ESCAPING BERLIN

A historical novel, set during World War II, in which a German soldier seeks to escape war-torn Berlin.

Monahan’s work opens in January 1945 in the ruined German capital, where a damaged local man is wandering the rubble. Reinhardt Schmidt has been wounded, and as he recovers, he finds himself deeply disillusioned (“to the generals who never saw me,” he bitterly reflects, “my name was Cannon Fodder”). He now works in the Relocation Bureau of a city that’s been devastated by three years of relentless Allied bombings, and even as he receives a performance award from Adolf Hitler himself (whom he thinks of as a monster), Schmidt is scheming to escape the city under an assumed name before the Führer dies and the swiftly approaching Russians arrive to exact vengeance. As Monahan’s narrative unfolds, Schmidt finds that his plan is complicated by two things: the fact that his picture is taken at his award ceremony, opening up the chance that a newspaper reader will recognize him, and the fact that he’s been transferred to the Berlin police, where he’ll be under scrutiny. Schmidt hopes to swap a dead body for his living one, and use counterfeit paperwork to escape the city without alerting anyone, including cop Helmut Pfeiffer, to the scheme. There are many other variables at play, of course: Schmidt must keep a worried eye on everything from his own work schedule to the jittery rhythms of the war itself: “I needed after-work hours to create another relocation permission certificate,” he worries at one point, callously adding that he “also depended on one or two days off in case the weather cleared and another large air raid should produce a new crop of corpses.” 

Monahan shapes his story with a great deal of skill and considerable, low-key eloquence, as in this passage, in which Schmidt walks with a young Jewish woman he’s known since his teens: “I followed after Ruth into the slate-shadowed city of the dead,” he writes vividly at one point. “Despite the darkness she moved with assurance, gliding through the markers and statues with the noiseless grace of a ghost.” The author also wisely makes the decision to portray his main character, who resembles an Aryan figure on a Nazi recruitment poster, as a deeply flawed and ambivalent figure. Readers will sympathize with the urge to leave a city that’s referred to as a “de facto prison,” but they’ll squirm at the main character’s amoral, by-any-means-necessary approach. Monahan’s dialogue is sharp as well, and the author allows it to carry considerable weight in the narrative. In one representative exchange, a character taunts Schmidt for his seemingly robotic attitude, which appears to lean into the Third Reich’s toxic mythology of manliness. “I have all my emotions,” he snaps back. “I'm simply trying to control them until the war ends.” It’s a mark of Monahan's narrative skill that readers can hear Schmidt’s sincerity in such moments while neither believing him nor sympathizing with him.

A smart and unexpectedly moving wartime drama.