Catharsis through crime fiction

Christoph Ernst talks about how he uses history to fuel his writing, and the art of the Krimi-Roman novel

September 21, 2016 07:55 pm | Updated 07:55 pm IST

German historian and crime fiction author Christoph Ernst brandishes what he calls ‘a mastodon cell phone’ before settling down to talk to us. A mastodon is a large extinct elephant-like mammal, so you get the idea how the phone looks. “One of the pleasures of being a writer is that one can wilfully posses a ‘pre-historic’ cell phone which effectively obviates unnecessary social chatter,” he affably quips. The tall, multifaceted 58-year-old is a dead ringer for the late American actor Jack Palance.

An accomplished writer, whose interests range from vintage cars to film noir , Ernst was recently in Pune for a series of creative writing workshops on the craft of crime fiction at the invitation of the Goethe Institut-Max Mueller Bhavan.

The usual suspects

Ernst cites the works of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James Cain, the trinity of hard-boiled American crime fiction canon, as formative influences. “James Cain, especially, has had an indelible influence on me. Mildred Pierce and The Postman Always Rings Twice are models to be emulated for any aspiring crime fiction neophyte,” says the author who has studied history in Hamburg and New York.

For Ernst, the Krimi-Roman or crime fiction novel is an effective and subtle prism through which to dissect and detect a country’s past. “My first book was a non-fiction one, which featured a series of interviews with survivors of labour camps, especially the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany. The interviews were a revelatory experience and I married my grounding as a historian to the ‘entertaining’ genre of crime fiction to tease out the complexities of our turbulent past,” says Ernst, who generally shies away from the literary limelight.

Nordic noir and more

In the last decade or so, lovers of crime fiction have consumed a tidal wave of Nordic crime fiction, including the wildly popular works of Henning Mankell and the late Stieg Larsson. The Scandinavian genre, dubbed Nordic noir , has also spurred a renaissance in the German Krimi-Roman.

“There’s definitely a trend in German crime fiction to employ history to dissect the scars of the past. German crime fiction is certainly more exciting now than it was in the 1980s or 90s, when the stories were much lighter. The Krimi today is darker and more meaningful, albeit eschewing complexity at times,” says Ernst in his precise, unaccented English.

The resuscitation of German crime fiction began with then first-time writer Andrea Maria Schenkel, whose 2006 novel The Murder Farm ( Tannod in German) sold more than a million copies in Germany alone and was later translated into 20 languages. Schenkel’s book, a slice of dark social history, is a slim, 150-pager, which recounts the gruesome axe murder of a family in 1920s Bavaria and opens a window to the bigoted, parochial Catholicism of Southern Germany where Hitler first made his mark.

Scars of the past

Since then, a rash of innovative German authors have used the genre to deal with the country’s guilt-wracked past and tackle the dual scars of the Second World War and the legacy of Stalinist Communism.

Like Schenkel, lawyer Ferdinand von Schirach — the grandson of Nazi Youth leader Baldur von Schirach who stood trial in Nuremberg — made waves with The Collini Case ( Der Fall Collini , 2011), a courtroom thriller in which he based a character on his grandfather to investigate the burden of post-war guilt.

But Ernst, through his ‘Jacob Fabian’ novels, probes deeper than his hallowed contemporaries, dealing with universal questions such as the immense psychic weight of accumulated time, the elusiveness of justice, and the unreliability of memory in an incisive way. “The name ‘Jacob Fabian’ owes its origin to author Erich Kastner. It is taken from the 1932 Weimar-era classic Fabian, which explores a crumbling society,” he says. Kastner is most famous for his enduring 1929 children’s classic Emil and the Detectives .

Private eye Fabian

Ernst says about his fictional creation, “My objective is not merely to create yet another quirky ‘private eye’ series, but rather use him to probe into the deepest recesses of German history.” In Ansverus-Fluch ( Curse of Ansverus ), Fabian stumbles to solve the mystery of a murdered man who had discovered the mummified body of a Slav lady, who in turn was murdered nearly 1,000 years ago at the same site where a ‘St. Ansverus’ was stoned to death in 1066 C.E.

Along with a pastor, Fabian urgently rifles through history and stumbles upon a secret society called ‘Brotherhood of Ansverus’, which still exists and has helped move some Nazi war criminals out of the country as late as 1946.

The novel harks back to the days before the First Crusade and examines the relations between Germany and Russia, the Teutons and Slavs, and obliquely traces the problems when Hitler waged his rassenkrieg (‘race war’) against a Soviet Union ruled by Stalin in 1941.

“The book operates at multiple levels: as an unobtrusive narrative of relations between Germans and Slavs, and the paring away of the myth of local martyr ‘St. Ansverus’, which was deliberately created by a medieval Germanic elite to rally arms with the objective to expropriate more land from the Slavs. You could liken Ansverus to an 11th century Horst Wessel [the Nazi youth whose death was exploited by the party for political propaganda],” explains Ernst.

In Ernst’s 2012 novel, Dunkle Schatten ( Dark Shadows ), an elderly lady, who goes to reclaim her property expropriated by the Nazis in 1938, is found dead under mysterious circumstances. The novel straddles a vast period in history as its finely-etched characters cope with the ideological ravages of Nazism, East German Communism and even ‘left-wing’ anti-Semitism. Passages from the book were read out at the recently concluded Pune International Literature Festival, 2016, to wide applause.

Another novel, Kein Tag fur Helden ( No day for heroes , 2008), sees Fabian confounded with the success of a celebrity author who is accused of plagiarising the work of a novelist banned by the Nazis in 1938.

With his brilliantly unconventional plots, Ernst’s novels hew closer to the British crime fiction tradition than the Nordic one, resembling the masterpieces of Josephine Tey or the best books of Anthony Price, whose David Audley novels often deal with the legacy of a tumultuous past. Yet, his books have regrettably not found an English publisher. While Ernst’s books may not be catnip for the commercial market, his novels are grounded in historical research and, more importantly, ask tougher questions which his fellow genre authors might shy away from at times.

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