn’t going to fix that. I sat down again, quickly. Now I really did want a cigarette. (297)

Laura Major notes that in Kerr’s first three novels featuring Bernie Gunther, it is through “the sardonic, wise-cracking fashion of the hard-boiled detective” and “in ironic thought and speech” that “Gunther resists the Nazis” (2019: 5). Moreover, according to Antony Lake, irony and humour are utilized throughout the whole series (2016). Gunther begins his career as an officer of the Kripo (Kriminalpolizei—Berlin’s criminal police). Thus, he inevitably participates, without having a choice, in the crimes and violent acts of the Nazis. This part of his life haunts him for years, and irony and humour are his attempt to deal with guilt. However, “when that irony reaches the limits of its representational power, the series turns its attention to its protagonist’s guilt about his role in the Holocaust” (Lake 2016: 105). This remark applies also to the feelings that Gunther expresses towards Eskenazi:

‘Would it make any difference now if I said I’m sorry?’

‘Good God’. The woman next to me laughed and then covered her mouth. ‘That’s a surprise. I’m sorry but you’re the first German I’ve met since the war who ever said sorry. Everyone else says, “We didn’t know about the camps” or “I was only obeying orders” or “Terrible things happened to the Germans, too”. But no one ever thinks to apologize. Why is that, do you think?’

‘An apology seems hardly adequate under the circumstances. Maybe that’s why we don’t say it more often’. I reached for my cigarettes and then remembered I’d given them to Arthur Meissner. (297)

Insofar as history in Greeks Bearing Gifts is deeply connected with personal memory, Kerr suggests that truth—historical truth—can only ever be subjected, despite the presence of figures of narrative and political authority like Gunther and Eskenazi. Moreover, in the efforts by the Greek authorities to cover up the crimes of the Nazi invaders and their native collaborators, we can see how official history—or History with a capital H—is better understood as an ideological social construction. And yet Kerr does not want to go as far as to embrace an ‘anything goes’ postmodern historical relativism and deny that certain historical events took place—that is, that particular episodes and events happened and had very real and far-reaching consequences. This kind of truth is represented at the level of narrative by Gunther’s investigation and the expectation that the excavations of the hard-boiled detective will reveal what really took place—even if Gunther is unable to bring all the perpetrators to justice. As a criminal investigator and at the same time a historian, Gunther constructs the ‘story of the investigation’ not to solve a specific, individualized crime, but rather to show how official or state-sanctioned versions of history are riddled with omissions, fabrications, and outright lies.

As a detective, and as a historian, Gunther’s actions are rooted in humanist and democratic ideals, which are more typically hidden behind the cynical and sardonic outlook and behaviour of the hard-boiled gumshoe. As such, Gunther’s socio-political perspective is aligned with a humanist understanding of Marxism, a perspective detached from the two extremes of the Cold War: the post-war Capitalism of the West and the Communism of the Eastern Bloc. Gunther’s attempt to reveal the truth about the Greek Jews takes place in the context of a larger antifascist, anti-authoritarian and democratic struggle. Gunther’s preference for ‘democratic Marxism’ is explicitly mentioned in at least two parts of the novel, yet it is not clearly associated with the Shoah. However, in the following excerpt, the connection between Marxism and a particular account of history is clear. The dialogue that takes place is between Gunther and Elli Papantoniou, a young and beautiful lawyer with whom Gunther has a love affair:

‘I thought we weren’t going to talk politics’.

‘This isn’t politics. This is history’.

‘There’s a difference?’

‘Don’t you think there is?’

‘Not in Germany. Politics is always about history. Marx certainly thought so’.

‘True’.

‘I’m a Marxist’, I said. (259–260)

In Greeks Bearing Gifts, such politicization of history and historicization of politics come together in the novel’s efforts to excavate the traumas suffered by the Jewish community of Thessaloniki. Gunther’s claim to be a Marxist makes sense not in the specific context of the Cold War and the fracturing of leftist politics into different Marxist sects but rather in a more general antifascist and humanist sense (e.g. opposing the alignment of states and capitalism and trying to give dignity and truth to the exploited and oppressed). Gunther’s investigation may not have all the answers but it demonstrates how crime fiction can excavate historical truths and in doing so can bring about a measure of justice for those caught up in the traumatic events of the past.

Conclusion

Greeks Bearing Gifts is not only a representative novel of historical crime fiction but also a work in which crime fiction is imbued with a set of concrete socio-political ideologies. In fact, with this novel, Philip Kerr connects crime fiction with public history, as he dynamically intervenes in the recent efforts to critically reflect on the extermination of the long-standing Jewish community of Thessaloniki by the Nazis during the German Occupation of Greece. In doing so, Kerr, as British novelist, writing from the perspective of a former Nazi cop whose sympathies are aligned with the murdered Jews of Thessaloniki and to a humanist version of Marxism, enacts and participates in a more general European project underscored by efforts to better understand the past (and past crimes) and by a politics of antifascism, critical thinking and democratic values. The dynamic and clear-eyed political intent of the novel is in constant interaction with elements of the hard-boiled style—for example, the graphic depiction of violence and the dark sense of humour—as they are expressed by the actions and thoughts of Bernie Gunther. In Greeks Bearing Gifts, Kerr, as Marxist, as British crime fiction writer and as European, shows us how an activist political stance can be effectively incorporated into a crime novel that can entertain as well as educate.