Tangled Web UK Review June 2008
Death in Breslau by
Marek Krajewski
pbk out September 08
(Quercus)
at £7.99
Every once in a while, a truly unique piece of writing comes your way. A singular vision. This one comes from the pen of Marek Krajewski, a lecturer in Classics at the University of Wroclaw, Poland, who has chosen to write about his hometown’s pre-war incarnation as the German town of Breslau.
The book opens in a psychiatric unit in Dresden in 1950. The Stasi are very interested in a patient called Anwaldt, who has a great fear of insects. To learn why, we are taken back to Breslau in 1933, and Madame Le Goef’s brothel. It is a place of exotic pleasures both Oriental, bacchanalian, and German bawdy. Taking his pleasure there is the deputy Head of the Criminal Dept of the Police, Counsellor Eberhard Mock. His curious interest is to play chess with two attractive ladies, and if he loses, then he has a frustrating evening back with his wife. This time, his chess is interrupted by his assistant Forstner, because Mock’s sponsor, and fellow Mason, Baron von der Malten, has a daughter who has been murdered in exotic circumstances. The young woman and her governess have been found raped, with their stomachs slashed open. Inside them are writhing scorpions. Chief Muhlhaus wants a quick resolution, and doesn’t care if a jew, a mentally defective pervert or a Mason is convicted. Mock is also being pressed by the baron not to expose the Masons. With Nazi plant Forstner looking over his shoulder, Mock is forced to cooperate with the Gestapo, who are growing in power and control. A supplier of exotic insects, Friedlander also happens to be Jewish and epileptic. The Gestapo beat a confession out of him, and Mock complies with their suggestion he close the case, especially as in return he takes over Muhlhaus’s post. The trouble is, a year later the baron is threatened with death by scorpions, and an alcoholic policeman from Berlin, Anwaldt, is brought in to rescue his career. He and Mock are drawn into a Byzantine plot going back to the Crusades, and satanic sects before the truth emerges.
The atmosphere of pre-war 1930s Germany seeps out of every seedy pore of this story. We are presented with perverted aristocrats, corrupt ministers, and evil Nazis who have no qualms about beating Jews to death and turning their daughters into drugged whores. The darkly occult mood pervades everything to do with the politics of the time, and the sinister arm that is stretching from the past in search of retribution. The fact that Mock is a fallible character with his own weaknesses counts for nothing because of the cesspit in which he has to wallow. By the standards of those crawling around him, he is a paragon of virtue. Danusia Stok’s tight prose translation mirrors the terse, carefully calculated writing of the original. This is only the first of four Eberhard Mock novels that Krajewski has written, so we can look forward to more of the same. They cannot come soon enough.
translated by Danusia Stok
(
Ian Morson
Author of Falconer books and short listed for 1999 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Dagger)
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