THE GOSSIP COLUMNIST

In Burke’s historical novel, a gossip columnist harboring a dangerous family secret struggles to counter pervasive propaganda in Nazi-era Germany.

In 1929, when Bella is first made a junior gossip columnist at the Vosstiche Zeitung newspaper, she is humiliated by the frivolity of the assignment, but she quickly decides that “gossip is the real news!” She longs to write about the bottomless prurience of the Nazis in the “sexual circus” that Berlin has become, their sexual perversions thinly veiled by a posture of moral righteousness. However, Josef Goebbels, the Nazis’ Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, controls all public communication. Bella is reduced to writing in code, employing “varying levels of irony” (“unfortunate events meant a bloody rampage by Nazi thugs”). Meanwhile, her impossibly beautiful younger sister, Karin, a pornographic actress, unfortunately catches Goebbels’ eye. Once Bella’s esoteric sardonicism is eventually detected and she is dismissed from her job, she disappears into the underground and devotes herself to exposing Goebbels as an insatiable sexual deviant in a small act of political defiance—and possibly as a means to protect her sister. Bella also guards a perilous secret: Her grandmother was a Jew, a fact that, if discovered, could mean the end of her entire family. In this engrossing novel, Burke brings to vivid life the “desolation of the years” following World War I and the sexual licentiousness that came to characterize Berlin. This provided ample opportunities for manufactured moral indignation; Goebbels, a “misshapen, bulbous-eyed, lecher” is a perfect exemplar of this duplicity, an amoral monster charged with shaping the German soul through cinema. The weakest part of this captivating tale is the author’s depiction of Karin, who never seems like a fully realized human being. However, the work as a whole is dramatically absorbing and truly eye-opening; the author’s research into the Nazis’ perversions, as well as their intramural disputes over power, is impeccable. Burke manages, with impressive literary artistry, to shed some light on a historical conundrum: How did such unabashed savagery spring from such a famously refined national culture?

A stunning novel crackling with historical insight.