A PARAGON OF VIRTUE

author:
CHRISTIAN VON DITFURTH

Fiction
250 pages
The Toby Press

Germany is a country of a rich and deep cultural heritage, though the mid-century Third Reich remains an appropriately delicate area of discussion in the realm of fiction. Historian Christian von Ditfurth sensitively mines Nazi-era history for his first novel featuring the academic Josef Stachelmann, a failed historian who grapples with not only a series of period-related murders but also his own connection with the past in A Paragon of Virtue.

For the last decade, the family of wealthy and prominent Hamburg citizen Maximilian Holler has been murdered, one by one. The police have no leads until they decide to dig deeper into Holler’s past and potential enemies: Holler’s deceased father gained much of his business and wealth through ill-gotten transactions forced from Jews in the late thirties, and now someone wants revenge.

Enter Stachelmann. Though originally enlisted for assistance from an old friend on the police force, Stachelmann takes his own half-hearted route into the investigation when his ideas are not pursued, which places him in the line of a killer who will not let one middle-aged historian get in the way of his vendetta.

Stachelmann is a sympathetic character through and through: he painfully suffers from rheumatoid arthritis, bouts of which leave him incapacitated; he has long worked on his definitive academic treatise on Nazi concentration camps, a tome that will gain him tenure and respect, but his office contains a mountain of paperwork and photocopies that weighs on his mind even as he cannot bear to sort through it; he has difficulty making conversation with the attractive graduate student who seeks out his attention, even growing paranoid that she might have been sent from the department head to spy on him.

In every way Stachelmann reeks of disappointment, yet his weary determination to take a few more steps on his inflamed joints, to interview one more witness, to find the documents he needs to solve the murder belie his own self-admitted failures. The man has not yet given up.

Von Ditfurth writes a solid murder mystery, dealing almost pragmatically with the crooked Nazi businesses that gave his characters wealth and prestige, but between his efficient lines lie a hidden history, and in this in particular the novel gains its depth. Modern Germany still struggles with its cultural identity in light of its recent past, leaving whole generations grappling with the concept that their parents or grandparents may have been cogs, no matter how big or small, in the Nazi machine. Stachelmann’s issues with his father, a low-level policeman who guarded deportees during the Third Reich, reflect this modern Germany trying to come to uneasy terms with its past.

In translation, the prose is sometimes beautiful, the dialogue is usually wooden, and the language overall seems stilted and awkward. This style will no doubt be a turn-off for many readers, but persevere: this is one book where the intent is greater than the (translated) execution, and with any luck English-speaking readers will soon have more Stachelmann mysteries to rouse and intrigue.

purchase at Amazon.com