The Novelist from Berlin by V.S. Alexander
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I received this book for free, this does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review
The warnings were in front of us, but we didn't pay attention.
Starting in 1929 Berlin, The Novelist from Berlin is told all from Niki, a woman coming of age in Germany after WWI, and inspired by the real life novelist Irmgard Keun. Divided into two sections, the first half delivers on the sense of dread as Hitler and his cohorts begin to creep closer to power. Niki starts off young, early twenties and sees how, while Germany seems to be a place experimenting with being open to progressive ideals, their downfall from WWI has embittered the people. The economy isn't in a great place after losing the war and with money tight, Niki working as a typist, seems to see some escapism when she meets an older man, Rickard, an owner of a movie studio. While she seems genial to him, it's more of a sense of security bonding her to him as the SA (Sturmabteilung – Brownshirts) start to begin terrorizing citizens. When the movie Niki was given a small part in gets shut down for “indecency” she turns to her first love, writing. With Rickard, now her husband, kowtowing to the Nazis party and allowing his studio to be used for propaganda, Niki starts to plan a way to escape, hiding her proceeds from her first book published, one that she must hide her identity when it too gets banned for being indecent.
For us, dread, loathing, and fear were fast becoming a way of life.
While this first half moved along at a good pace to get from 1929 to 1939, I still felt the story did a good job staying and bringing in humanity through the characters. Niki, is of course, the one readers get to know the most and follow along on her struggle to want to stay safe but also push back against the SA. Real life historical figures and events, Goring, Goebbels, Night of the Long Knives, etc. are integrated and make appearances. The sense of dread is done well here, as readers know what is on the horizon. Niki ends up having to escape Germany, leaving her daughter and Rickard, who she no longer has feelings for, and goes to Amsterdam with her new lover Emil.
Every action the Nazis took was designed to break, to destroy, to make freedom impossible for anyone other than their own kind.
With a little under four hundred pages, taking a story from 1929 to the 1960s is a huge undertaking and I think the second half showed this difficulty. Book two has to abandon some of the personal character touches in favor of time jumping, only hitting on more huge moments. The Nazis make their way to Amsterdam, where they set-up the Ghetto and commit more atrocities. There's a little bit of Niki joining the Dutch resistance but it felt more like a blip and then her love Emil, a Jewish man, is taken by the Nazis. This has Niki going back to Berlin, the character claims it's because she might have some connections to find out where Emil is and search for her daughter but it feels more forced as a way to have the character in Berlin for the Airlift and Russians coming.
I've lived through the Great Depression, Hitler, World War II, the Berlin Airlift, and the Berlin Wall. Many mornings I wonder how I survived these catastrophic events. There's no easy answer to that question.
There's some with Niki connecting with friends and working to do a little resistance but the latter second half time jumps so quickly, it really was a whiplash of historical events; if you didn't know the true historical history with that built in context, you'd be whiplashed into confusion. The arrival of the Russians brings the end to WWII and Niki sort of befriends a Russian captain who gives her access to Rickard, jailed for his help in creating Nazis propaganda, and he tells her he sent their daughter off with a housekeeper to try and save her from Russian soldiers. This leads to years of time jumps and some explanation of how Berlin was divided up between the Allied Forces and the eventual building of the Berlin Wall. In these time jumps, Niki does find her daughter and some of her trying to build trust there and more trying to rescue and find a place to settle in peace.
The first half delivered on some emotional angst of what the character of Niki would go through in the rise of Hitler in Berlin but the second half was such a speed through of historical events that the personal touches got left out, Emil's fate is eventually learned but hardly spent any time with. If you were looking for less of an emotional fictional accounting and more of a bare bones quickly hit on the important dates, with a touch of inspired by a real woman, this could do the trick.
