Contemporary European Crime Fiction: Representing History and Politics 3031219783, 9783031219788

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CRIME FILES

Contemporary European Crime Fiction Representing History and Politics

Edited by Monica Dall‘Asta Jacques Migozzi Federico Pagello Andrew Pepper

Crime Files Series Editor

Clive Bloom Middlesex University London, UK

Since its invention in the nineteenth century, detective fiction has never been more popular. In novels, short stories and films, on the radio, on television and now in computer games, private detectives and p ­ sychopaths, poisoners and overworked cops, tommy gun gangsters and cocaine ­criminals are the very stuff of modern imagination, and their creators a mainstay of popular consciousness. Crime Files is a ground-breaking series offering scholars, students and discerning readers a comprehensive set of guides to the world of crime and detective fiction. Every aspect of crime writing, from detective fiction to the gangster movie, true-crime exposé, police procedural and post-colonial investigation, is explored through clear and informative texts offering comprehensive coverage and t­ heoretical sophistication.

Monica Dall’Asta • Jacques Migozzi Federico Pagello  •  Andrew Pepper Editors

Contemporary European Crime Fiction Representing History and Politics

Editors Monica Dall’Asta University of Bologna Bologna, Italy Federico Pagello University of Chieti-Pescara Chieti, Italy

Jacques Migozzi University of Limoges Limoges, France Andrew Pepper School of Arts, English & Languages Queen’s University Belfast Belfast, UK

ISSN 2947-8340     ISSN 2947-8359 (electronic) Crime Files ISBN 978-3-031-21978-8    ISBN 978-3-031-21979-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21979-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 7 chapters are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see license information in the chapters. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Charles William Lupica / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Monica Dall’Asta, Jacques Migozzi, Federico Pagello, and Andrew Pepper Part I Contemporary European Crime Narratives about World War I and World War II  23 2 Where’s  the Empire? Loss, Geopolitical Agency and Imperial Longing in Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs Series 25 Maarit Piipponen 3 The  Fingerprints of Fascism: Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther Novels, Nazi Noir, and the Continuing Presence of the Past 41 Eric Sandberg 4 Noir  Bearing Gifts: The Greek Shoah and Its Memory in Philip Kerr’s Greeks Bearing Gifts 59 Christos Dermentzopoulos, Lampros Flitouris, and Nikos Filippaios

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5 Confronting  Memories: The Case of Babylon Berlin 75 Massimiliano Coviello Part II Contemporary European Crime Narratives about the Post-World War II Era  93 6 Crime  for a Higher Cause: The Baader Meinhof Complex and The Left Wing Gang 95 Gunhild Agger 7 No  Future and Spectrality in David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet113 Marco Amici 8 The  Trails of a Counter-Narrative: The Representation of the Years of Lead in Loriano Macchiavelli’s Sarti Antonio Series131 Silvia Baroni 9 D  idier Daeninckx, Le roman noir de l’Histoire (2019): Dismantling the Tale of French History through Disseminated Micro-Histories149 Alice Jacquelin 10 Revisioning  the Past to Build the Democratic Future: The Cases of Italian and Spanish Crime Fiction167 Stewart King and Barbara Pezzotti Part III Contemporary European Crime Narratives about the Post-1989 Era 185 11 How  Does Crime Fiction ‘talk politics’? Figures of Political Action in Contemporary French Crime Writing187 Lucie Amir

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12 Shadow  Economies: The Financial Crisis and European TV Crime Series209 Thomas Morsch 13 A  ‘Bottom-Up’ Approach to Transcultural Identities: Petra and Women Detectives in Italian TV Crime Drama229 Elena D’Amelio and Valentina Re 14 The  Excavation of History and the Quest for Identity in Contemporary Polish Crime Fiction253 Magdalena Tosik 15 Euroscapes:  Space, Place, and Multi-Level Governance in European Television Crime Series271 Caius Dobrescu and Anne Marit Waade Index291

Notes on Contributors

Gunhild  Agger is Professor Emerita at Aalborg University. Agger’s research covers a wide range of topics from the history of television drama, media and genres to national and transnational cinema. She was director of the collaborative, cross-disciplinary research programme Crime fiction and Crime journalism in Scandinavia (2007–11) and member of the research team What makes Danish Television Drama Series Travel? (2014–2018). She has published books on the history of Danish television drama and transnational television drama. Her articles have been published in anthologies and journals such as the Journal of Popular Television, Series, Kosmorama, Northern Lights and the Journal of Scandinavian Cinema. Marco Amici  graduated from the Sapienza University of Rome, and was awarded a PhD funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences from University College Cork (UCC). He is currently a lecturer in the Italian Department, UCC, where he teaches Italian culture and language courses at undergraduate and postgraduate level. His research interests include crime fiction, dystopian narratives and posthuman theory and he has published several articles in scholarly journals and edited volumes on Italian noir. In 2012 he edited The Black Album, a book-interview with the Italian crime writer Massimo Carlotto. Lucie Amir  is a former student of the École normale supérieure of Lyon and a PhD student in French Literary Studies at Limoges University. Her research focuses on French contemporary crime fiction and the ­relationship between literature and politics. She has taken part in the DETECt project. ix

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Silvia Baroni  Is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bologna where she has been involved with the DETECt-H2020 project. She has a joint PhD from the University of Bologna and the University of Paris-Est, with a thesis on the illustrated editions of Honoré de Balzac’s works. She is interested in contemporary European crime fiction in a comparative and transmedia perspective, European novels of the nineteenth century, and the relation between art and literature. She has published several articles in national and international academic journals. Massimiliano Coviello  is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Link Campus University. His research examines the relationship between images, witness and memory, as well as film and seriality. Among his publications are the books Comunità seriali. Mondi narrati ed esperienze mediali nelle serie televisive (Meltemi, forthcoming), Sensibilità e potere. Il cinema di Pablo Larraín (2017, co-authored with F.  Zucconi), and Testimoni di guerra. Cinema, memoria, archivio (2015). Monica Dall’Asta  is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Bologna, Italy. She is a one of the founding editors of the Women Film Pioneers Project, based at Columbia University, and served as Coordinator of the DETECt-Detecting Transcultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives project (2018–2021). Elena  D’Amelio is Professor of Media and Gender Studies at the University of San Marino, where she is also associated with the Center for Memory Studies and the Research Center for International Relations. Her main research areas include film history, stardom, gender and motherhood studies; transnational media; feminist media theories, celebrity studies and digital media. Among her recent publications on female investigators in popular culture, she co-authored with Valentina Re the article “Neither voiceless nor unbelievable: Women detectives & rape culture in contemporary Italian TV” (MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, 2021). Christos  Dermentzopoulos  is Professor of Anthropology of Art, Film and Cultural Studies in the Department of Fine Arts and Art Sciences at the University of Ioannina in Greece. He is also the Director of the History of Art Laboratory in the same faculty and editor at Metaihmio Editions for the series Alterities and Film Studies. He have published four book editions on popular culture, popular film and audience studies.

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Caius  Dobrescu  is a professor at the Bucharest University (Theory of Literature, Cultural History, Cultural Studies). He has authored books and studies on literature and politics in the Communist and post-­ Communist epoch, on the conflicting understandings of the notion of “bourgeois culture” and their impact on political and cultural modernity, and on the literary representation of corruption in modern culture. As a Fulbright Scholar affiliated with the Committee on Social Thought of the University of Chicago he has conducted research on terrorism and literary modernity. He has also authored four volumes of poetry and nine novels, five of which are crime fiction. Nikos Filippaios  Is a PhD candidate in the Department of Fine Arts and Art Sciences at the University of Ioannina and also a secondary teacher of Greek language and literature. He is a member of the DETECt consortia. Lampros Flitouris  is Assistant Professor of European Cultural History at the University of Ioannina and at the Open University of Greece. He studied History in Greece (Ioannina and Thessaloniki) and in France (University of Strasbourg, Pantheon-Sorbonne and Versailles). He gained his PhD from the University of Versailles and has been an invited professor at Limoges, Versailles and Lund University. He has also been primarily responsible for the DETECt research activities carried out for and by the University of Ioannina. Alice  Jacquelin  is a research and teaching assistant at Paris Nanterre University. She gained a PhD in general and comparative literature (‘country noir’) in 2019 and was a postdoctoral fellow in the European project H2020 DETECt. She is currently a member of the ANR POLARisation project on crime fiction. Her research focuses on media culture and popular literature. She was co-curator of the exhibition L’Europe du polar (2020) and co-edited an issue of the journal Cinéma&Cie on “Glocal Detectives” (2021). Stewart King  is a senior lecturer at the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. He is the author of Murder in the Multicultural State: Crime Fiction from Spain (2019) and co-editor of Criminal Moves: Modes of Mobility in Crime Fiction (2019), The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction (2020) and The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction (2022).

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Jacques  Migozzi  is Professor of French Literature at the University of Limoges, where he leads the Groupe de recherches sur les Littératures Populaires et Cultures Médiatiques. Having written about popular fiction for thirty years, he published a synthetical essay in 2005, Boulevards du Populaire, and has edited or co-edited twelve volumes or journal special issues. Thomas Morsch  has been Visiting Professor of Film Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin since 2016 and member of the DETECt research group since 2018. He received his PhD in 2008 from Freie Universität Berlin for a thesis on embodied perception and corporeal experience in cinema. Recent publications include a handbook of film theory (Handbuch Filmtheorie, co-edited with Bernhard Groß, 2021), a special issue of the Journal of European Popular Culture on identity in European television crime series (co-edited with Valentina Re, 2021), and an edited volume on media and tourism (Der mobile Blick. Film, touristische Wahrnehmung und neue Screen Technologien, 2022). Federico  Pagello  teaches Film and Media Studies at the University of Chieti-Pescara. His current research focuses on popular serial narratives and their transmedia circulation, with particular attention to the crime genre. His most recent monograph is entitled Quentin Tarantino and Film Theory: Aesthetics and Dialectics in Late Postmodernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Andrew Pepper  is Professor of English at Queen’s University Belfast. He is author of Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State (2016) and The Contemporary American Crime Novel (2000), and co-editor of Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction (2020). Barbara  Pezzotti  is a Cassamarca Lecturer in European Languages at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include crime fiction and popular culture, literary geographies and utopian literature. She has published on Italian, Spanish, New Zealand and Scandinavian crime fiction. She is the author of The Importance of Place in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction: A Bloody Journey (2012); Politics and Society in Italian Crime Fiction: An Historical Overview (2014); and Investigating Italy’s Past through Crime Fiction, Films, and TV Series: Murder in the Age of Chaos (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Her current project is provisionally entitled “Mediterranean Crime Fiction: Place, Gender, Identity”.

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Maarit Piipponen  is University Lecturer in English literature at Tampere University, Finland. Her research interests include crime fiction, spatiality and mobilities research, gender and ethnicity studies, and Orientalism and imperialism. She is the co-editor of Transnational Crime Fiction: Mobility, Borders and Detection (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and Topographies of Popular Culture (2016). Valentina  Re  is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Link Campus University of Rome, where she teaches Film History and Digital Media. Her main research areas include film, media and literary theories; media production, distribution and consumption; and film analysis, diversity studies and television studies. She is co-editor of the international journal Cinéma&Cie and the book series Narrazioni seriali. Among her recent publications on female investigators in popular culture, she co-authored with Elena D’Amelio the article “Neither voiceless nor unbelievable: Women detectives & rape culture in contemporary Italian TV” (MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, 2021). Eric Sandberg  is an assistant professor at City University of Hong Kong, and holds a docentship at the University of Oulu, Finland. He works on modern and contemporary literature, with an interest in the borderlands between literary and popular fiction. His monograph Virginia Woolf: Experiments in Character appeared in 2014. He co-edited Adaptation, Awards Culture, and the Value of Prestige in 2017 (Palgrave Macmillan), and edited 100 Greatest Literary Detectives in 2018. His companion to the work of Dorothy L. Sayers, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction, was published in 2021. His work has also appeared in journals including Ariel, English Studies and the Journal of Modern Literature. Magdalena  Tosik  is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Italian and Spanish Literature Studies at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland. She is the author of the book La interculturalidad en la traducción de la novela negra. El caso de la serie Carvalho de Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (2019). Her research interests focus on contemporary Hispanic literature and her current research explores the topics of collective memory and cultural identity within crime fiction. Anne Marit Waade  is Professor of Global Media Industries and Head of Media Studies and Journalism at Aarhus University. Her research focuses on the creative industry, screen tourism, promotional culture, location studies and landscapes in television series. She has published Wallanderland

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(2013) and co-authored Locating Nordic Noir (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Her research has been funded by national and international funding bodies, including projects on the international export of Danish television drama series (DFF), screen tourism destination development (Danish Innovation fund), travel series as television entertainment (DFF), and European crime series (DETECt, H2020).

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Monica Dall’Asta, Jacques Migozzi, Federico Pagello, and Andrew Pepper

European crime fiction is both the sum of its constitutive parts—the national crime fiction traditions of those individual states that comprise Europe—and a broader, transnational and transcultural phenomenon that offers insights for thinking critically about Europe, its past, present and future. This book on contemporary European crime fiction follows a similar pattern: while it endeavours to examine the way French, British, Polish and Italian, to name but a few, crime novelists and crime narratives

M. Dall’Asta University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy e-mail: [email protected] J. Migozzi University of Limoges, Limoges, France e-mail: [email protected] F. Pagello University of Chieti-Pescara, Chieti, Italy e-mail: [email protected] A. Pepper (*) School of Arts, English & Languages, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Dall’Asta et al. (eds.), Contemporary European Crime Fiction, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21979-5_1

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approach the related questions of ‘What and whose history?’ and ‘Which politics?’ within a discrete set of national frameworks, it also tries to illuminate those places or moments where the complex and at times contradictory meanings of Europe are brought into sharper focus. The starting point for our book is that crime fiction as genre is well placed to interrogate the attendant tensions. The EU’s longstanding commitment to open borders, democratic institutions, social and political cooperation, and the rule of law finds its equivalences in the genre’s search for justice (see Chap. 15), in its envisaging of new identities forged at the crossroads of nation, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class and religion (see Chaps. 2, 13, and 14), and through the models of trans-European collaboration necessary to bring television crime series to the small screen (see Chaps. 5, 6, 12, 13, and 15). Equally, crime narratives are adept at exploring heavy-handed policing and security initiatives and the threat of social breakdown, the exploitation of ‘free’ markets by commercial enterprises and organized crime (almost indistinguishable from each other) and of open borders by drug and people trafficking gangs, and the rise of xenophobic violence against perceived outsiders (see Chaps. 7, 8, and 12). The fact that this ‘open borders’ policy works for commodities but not for people is critically examined both by the genre and by contributors to this edition. Gulddal and King’s claim that “there is no common European crime literature” is offset by their acknowledgement that “transcontinental investigations and comparisons might […] be illuminating and reveal certain tendencies that are prominent among European crime authors from different nations” (2022: 196). We recognize their scepticism but argue that a broader European field is starting to emerge and is visible in this tension between its critical and more optimistic practices and elements.

The Internationalization of European Crime Fiction To even talk about, let alone construct a book-length study of, European crime fiction, rather than about the distinctive and overlapping crime fiction traditions in different European countries, is a relatively new phenomenon. The University of Wales Press series on European crime fiction is a case in point: with individual volumes looking at Italian, French, Scandinavian, Iberian and German examples, only one—Andrew and Phelps’ Capital Crimes (2013) focusing on crime fiction and the city— offers a broader pan-European focus. Certainly there have been significant and widespread moves to consider the internationalization of crime

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fiction—the genre’s so-called global turn—both as an acknowledgement of the genre’s capacity to circulate, historically and in the contemporary, across national borders and to try to combat the perceived dominance of the Anglo-US perspective in crime fiction studies (King 2014). Edited works by Matzhe and Mühleisen, Krajenbrink and Quinn, Anderson, Miranda, and Pezzotti, Pepper and Schmid, and Gulddal, King and Rolls have made notable contributions to this internationalizing initiative.1 The lack of critical attention paid to the specifically European dimension of crime narratives was one of the jumping off points for the DETECt research project (Detecting Transcultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives), funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme, from which this volume has directly emerged.2 The transnational framework of DETECt is necessarily concerned with civic and ethical issues linked to the construction of new, possibly cosmopolitan European identities in crime narratives—and concerned to think about how and why crime fiction is particularly well suited to examining and producing these new transcultural identities. If there is a marked tendency for critical studies of crime fiction and the transnational or ‘global turn’ to focus only on representation—how these processes are represented in or by specific crime narratives—the DETECt project, and, by implication, this volume, is just as concerned to map and interrogate the possibilities and limits of transculturation practices in terms of production processes and the ways that crime texts are read and understood by diverse audiences. Of the critical works that have paid attention to the essential characteristics of European crime fiction, the most complementary in approach to our volume is Gulddal and King’s chapter on European crime fiction in The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction, and their definition stands as a useful marker for our book: The term ‘European crime fiction’ […] refers not to an actual entity that can be described and defined exhaustively, but rather to a comparative opportunity that enables us to examine crime fiction from various countries in terms of their distinctiveness as well as their shared concerns and historical experiences. (198)

Gulddal and King are right in one sense to suggest that the central problem is one of scale—caught between the privileged site of the national and newly emerging field of global or world crime fiction, the “continental scale […] has found fewer advocates” both because “it sets uncomfortably

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at the halfway mark” and could be seen as trying “to resurrect outmoded European conceptions of the literary field” (196). Our transnational, comparativist approach to the crime genre certainly finds affinity with their account of crime fiction as world literature (2022; also see King 2014; Nilsson et  al. 2018), that is, “to explore the international dimension of crime fiction” and to reverse a more common tendency to see the global genre as “nationally bounded” (King 8, 9). Indeed, insofar as David Damrosch proposes that a “world literature” frame “doesn’t go global directly” but rather treats its subject as a “variable, contingent concept taking distinct forms in different national and regional contexts” (518), the category of Europe may actually be a more manageable proposition through which to explore the production and circulation of new identities and critical practices. For one of the central claims of this book, and of the DETECt project as a whole, is that crime fiction in Europe has increasingly worked as a driver of narrative ‘glocalization’ (Dall’Asta et al. 2021; Barra et al. 2021). In other words, insofar as the places of crime fiction have moved very far from the metropolitan centres to inhabit the remotest localities of the European continent, we are interested in exploring what this shift means regarding the production of new regional and indeed continental identities and the creation of reciprocal knowledge and understanding among transnational readers and audiences. Our book considers how the strains and symmetries between the national and the European can be identified at the level of representation—how these aspects are represented in particular crime narratives—but we are just as keen to investigate the different production cultures emerging across the continent and the extent to which these projects involve transnational cooperation among different media and enable what are often highly localized narratives to circulate across the entire continent (see Chaps. 5, 12, 13, and 15). This function of crime fiction in the transnational dissemination of localized narratives, however, does not operate without and beyond crucial systemic contradictions. The disproportionate power and influence of global television streaming/production giants like Netflix, Amazon and HBO has left specific regions in Europe, notably in the East (Kálai and Keszeg 2021), particularly dependent on their ‘largesse’. And whereas collaborations between state broadcasters and private companies speak powerfully to a vision of Europe-wide cooperation, the failure of the EU to put into practice effective policy and financing initiatives to bridge the gaps that still exist between its larger and smaller markets in terms of opportunities for the development of the cultural industries is also noticeable.

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European Crime Fiction as Political Critique To talk about the crime genre in the first place, of course, is to recognize the inherent comprehensiveness and elasticity of a category that speaks to and contains multiple forms and sub-genres and is always on the move, “constantly violating its own boundaries” (Gulddal, King, and Rolls 1). Two of the most popular expressions of the crime genre, the detective and spy novel, have long been identified as ‘sociological’ in their orientation (Boltanski). As such, these forms often tackle enigmas or conspiracies that are concealed within or by states, asking searching questions about the failure of liberal democracies and their criminal justice systems to deliver fairer societies (McCann). Likewise, following the example of US hardboiled fiction, the noir or néo-polar variant of the genre has also established itself as a ‘literature of crisis’ (according to Jean-Patrick Manchette’s formula), where the shredding of official truths and of ‘reality’ itself ends up revealing dark political motives and in turn a bleaker set of ethical and affective interrogations. While the obvious links between the ‘noir’ or néo-­ polar and hardboiled traditions of crime fiction (and, e.g., between crime writers like Manchette and Dashiell Hammett3) suggest a US–French or even trans-Atlantic network of affiliation, we want to use this model to think about the wider European development of crime narratives, following Manchette’s formulation, as an explicitly critical or political project. That is to say, as a body of work that exposes the corrupt links between states and corporations and attendant abuses of power and authority; that shines a light on the plight of the exploited and marginalized (though without any real faith in the possibilities of wider social transformation or even revolution); that shows how structural violence is embedded at the heart of capitalism; and that points the finger not at individuals who may indeed commit terrible crimes but at the larger social, economic and political systems that turn a blind eye to state and corporate malfeasance (Moretti 1983: 139). Chapters 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 think about what political commitment—as a wider European project—might look like in the face of a power that is both centralized in the practices of states and corporations and also increasingly hard to actually see insofar as it plays out in the humdrum interactions of everyday life. These interventions emphasize the work that crime fiction (as a ‘literature of crisis’) performs in  locating and shining a light on what would otherwise remain concealed, buried or pushed to the margins.

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Much work has been carried out into the political commitment, emphasizing a leftist politics and perspective, of crime fiction at a national level, that is, works that explore how the specific or individual crimes that typically set in motion crime narratives (and their investigations) end up exposing the corruption and violence at the heart of institutional and political life (see Chaps. 3, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, and 14). In France and Italy, the work of crime fiction as a form of political activism has been thoroughly investigated by Annie Collovald and Érik Neveu’s Lire le noir: Enquête sur les lecteurs de récits policiers (2004), De Paulis-Dalambert’s L’Italie en jaune et noir: La littérature policière de 1990 à nos jours (2010) and Barbara Pezzotti’s Politics and Society in Italian Crime Fiction: An Historical Overview (2014), while Nestingen (2016) has examined the political unmasking enacted by and in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium novels. Our book on European crime fiction picks up this mantle, and while paying attention to these national traditions—Amir’s chapter on French noir, for example, seeks to show how this idea of political commitment has been transformed and to an extent diffused in the contemporary era—it also tries to think about whether the kind of unmasking at play in much contemporary crime fiction might be understood as a European phenomenon.

History and Trauma What seems to motivate much of this practice, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, is a determination to unmask and interrogate the buried traumas and violence that characterize twentieth-century European history, notably in relation to World War II (see Chaps. 2, 3, 4, 5, and 10). Claire Gorrara explicitly links this ‘critical framing’ of crime fiction to the way in which the genre “engages with the struggles to understand the social, political and moral conflicts and dilemmas that the Second World War has bequeathed to France” and indeed other European countries (11–12). We place this imperative to interrogate the recent past—to assess and revise our collective understanding of what took place in 1945 or 1968 against the so-called historical record, to better see or comprehend the conditions of the present (and vice versa)—as a key motif or theme of European crime fiction (see Gulddal and King 209–217). In this volume, then, we want to uncover the ways in which the crime fiction genre, in its multiple guises, forms and media/transmedia developments, has sought to investigate these typically concealed, sometimes little-known histories, and the complex, murky political inclinations at play in doing so. By looking at this

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intersection of history and politics, and by giving our collection the sub-­ title Representing History and Politics, we do not mean to suggest that there are separate domains called ‘history’ and ‘politics’. Just as the act of historical retrieval is an intensely political one, as it draws attention to the knotty relationship between knowledge and power (whose history?), the contestation of political ideas and the emergence of a particular set of political discourses at a particular juncture reflects on the way official history is constructed—and alludes to how it might be questioned or overturned (see Chaps. 5 and 14). At stake here is the thorny question of how we bring an understanding of what happened in the past to bear on our sense of the present and future and in turn how this sense of presentism informs the shape of our historical understanding. Crime fiction approaches this task in a number of ways. First, what we might call, rather paradoxically, contemporary historical crime fiction seeks to recreate a particular historical moment and fashion an investigation that takes place solely within this frame (Scaggs 125). Marcin Wroński’s series, set in Lublin, Poland, in the inter-war years and featuring Detective Inspector Zygmunt Maciejewski, offers a fascinating insight into the society of the Second Polish Republic (1918–1939), notably its thriving Jewish community, both as an example of historical recovery and to fill in the gaps for contemporary Polish readers, for whom the depiction of an open, vibrant, multi-ethnic society could be seen as a reflection of the ambitions of the new post-1989 Polish state (see Chap. 14). It might also be interesting to weigh up Wroński’s tolerant and inclusive vision vis-à-vis the rather more conservative and indeed intolerant policies of the Law and Justice party which won the presidency and took the largest number of seats in 2015 and again in 2020.4 Secondly, in works by Didier Daeninckx and Eoin McNamee, for example, the narratives feature the attempts of a surrogate detective in the present of the story to excavate historical crimes. In the case of Daeninckx’s Meurtres pour mémoire (1984), translated into English as Murder in Memoriam, this relates to a demonstration in Paris in 1961 and the massacre of hundreds of French Algerian protestors at the hands of the police (see Chap. 9). In the case of McNamee’s The Ultras (2005), the investigations, past and present, dig into the complicity between army personnel and loyalist paramilitaries in the murders of the Miami Showband in County Down in 1975. In both examples, this excavation work has self-evident political implications: the exposure of state involvement in the murders of those deemed to be undesirable or expendable according to the prescriptive

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norms of ethnicity, class and/or religion and the suggestion that the state has an ongoing interest in hiding this involvement in the present. The issue for crime writers and for crime fiction scholars is to think about how well the ever evolving, elastic, open-ended, multiple forms of crime fiction can excavate and do justice to a past that is not simply past but rather is characterized by trauma and unreliable memory (see Chaps. 3, 4, 5, and 10). What is at stake when we try to collectively remember and in doing so confront the horrors, and the repressed traumas, of Nazism, fascism, colonialism/imperialism, military occupation, state violence and totalitarianism? In her work on crime fiction and trauma, Cynthia S. Hamilton argues that the consequences of traumatic events and trauma theory’s willingness to conceive of these events as violating and potentially unrepresentable opens a space to push against claims for the genre as conformist and ameliorating. Insofar as the violence of crime fiction—the sheer scale and reach of the violence of the Nazis, for example—“ruptures experience, precipitating incomprehension, disorientation and fragmentation” (2020: 318), there can be little expectation of the status quo being reinscribed. One consequence of this trauma, and of the disorientation and fragmentation it produces, is that it is difficult for individuals caught up in traumatic events to bear witness to them, which opens up the related concern of memory and how memory is often thematized by and in crime fiction texts as unreliable. Kate M.  Quinn, for  instance, considers how examples of crime fiction texts from Chile and Austria use the genre to address and prize open “historical amnesia and the hidden or silenced histories of state criminality” (2020: 310). This focus and understanding is useful for our consideration of the genre’s efforts to come to terms with the buried trauma and repressed memories of World War II and its aftermath (see Chaps. 3, 4, 5, 8, and 10): what can and cannot be recollected and what is at stake for individuals and governments in trying to do so.

Europe: Past, Present, Future Contemporary European Crime Fiction, then, looks both forward, examining new policing and criminal constellations and the emergence of new transcultural identities, and backward, at the ways that historic traumas, and repressed memories of these traumas, continue to shape our perception of Europe’s present. Indeed, it is our understanding that both moves are linked and that past, present and future are conjoined, as suggested by Michel Foucault’s famous formulation from Surveiller et punir (1975),

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translated as Discipline and Punish: the “history of the present” (1991: 31). The willingness of contemporary crime narratives to revisit particular aspects of World War II or the political uprisings of 1968 tells us as much about presentist anxieties, fears, hopes and preoccupations as about the historical events themselves (see Chap. 9). For example, the assertion of French noir writer Jean-Claude Izzo, in Chourmo (1996, tr. 2006), that “Beneath the paving stones there was never a beach. There was only power” (2009: 133) is both a retort to the Situationist refrain from the late 1960s and early 1970s5 and a contemporary belief that culture, including crime fiction, cannot be unproblematically hijacked or re-routed for politically radical ends. We argue that contemporary crime narratives can serve politically progressive ends (e.g. anti-capitalist, anti-racist, pro-­ feminist—see Chaps. 2, 12, and 13) but that these are inevitably compromised by the genre’s concomitant push towards compromise and resolution. Equally, what we might see as a countermove, characterized by hope for a more open, tolerant, democratic society, typically collapses in the face of crime fiction’s thematization of institutionalized corruption, inequality, and the ongoing effects of racism, misogyny and homo/ transphobia. The focus of this collection is intended to capture this emphasis on dark refraction, that is, European history and politics captured through a glass darkly of contemporary crime fiction. The comforts and reassurances that crime fiction can, at times, offer us are set against the pessimistic awareness that justice, under our current political dispensation, at a national and supranational level, may not be possible, and an acknowledgment of the impossibility of arriving at definitive, clear-cut answers about the meaning and truth of historical events. In all of this, and notwithstanding the ‘noirification’ of European crime fiction (where the emergence of regional noir designations—Nordic, Mediterranean, Tartan etc.—speaks to the growing political crisis enveloping the continent and efforts on the part of the genre to lay bare this crisis), we remain hopeful that European crime narratives, understood as de-territorialized and polycentric, can help to foster the propagation of a transcultural ethos, promote new forms of reciprocal knowledge (and new understandings of the multiple meanings of the past), and stimulate a cosmopolitan disposition to difference and diversity among transnational audiences. At the level of representation, this is certainly the case, as the chapters in this collection will demonstrate. And looking at the production context, it is also true that transnational hook-­ ups between state broadcasters in order to finance TV crime series about

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Europe’s past speak to a model of cooperation and consensus that is echoed in or by the EU’s efforts to understand its own past and plot its future.6 However, on a gloomier note, contemporary crime fiction lays bare the crises that have threatened the construction of a humanist European identity in line with the EU’s founding ideals. These narratives, therefore, deliver a powerful critique of certain political choices that have weakened the cohesion of Europe, planting the seed for nationalism and xenophobia. Likewise, the extreme fragmentation of the media market, the natural obstacles posed by European multilingualism, and the tendency to follow convenient pathways to proximity in the distribution of cultural products still hinder crime fiction’s potential for the dissemination of an expansive transculturality among European audiences. The noir aspects of crime narratives tell a related story. Contemporary European Crime Fiction: Representing History and Politics This volume has been arranged into three distinctive sections, which hopefully makes it easier for the reader to navigate and helps to delineate the book’s distinctive focus on the ways that contemporary crime narratives have sought to interrogate the ‘problem’ of history at a national and continental level and to engage with the political meanings of these attempts to represent this fraught and by no means agreed upon past. If the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marks one bookend of the volume, which looks forward to the opening up of Europe, east and west, north and south, and the closer economic, social and political ties between European countries and EU member states, the other bookend is the fallout of the war in Ukraine and the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, even if the significance of these events for our understanding of the Europeanness of crime fiction is not yet discernible and the crime narratives about these events are yet to be written and filmed. In the first section of the book, we examine European crime narratives about World War II (and the periods immediately before and after it) in order to think about the ongoing significance of this conflict for our multiple and at times contested understandings of national and European cultures and identities in the present. Maarit Piipponen’s chapter on British writer Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs novels uses the representation of the inter-war years and Britain’s geopolitical manoeuvrings to reflect both on imperial nostalgia and attempts to destabilize and remap spaces of class and gender along more

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progressive lines. Piipponen persuasively argues that the series offers a fantasy of female geopolitical agency at a time when women’s roles were typically a good deal more limited (e.g. secretaries and nurses rather than spies and code-breakers), and where Maisie’s travels around a Europe on the brink of war work to foreclose contemporary debates about the damaging consequences of Britain’s colonial practices. The complex bearing of past on present, and present on past, which is central to both histography and historical crime fiction, is used by Piipponen to think about this re-­ gendering of sovereignty and imperial nostalgia in light of contemporary anxieties about border security and migration—and about Britain’s fraught relationship with Europe, both historically and in our contemporary moment. Through Maisie’s investigations, we are invited to consider the effects of war on the individual and collective/national psyche, and to assess how or how far the novels’ discourse of nostalgia shuts down opportunities to reflect on the feminization of the public sphere and the creation of new identities at and across the borders of gender, nation and class. In his chapter on fascism and crime fiction, Eric Sandberg explores the legacies of the Nazi past as common denominator that connects European experiences across time and space, both in terms of the trauma of atrocity that afflicted many European nations during and after World War II and as an unruly and open-ended “buried history” in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century European popular culture. Specifically, Sandberg investigates how crime fiction, characterized as a genre invested or perhaps even overinvested in the past, operates as a narrative matrix through which to engage with the history and legacy of Nazism. As well as offering us a broad sense of this engagement, Sandberg focuses on the ways in which Phillip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels think about, and think through, the problem of crime. Rather than individualizing it, as is often the practice in hardboiled fiction, crime in these novels, connected as it is to a larger set of institutional practices that ultimately lead to the multiple sites of Nazi atrocities, can barely be apprehended or discerned, let alone solved. Most significantly, rather than seeing Nazism as a delimited phenomenon, historical in character and tied to the specific practices of National Socialism in Germany from 1933 to 1945, Kerr’s later works, especially the Gunther novels set in the post-World War II era, represent fascism as a spreading stain encompassing ever increasing numbers of individuals and social groups and ever larger swathes of European territory: part of a more general European past that refuses to remain buried.

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Christos Dermentzopoulos, Nikos Filippaios and Lampros Flitouris also consider one of Kerr’s late period Gunther novels, Greeks Bearing Gifts (2018), for the ways it engages with one of the darkest moments in twentieth-century Greek history: the extermination of the Thessaloniki Jews during the German occupation of Greece (1939–1944). While putatively operating as both crime fiction and historical fiction, engaging readers through the creation of suspense and filling in gaps in the so-called historical record, Kerr’s novel also furthers a historiographic argument about what it means to remember, and conversely to forget, past crimes. The authors argue that Gunther’s democratic and humanist perspective, informed by a particular understanding of Marxism, which Gunther openly acknowledges, sets in motion the act of historical recovery: what is to be recovered and why it is important to do so. Kerr’s novel is not treated as objective or official history but rather history from below— where new understandings and accounts of what occurred in the past emerge from eyewitness testimonies to contest and overturn received understandings. This chapter situates the novel’s effort to expose and draw attention to “the Greek Shoah” as part of a wider European move to think through the ongoing effects and buried trauma in the contemporary of World War II. The final chapter in this first part of the book, by Massimiliano Coviello, examines the German European television series Babylon Berlin (2017–), inspired by Volker Kutscher’s novels and distributed by Sky and Netflix across Europe and globally. Set during the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), this TV series speaks to the capacities of crime narratives to explore the ongoing effects of individual and collective trauma by following the life and investigations of Commissioner Gereon Rath, a man damaged by his experience in the trenches of World War I.  Coviello’s chapter shows us how Weimer Berlin is reimagined through its use of real-life locations and intertextual references to earlier cultural renditions of this historical period, as well as through a practice of international collaboration at the level of the production context. While Coviello argues that historical trauma is not necessarily something that can be easily overcome, he remains hopeful that the series’ unwillingness to turn a blind eye to Rath’s damage and the cooperation enacted at the level of production and distribution offer us a way of reckoning with the past so that we are not condemned to endlessly repeat its mistakes. The second section of the book considers European crime narratives that focus on the post-World War II era, up to and including the political

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uprisings of the late 1960s and 1970s. In doing so, the chapters collectively ask whether or to what extent the continent-wide social and political schisms that climaxed in May 1968 reverberate in the contemporary and can help us understand what kind of socio-political transformations might still be possible, in light of subsequent retrenchments by capital and the state. Gunhild Agger examines how two texts—The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008), a German film, and the Danish television miniseries The Left Wing Gang (2009)—represent domestic terrorism of the late 1960s and early 1970s but where the terrorist action is in support of the Palestinian cause. As such, the chapter asks whether or to what extent this willingness to explore the complex motivations of the protagonists allows us to expand our understanding of what constitutes crime in the first place. By offering a detailed account of the narrative scope and generic restlessness or hybridity of the texts, Agger considers the wider cultural significance of their thematizations of politics and political action, and of the complex interplay between criminal and politicized violence. Agger argues that the ‘dark heritage’ of European trauma and division is unearthed in these texts not just to recreate moments from our recent past but also to think about how a desire for radical political action and social justice continues to stalk our own present. The radical potential of crime fiction—its ability to overturn commonplace generic assumptions and to develop disorientating aesthetic practices that in turn speak to the need for wider political transformation—is explored by Marco Amici in relation to the work of British novelist David Peace. Peace is the author of the Red Riding Quartet—four crime or ‘noir’ novels set in Yorkshire between the early 1970s and early 1980s. Insofar as these works follow the traumatic events surrounding the real ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ murders and use these to explore the spectre of social and political impasse or collapse, Peace offers us a bleak portrait of stagnation and decay. But Amici’s framing of the Red Riding Quartet as socially engaged, following Jean-Patrick Manchette (to whom Peace owes a self-­ acknowledged debt), and his efforts to locate both a punk aesthetic and traces of spectrality in Peace’s writing, opens up a space for thinking about the possibilities for political transformation—although one that remains a fraught, agonized prospect. As such, Amici’s chapter proposes a reading of the Quartet in which the constitutive inability of Peace’s writing reflects the instability of a key moment in European history when, as Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi points out, the imagination of the future has collapsed into the present. Hence, beyond the immediate locality of Yorkshire and the

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spectral presence of the Yorkshire Ripper, Peace is able to render a European sense of ‘no future’—a politicized but undoubtedly bleak vision—which characterized the late Cold War period and whose traces can be located in our own present. Loriano Macchiavelli’s long-running crime or noir fiction series featuring low-ranking police detective Sarti Antonio is set during the same period as Peace’s Red Riding Quartet and responds to a similar set of political and historical contexts, even if, as Silvia Baroni argues, there is something distinctively Italian about the so-called Years of Lead: a period from the end of the 1960s to the start of the 1980s characterized by mass protests, terrorist attacks, political violence and state repression. Baroni’s chapter considers how this recent past is thematized and interrogated by Macchiavelli, both in the period itself, because the first Sarti novel was published in the early 1970s, and via practices of historical recovery, because Macchiavelli continued to write about this era up to the late 2010s. Baroni weighs up Macchiavelli’s complex treatment of the relationship between fiction and history to think about the burden and responsibilities of truth-telling and how our recollection of fictional and ‘real’ events, even traumatic events, is dependent on the tricks of narrative. Particular attention is paid to the figures of Sarti, an inept and physically compromised detective who stands as apotheosis of the hardboiled defective übermensch, and Rosas, a police informer and undergraduate student, who uses his grasp of history to see through the absences and falsities of the official historical record, a move which in turn upsets the cause–effect dynamics integral to the crime story’s push towards resolution. In line with other contributions to this volume, Baroni’s chapter considers the wider European implications of the genre’s move to keep certain memories and truths alive vis-à-vis official attempts to write them out of existence. This emphasis on memory and truth-telling is central to Alice Jacquelin’s account of the French noir novelist Didier Daeninckx, a seminal figure in the field of French crime writing for his project of exposing the French state’s guilt in the massacre of French Algerians in the 1960s and its collaboration with the Nazi administration during World War II. As an heir of the néo-polar, a term derived from Manchette, Daeninckx specializes in excavating memories that officialdom would rather remain buried. Jacquelin’s chapter examines Daeninckx’s 2019 magnum opus Le roman noir de l’Histoire. This is not a novel as historical document or as historical mimesis but rather a collection of seventy-six short stories that collectively recount eleven periods in French and European history from 1855 to

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2030—and where the emphasis is placed on the kaleidoscopic nature of micro-history (or rather history from below), that is, individual fragments that do not necessarily add up to a coherent whole. Jacquelin argues that Daeninckx’s move from the crime novel to short stories (where crimes occur) complicates the genre’s typical preference for linearity and where a single investigation is brought to resolution. As such, Daeninckx demonstrates how a (re)collection of literary snippets and snapshots and a gallery of fictional portraits can be more truthful and reliable than any historical tale or indeed any traditional crime story. In the final chapter in this section, King and Pezzotti continue this investigation into the complex relationship between memory and trauma and the intersection between crime fiction and history, to demonstrate how and why contemporary novelists in Italy and Spain have sought to critically reinterpret the traumatic events and episodes of the continent’s recent past. Their chapter offers a perceptive comparative analysis of two crime fiction series, by Carlo Lucarelli and Jordi Sierra I Fabra, set respectively during the Italian Fascist period (1922–1943) and the Francoist regime in Spain (1939–1975). It considers these novels as a response to contemporary debates about personal and collective responsibilities in the context of revisionist theories from the 1990s on fascism in both countries and the anti-Communist rhetoric of governments in Italy and the controversial Law of Historical Memory in Spain during the first decades of the twenty-first century. While this engagement with the past is conducted in the present, the resulting insights serve to construct new visions of the future. As such, memory is not fixed; it is a ‘project’, “an unfinished task” (Song 2016). In the context of these series, King and Pezzotti argue that in investigating past injustices, Lucarelli and Sierra I Fabra combine the past and the present with the aim of proposing an alternative political future via the construction of a democratic community (real and imagined) whose foundations are built on the recognition of past injustices and the symbolic provision of justice. This in turn speaks to a wider European hope or aspiration that new collective ways can be found to deal with the horrors of history. The third and final section of the book focuses on crime narratives set in, and told about, the contemporary era, which is characterized both by attempts to construct new transcultural identities across national borders and boundaries of ethnicity, gender, class and sexuality, and by the spectre of social, political and economic crises that threaten European cosmopolitanism and cooperation. These chapters do not claim that crime narratives

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are explicitly political in the sense that they stake out positions on, for example, the benefits of closer European integration; rather, they focus on crimes that are not easily seen, let alone resolved, and on the potential breakdown of social order, and suggest a society and justice system always under threat from within. Lucie Amir considers the legacy of political radicalism and also disenchantment, associated in France especially with the generation of 1968 and the emergence of the néo-polar, in contemporary French crime narratives. Her wide-ranging assessment suggests a genre or a field inhabited by disorientated, disillusioned cops and characterized by hazardous political trajectories and undecided commitments. Rather than exploring the political issues emerging from crime fiction, Amir’s chapter focuses on the representation of political attitudes themselves, to better understand the ambiguous nature of political commitment and disarray in the twenty-first century. Instead of dealing with one or two case studies in detail, Amir examines a large number of novels in which protagonists have to face significant political choices to assess how or how far our European-­ wide understanding of politics has moved on since the 1960s and early 1970s. Her analysis suggests that an emphasis on social engagement and political commitment has been replaced by novels that explore uncertainty, anxiety, doubt, ambiguity, contradiction and failure, a move that in turn speaks to the same forces playing out in crime narratives all across Europe. This emphasis on the way that contemporary crime narratives can interrogate complex political—and economic—ideas and data, without reducing these to straightforward good/bad, for/against positions, is picked up and developed by Thomas Morsch’s chapter that looks at the global financial crisis of 2008–2009. Morsch considers how (un)successfully crime narratives have been able to lay bare the origins, complexities and consequences of this crisis and delineate how or how extensively it afflicted European societies and economies. Looking at TV crime dramas, and particularly the Danish series Follow the Money (DR1, 2016–2019) and the German-Luxemburg show Bad Banks (ZDF/ARTE, 2018–2020), Morsch asks what fiction might be able to uncover about the financial crisis that news reports or documentaries might not have captured adequately. Given the invisibility of capital, the non-sensual nature of economic processes, the abstract nature of financialization and the ‘inhuman’ time regime of high-frequency trading, contemporary economics pose a significant challenge to any form of representation. This chapter considers whether popular crime narratives are guilty of reducing complex economic

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processes to simple stories about individual gain and failure, or whether these narratives can tease out particular aspects of the attendant crisis in ways that go beyond other forms or modes of representation. Morsch’s focus on European crime television series, and the complex mediations that such series enact or engender between representation and reality, is developed in a chapter by Elena D’Amelio and Valentina Re— even if D’Amelio and Re are more hopeful than Morsch that these “mediated cultural encounters” where “our own local reality and experience meets other European realities” (Bondebjerg et al. 2017) can help audiences to better understand what mutual understanding and cooperation they might be able to achieve. The chapter looks at how this process also influences the representation of gender identities, examining in particular the emergence of a distinctive type of female-centred crime drama in Italy in the wake of the success of similar female-led detective series in the Scandinavian countries (e.g. The Killing, 2007; The Bridge, 2011) and the UK (The Fall, 2013). While a ‘top-down’ perspective on the issue of gender equality might take the form of laws and policies underwritten by the EU’s commitment to shared values, D’Amelio and Re argue that the kind of ‘bottom-up’ perspectives that play out in TV dramas may actually be more useful or effective for helping audiences to critically interrogate the social stereotypes surrounding gender roles and their practical implications for their everyday lives. By closely examining the case of the recent Italian adaptation of Alicia Giménez-Bartlett’s series of novels focused on police detective Petra Delicado (in Sky’s show Petra, 2020–), they argue that these new crime dramas challenge stereotypes about gender and national identities at the same time, thus realizing the transcultural potential that we have attached to the very idea of European crime fiction. The extent to which crime narratives can help to foster and give substance to what is a rather vague concept of ‘imagined community’ is developed by Magdalena Tosik, though Tosik focuses primarily on a national (i.e. Polish) rather than wider European context. In her chapter, Tosik argues that Polish crime narratives, such as the Eberhardt Monk series penned by Marek Krajewski and Marcin Wronski’s novels featuring Detective Inspector Zygmunt Maciejewski, tend to pursue this question through a careful examination of historical inheritance, notably a focus on the inter-­war period in Poland when the country regained its independence (and before this independence was suppressed by the Polish People’s Republic, 1947–1989). It is inevitable that the burdens and traumas of history would resurface after a long period of suppression, a point made by

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Leder’s Prześniona rewolucja (2014). Following Leder’s careful examination of this subject, Tosik considers how the painful legacies of war, invasion and violence continue to haunt Polish crime fiction in the contemporary era and what kind of ‘imaginary’—transcultural, cosmopolitan, European— is possible in these circumstances. Her conclusions suggest that the attendant social worlds may not be ‘radical’ in the sense that they are realistically depicted and that they feature middle-class characters who are by and large content with their middle-class lives. But insofar as they recreate an interwar Poland that is cosmopolitan, diverse, open and progressive, these novels fill in the blanks of history and, in doing so, open up a culturally important space for new, and indeed older, identities to come to the fore. In the final chapter of this section and the book, Dobrescu and Waade map and interrogate the links between theorizations of European governance, specifically the concept of multi-level governance developed by Hooghe and Marks, and the representation of place in contemporary European crime television series, notably analysing how this representation gives narrative substance to the interplay between different tiers of bureaucracy and different jurisdictions and the particular challenges of solving crimes. Their chapter skilfully argues that television series and the storyworlds they create enact a version of multi-level governance (defined in terms of the related principles of devolution and localization) both through the way they represent crime-solving practices and at the level of production, via complex hook-ups between state television broadcasters and private corporations. Dobrescu and Waade’s chapter covers a lot of ground in terms of the range of television crime series considered, arranged by or according to different taxonomies of place and space, but a handful of exemplary texts become central to their unfolding argument. With its overlapping jurisdictions, The Bridge/Broen is a powerful example of the way that crime narratives experiment with fictional representations of non-­ tiered levels of governance and in doing so demonstrate the benefits of a more general commitment to public order at a local, regional and national level. The chapter tests the concept of multi-level governance—quintessential to the administrative philosophy of the EU—through the working out of criminal justice in series such as The Bridge, emphasizing not simply where multi-level governance works but also those areas where it frays and begins to break down. Importantly, Dobrescu and Waade are proposing a genuinely European framework for assessing the insights and achievements of a wide range of television series set in different national

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jurisdictions but similarly thinking about what can be achieved through the conjoined practices of devolution, localization and cooperation across state borders. Acknowledgement  This book presents  research results  stemmed from the DETECt: Detecting Transcultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives, a large collaborative project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme under grant agreement 770151.

Notes 1. Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühleisen, eds., Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective (2006); Marieke Krajenbrink and Kate Quinn, eds., Investigating Identities: Questions of Identity in Contemporary International Crime Fiction (2009); Jean Anderson, Carolina Miranda and Barbara Pezzotti, eds., The Foreign in International Crime Fiction: Transcultural Representations (2012); Andrew Pepper and David Schmid, eds., Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction: A World of Crime (2016); and Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King and Alistair Rolls, eds., Criminal Moves: Modes of Mobility in Crime Fiction (2019). 2. The four editors of this volume, Monica Dall’Asta, Jacques Migozzi, Federico Pagello and Andrew Pepper are all part of the DETECt consortium, as are the following contributors: Lucie Amir, Silvia Baroni, Massimiliano Coviello, Maria D’Amelio, Christos Dermentzopoulos, Caius Dobrescu, Nikos Filippaios, Lampros Flitouris, Alice Jacquelin, Thomas Morsch, Valentina Re and Anne Marit Waade. 3. Manchette’s debt to Hammett, outlined in “A Toast to Dash”, is alluded to in David Peace’s Foreword to Fatale. See David Peace, “Foreword” in Jean-­ Patrick Manchette, Fatale (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2015), v–vii. 4. Claims about the intolerance and conservatism of the Law and Justice party’s administration in Poland, notably regarding its hostility to LGBTQ issues and rights, need to be weighed up in relation to the extraordinary mobilizations at local, regional and state level to greet and house Ukrainian refugees fleeing the conflict in 2020. 5. The reference is to one of the slogans used in France’s 1968: ‘Sous le pavé, la plage’. 6. “For generations, Europe was always the future”. Thus opens the European Commission’s “White Paper on the Future of Europe: Reflections and ­scenarios for the EU27 by 2025” (2017). See https://eur-­lex.europa.eu/ legal-­content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM:2017:2025:FIN.

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Morsch, Thomas and Valentina Re, editors. 2021. European Identity in Popular Television Crime Series, special issue Journal of European Popular Culture, 12:2. Nestingen, Andrew. 2016. ‘Scandinavian Crime Fiction and the Facts: Social Criticism, Epistemology, and Globalization’. In Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction. Editors, A. Pepper and D. Schmid. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 159-177. Quinn, Kate M. 2020. ‘Crime Fiction and Memory’. In The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction. Editors, J. Allan, J. Gulddal, S. King, and A. Pepper. Oxford: Routledge. 310–317. Scaggs, John. 2005. Crime Fiction. Oxford: Routledge. Gulddal, Jesper and Stewart King. 2022. ‘European Crime Fiction.’ In The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction. Editors, J. Gulddal, S. King, and A. Rolls. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 196-220. Nilsson, Louise, David Damrosch and Theo D'haen, Eds. 2018. Crime Fiction as World Literature. New York: Bloomsbury. Song, H. Rosi. 2016. Lost in Transition: Constructing Memory in Contemporary Spain. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Bondebjerg, Ib, Eva Novrup Redvall, Rasmus Helles, Signe Sophus Lai, Henrik Søndergaard and Cecilie Astrupgaard. 2017. Transnational European Television Drama: Production, Genres and Audiences. Palgrave Macmillan.

Open Access    This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

PART I

Contemporary European Crime Narratives about World War I and World War II

CHAPTER 2

Where’s the Empire? Loss, Geopolitical Agency and Imperial Longing in Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs Series Maarit Piipponen

In the thirteenth historical detective fiction novel by British writer Jacqueline Winspear, In This Grave Hour (2017), Maisie Dobbs investigates the murder of Belgian World War I refugees in Britain in the 1930s. Besides mobilizing memories of the most famous Belgian war refugee in British classic detective fiction, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, the novel comments on British territoriality through exploring the treatment of the refugees. In doing so, the novel simultaneously reflects on today’s allegedly borderless and mobile world: the case finds a clear parallel in the discourse of xenophobia and border surveillance that emerged with the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe that “caused anxiety on both the political right and left, albeit marked by very different logics (‘we are being overloaded’ versus ‘we are losing our humanity’)” (Bendixen 538). In This Grave Hour thematizes a central concern in Winspear’s series: the impact of war on individual and collective British memory and sense

M. Piipponen (*) Tampere University, Tampere, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Dall’Asta et al. (eds.), Contemporary European Crime Fiction, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21979-5_2

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of self. Due to the crime narrative’s dual narrative structure (the story of the crime and that of its investigation), all crime narratives involve an examination of the past: “The relationship between the past and the present”, argues John Scaggs, is “crucial to both historiography and detection” (133). While historical fiction recollects, re-enacts and represents scenes of individual and collective importance such as wars, it also typically evokes social concerns in the reader’s reality and may encourage affective response. This re-enactment does not have to adhere to historical facts, which facilitates the reclaiming of history and insertion of alternative viewpoints. A good number of historical narratives published in recent decades have been crime narratives—the form has flourished from the early 1990s onwards (Johnsen 5)—which warrants critical interest in how historical crime narratives represent the past and especially mediate accounts of recent European war zones, and how this might shape contemporary views of said events. Due to its popular appeal, historical detective fiction has not only become a major source of historical knowledge and understanding to the public in the global market, but also a vehicle through which historical truth and the present moment can be questioned. Social critique becomes manifest in such narratives through examining hidden or unsolved crimes to correct past wrongdoings, reinterpreting historical events to question official narratives, inserting real historical figures within real and fictional crimes, or placing minority figures and groups into past settings to grant them agency and historical visibility. Alternatively—or simultaneously— historical crime narratives can prompt us to feel nostalgic about the past and what has been lost. The Dobbs series (2003–), consisting of sixteen novels so far, is set in the interwar period and foregrounds women’s agency and mobility against the backdrop of crime, war and, as this chapter contends, the British Empire. It destabilizes and remaps spaces of class and gender, combining social and gender mobility with national progress, modernity and loss: the series’ narrative arc moves from depicting the protagonist’s servant role in an aristocratic household to granting her mobility as detective, psychologist and ‘spy’ in the public sphere. In doing so, the series delves into individual and domestic dramas and creates space for women’s geopolitical agency through inserting a female investigator into a landscape of war and espionage. While London remains the series’ primary location, this domestic setting collides with spaces of international intrigue and the Empire

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through Maisie’s mobility across the globe: the trenches of World War I through recollections of her wartime experiences as a nurse, the peripheries of the British Empire through her travels, and the emergence of Nazi Germany through her role as a Secret Service ‘agent’. These settings reveal, as I demonstrate, “spatial dimensions of belonging and memory” (Wallis and Harvey 4) and serve in creating a sense of imperial longing in the novels. More specifically, while Winspear’s series offers an appealing fantasy of female and lower-class upward mobility, it communicates an ambiguous, indirect nostalgia towards the Empire in a framework of war, individual duty and patriotism; it is preoccupied with an affective mapping of Britain as a landscape of loss and triumph. Through Maisie’s investigations of lives altered by war and her role as a psychologist, the novels mobilize an affective response to the two world wars and Britain’s heroic—sometimes questionable—efforts to defeat the enemy and retain a position of leadership during European conflicts. In effect, World War I and World War II—and Maisie—become potent symbols of British resilience. Through its affective engagement with scenes of war and depiction of imperial rivalry between Great Britain and Nazi Germany, Winspear’s series also invokes contemporary concerns about the status of Great Britain within and beyond the borders of Europe. The series’ references to the present or former colonies of the Empire—or, rather, the curious absence of the British Empire as a colonizing force—add to the spatial uncertainty of the status of the Empire. The novels’ setting in imperial Britain differs significantly from the contemporary reality where Britain has joined and exited from the European Union and is currently realigning itself within shifts in global geopolitical relations. Detective fiction’s serial format is well suited for explorations of national status and post-imperial identity, as “seriality may become a useful tool for a sustained investigation into contemporary society and its problems” (Anderson et  al. 3). This chapter focuses on two novels, Maisie Dobbs and Journey to Munich, as they discuss World War I and emerging Nazi Germany, but includes references to the other novels in the series to construct an argument about the series’ ambiguous gaze on the geographically dispersed and ultimately vanishing British Empire. To pursue this goal, the chapter combines studies of war fiction with mobilities research; it first explores how the series engages readers affectively with war and, second, it analyses the novels’ ‘imagined community’ and the importance of the Nazi enemy for national identity.

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The War “Is Not Over When It Ends”: Mobilizing the Dead and the Wounded The series’ interwar period setting is significant because “it is such fertile ground for danger and intrigue… the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 was the beginning of the modern era, evolving into the shape and face of the world we now inhabit” (“Women Spies”). Crime narratives have employed war settings during and after wartime to bolster wartime efforts, criticize actions taken or shape our understanding of war. Representing crime in a war setting allows “for the exploration of complex principles of justice and retribution” from today’s perspective (Anderson 202) and juxtaposing “murder (in peace-time) and legitimate killing (in wartime) … allows for a discussion of the ethics of war” (Sokołowska-Paryż 95). The combination of crime and war might also assuage readers about the horrors of war: Patrick Deer suggests that individual crimes “hel[p] make the horror and violence of war comprehensible, providing readers with answers in the form of the solution to a particular crime when there seem to be few ready answers available about war” (348). Noting the popularity of World War I as a topic in fiction since the outbreak of the war, Esther MacCallum-­ Stewart emphasizes how “the constant reinvention of the war in literary texts also dictates the ways in which it is understood” (MacCallum-­ Stewart). A war setting may shape ideas about national identity and sense of self: while narratives can be said to perform a commemorative function, inducing us to ‘remember,’ it is equally true that these imaginative ‘returns’ to the Great War are strongly influenced by the current socio-political circumstances and contemporary versions of national history, telling and showing us as much about the period in which they were produced as about the reality and significance of the past military conflict. (Löschnigg and Sokołowska-Paryż 2)

Winspear’s debut novel, Maisie Dobbs (2003), set in London in the 1920s, contains flashbacks to wartime that illuminate Maisie’s climb on the social ladder and her work as a World War I nurse in France. During World War I, Great Britain was still the most important colonial and military power in the world; however, the Empire “began to decline” in the post-war period (Bush 180) similar to other European empires, many of which collapsed. The series thus frames Maisie’s investigations within a crucial period of historical change in European history. However, while the series thematizes the effects of World War I on the nation, it remains curiously silent

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about other interwar—imperial—conflicts, such as the Irish or Indian struggle for independence. I understand this silence as hiding the brutal fact of British colonial possession and revealing the series’ own role as a historicizing narrative. In the latter sense, what matters is not only what is present in a narrative, but also what is absent from it. One of the most striking features of Winspear’s series is how the primary geopolitical reference point in the early novels, World War I, becomes affectively charged through mobilizing the dead and the wounded; this mobilization binds the series’ characters and nation together. World War I is the catalyst for or origin of many of the crimes in Maisie’s post-war investigations. Maisie’s flashbacks transport readers to scenes of destruction, and many novels feature wounded and traumatized war veterans. There are thus two sites of crime in the series: the site of individual domestic drama that can be resolved by the detective, and that of international warfare that leaves nations and individuals crippled and which, despite the efforts of diverse actors, cannot be fully contained. The fact that the past war zone breeds crimes in the present breaks the temporal and territorial frame of crime and introduces trauma. Consequently, for Maisie, the other characters and readers, Britain becomes a site of violent hauntings, where the past and the present are spatially and temporally layered upon each other, as Journey to Munich suggests: in 1938, upon returning to London from her travels abroad, Maisie “crossed the road when she approached the place where she had witnessed a young man, disturbed by the war that still raged in his mind, kill himself with a hand grenade, filling the air with the terror of a blood-soaked hell that haunted him” (7). The war can be “conspicuously omnipresent in times of peace” (Sokołowska-Paryż 85) and wreak havoc on individual and collective levels. This engagement of Winspear’s series with the Great War distinguishes it from the interwar whodunnit by degree. In her analysis of body, violence and World War I in Christie’s interwar fiction, Gill Plain speaks of Christie’s “sacrificial” bodies which are “presented whole”, signifying the bodies torn apart by the war and the “transition from fragmentation to wholeness that replicates a social need for the reinstatement of the rituals of death” (33); detection, then, offers reassurance, since death can be explained and blame can be attributed to someone. While there are no people “maimed or blinded” by war in Christie’s fiction (33), with its depictions of psychological wounds and injured individuals, Maisie Dobbs sets the tone for Winspear’s series. Maisie’s investigations might focus on individual bodies and domestic crimes, but the corpses and wounded men

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that litter the pages of the novels make readers confront the palpable materiality of suffering, make the past present, and invite an affective response towards World War I and imperial Britain’s efforts—and sacrifices—to defeat the enemy. Referring to injured war veterans who have withdrawn from society, Maisie Dobbs makes note of how “they were now reduced to gargoyles by a war that, for them, had never ended. There were men without noses or jaws, men who searched for light with empty eye sockets, men with only half a face where once a full-formed smile had beamed” (262). Or, consider another who “was gazing into space, his mouth open, his tongue rolling back and forth between his lips” (Birds 136). War veterans literally have “war engraved on their faces” and are living “sites of memory” (Winter 143, 144). Maisie’s investigations cannot undo the past, but they can correct wrongs in the present. War and commemoration have played a central role in the construction of national identity (Osborne 209), and expressions of grief may serve personal and political needs (King 174). Besides such graphic details as presented above, the series encourages affective responsiveness to war by detailing the emotional state of individual characters and  referring to spaces of conflict and public commemoration. Examples of individual grief as part of “commemorative symbolism” (King 174) include the following: “Maisie’s eyes filled with tears as she was taken once again by the grief that still assailed” (Birds 40) and “it was happening to everyone we knew … losing a sweetheart or husband, or they were coming home wounded, and you tried not to show how affected you were” (Grave loc. 2074). The novels further evoke sites of battles, such as Loos (Mapping), Messines and the Somme (Birds) and the notorious Battle of Passchendaele (Maisie Dobbs). A Dangerous Place recalls the Thiepval war memorial and Gibraltar’s American Steps memorial, Birds of a Feather and Elegy for Eddy include references to war memorials with names of ordinary men who died in the war. While officials persuade Maisie to travel to Nazi Germany, she could “see the top of the Cenotaph, Sir Edwin Lutyens’ memorial to the dead of the Great War” (Journey 12); when she later looks at a memorial in Germany, she feels no respect for men “who had died to protect Hitler” (218). The series creates a geography and geopolitics of loss and triumph via mobilizing emotions by common streets, battlefields and official war memorials that then provoke shared feelings and a sense of togetherness. Winspear’s historical fiction does what Christie’s did not do in the aftermath of World War I: it lays bare the emotions and ravaged victims of war and, as historical fiction, it performatively functions as an affective,

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cultural tool of memorialization similar to the war memorials it references. Emotions, as Mimi Sheller explains, are “elicited, invoked, regulated and managed through a variety of expectations, patterns and anticipations” (226). Triggering emotional responses is also an aspect of detective fiction: the genre relies on (producing) a set of emotions, “stock emotions”, and emotions may relate to the causes of crime or offer clues to it (Pyrhönen 62, 64). Historical fiction, on the other hand, is capable of creating an “affective relationship between then and now that ‘normal’ history cannot accomplish” (de Groot, Remaking 20). Through showing individual and shared emotional responses to loss, such as grief and fear, Winspear’s series establishes a sense of community. Thereby the series, to quote Jerome de Groot on historical novels, “flatten[s] time, … makes[s] the past contemporary” (Remaking 19): it contributes to affective and imaginative encounters with Britain’s Great War across time and space, thereby maintaining the war’s significance to a contemporary sense of identity. Historical narratives are part of a mass culture which mediates the past so that it becomes “possible for people to take on … memories of events through which they did not actually live” (Landsberg 3). War “is not over when it ends” (Birds 266); it is, as Maisie acknowledges, “at once alive and dead and predatory” (Elegy 284). Winspear’s novels rarely address why World War I was fought in the first place, although they do address to some extent “society’s collective guilt, which must lead to a recognition of its moral responsibility for the past” (Sokołowska-Paryż 90). Besides addressing such collective guilt, Winspear’s novels that take readers to the battlefields and home front strengthen the discourse of remembrance and resilience in the twenty-first century when the UK’s stance in the global arena has diminished. The novels approach World War I victims and veterans with reverence and respect; thus, they exemplify “the prevalent commemorative trend in contemporary fiction about the Great War” (Sokołowska-Paryż 81). In Pardonable Lies, Maisie vows to herself that she “will remember” those who died in World War I (319). Yet, when John Otterburn, a Canadian businessman who is doing his best to fight Hitler through his newspapers, confesses to Maisie in Elegy for Eddie that ‘“We have to inspire the people to take pride in their country, to have something here.’ … ‘They have to believe there is something worth protecting, worth fighting for’” (391), Maisie seems critical of Otterburn’s means to achieve this goal. No such criticism is present when a Secret Service representative informs her that

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they are worried about political groups publishing texts “critical of Britain and her Empire” (Lesson 228). As a form, the crime narrative promises closure after the detective has solved the case. Maisie’s wartime role (nursing the wounds of the body) and her post-war roles (solving crimes, healing the mind and serving the Empire) allow an examination of the post-war traumatized psyche and nation. Maisie’s investigations become, to quote de Groot’s analysis of another temporally layered war novel, “a way of conceptualizing the relationship between past and present, between ‘reader’ of history and ‘participant’ in history” (Historical Novel 103). Maisie’s roles promise closure: she offers an explanation to crime and death—makes sense of the present via the past—and, as a psychologist, heals the scars of the mind. However, as the series progresses, the traumatized nation meets a formidable enemy in Nazi Germany, which aims to build its own empire in Europe. This imperial rivalry offers a path for the British Empire to triumph and gain a leadership role in the battle against an evil enemy; it also both reproduces the historically adversarial Anglo–German relationship (see Deighton) and creates emotional connections to the British Empire for the series’ post-­ imperial readers.

Maisie and the Imagined Community: “After All, Your Country Needs You” Winspear’s series pits male-driven geopolitics with its military officials, Secret Service agents and intelligence gathering against a female perspective that stresses emotions, healing and understanding the effects of war on the human psyche, body and nation. Historical fiction has traditionally been a gendered literary space: aimed at a male audience, it is “more based in adventure and concerned … with warfare”, while fiction aimed at women in the twentieth century deals with “relationships and love” and women’s oppression (de Groot, Historical Novel 78–79). Winspear’s series combines elements from classic mysteries and, as the series approaches the end of the 1930s, the cloak and dagger narrative to highlight women’s wartime efforts. Feminist historical crime fiction invites readers to consider “women’s agency in the past and … the possibilities for enacting their own power to create change” (Johnsen 1–2). Winspear’s series falls under this feminist category to some extent, as it articulates how women’s domestic confinement has been a constitutive element of a patriarchally organized society; such confinement is a form of women’s spatial control

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and a social control of their identity (Massey 179). In Birds of a Feather, a father hires Maisie to find his adult daughter, telling her that “If you know where my daughter is, Miss Dobbs, then I want you to bring her back to this house at once” (96). While female mobility caused social anxiety, the patriarchal society that had curtailed women’s mobility in the public sphere mobilized them in the name of king and country during wartime, also in “occupations … which had never before included women” (Grayzel 27). This contributed to the creation of the home front during the war and “provided women with a range of new opportunities” (Grayzel 5). During World War I and World War II, women thus gained increasing mobility within and beyond national borders as military nurses, ambulance drivers, labourers, secret agents and resistance movement members. In contrast to the shell-shocked and immobilized male World War I veterans and amputees, during her investigations Maisie walks, takes the train or aeroplane, travels by ship and drives her own car, a means of transport suggesting spatial and psychical freedom for women (see Thacker). This narrative of female mobility could be viewed as a progressive one; however, it is undermined by a linkage to what I identify as conservative nationalist history and patriotism that are mostly disconnected from greater social disparities that characterize British imperialism. Similar to World War I, the mobilization of all Britain in wartime efforts continues during World War II via a patriotic appeal. As one of Maisie’s female Secret Service interviewees notes, “If I can do just one thing to slow down [Hitler’s] progress, then I shall do it” (Consequences 49); or, when Maisie tries to explain to a male Secret Service officer that she is no longer “interested in cloak-and-dagger assignments”, the officer appeals to her patriotic feelings, telling her “After all, your country needs you” (Journey 9). This emotional, patriotic appeal informs the novels focusing on the emergence of expansionist Nazi Germany, calling forth further analysis of how this series is preoccupied with Britain’s imperial past—and our twenty-­ first-­ century geopolitical present characterized by references to a new “Anglosphere” alliance or “Empire 2.0” (see Sèbe). Notably, the novels’ international covert operations and acts of espionage not only draw attention to rivalry between Great Britain and Nazi Germany—creating space for Britain to reassert its greatness—but also highlight American geopolitical interests on the continent and pave the way for Anglo-American alliance. Maisie’s relationship with an American agent, Mark Scott, symbolically represents this new alliance.

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The series offers a counternarrative to the present day with its image of powerful Britain, a civilization unified against the dark forces in Germany and the culture of fear Hitler’s regime spreads “to control people” (Journey 84). Maisie’s aristocratic mentors and eventual parents-in-law, Lord Julian Compton and Lady Rowan, and their country estate stand for British stability, equality and noble values in opposition to Nazi Germany. Maisie Dobbs explicitly associates social harmony in post-World War I London with class issues: “They said that you could sit down to tea with just about anyone around Fitzroy Square, and dine with a countess and a carpenter at the same table, with both of them at ease in the company” (5). In later novels, Maisie’s lower-class father and the Comptons live on the same estate, with no apparent class tension between them. On the eve of World War II, Maisie gathers a small group of friends and acquaintances around this estate and the neighbouring house she has  inherited from another mentor, Maurice Blanche. The lack of class conflict and the fact that the group represents different ages, genders and professions seem to gesture towards a more equal society. However, as the group consists of white people only, it symbolically represents the nation as white. Ethnic issues are also marginalized when the series erases the contribution of non-white World War I servicemen and the grief held by their families; Maisie Dobbs and Leaving Everything Most Loved have only passing references to Gurkha and Indian regiments, which, ironically enough, helped ensure victory for the Empire. Thus, the novels’ ‘imagined community’ who fought for the Empire and where loss and mourning are felt is predominantly white, with an emphasis on class and gender equality. With its depiction of the Spanish civil war, A Dangerous Place prioritizes discussion on class equality while evading discussion on British colonial presence in the story’s setting, Gibraltar. With its focus on class and gender equality, then, Winspear’s series relatively rarely acknowledges Britain’s racial others or the role that Britain’s imperial project has played in creating a multiethnic Britain. Instead, the series produces a sense of national unity and self through mobilizing the dead of World War I, as discussed above, and through the Nazi enemy. As such, the books do not offer any in-depth analysis of or historical inquiry into fascism per se; instead, the Nazis serve the construction of a (post-) imperial identity, with Great Britain leading the battle against the enemy. In doing so, the series avoids the divisiveness that comes with exploring Britain’s imperial practices—which would also conjure their present manifestations for today’s readers. I understand this relative absence of racial

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diversity and British colonialism through Paul Gilroy’s concept of postcolonial melancholia. If World War I has had an “extraordinary hold upon the British collective imagination” (Wallis and Harvey 3), Gilroy poses a similar question on the continuing popularity of World War II imagery in Britain: Why are those martial images—the battle of Britain, the Blitz, and the war against Hitler—still circulating and, more importantly, still defining the nation’s finest hour? How is it that their potency can be undiminished by the passage of time, and why do they alone provide the touchstone for the desirable forms of togetherness that are used continually to evaluate the chaotic, multicultural present and find it lacking? (106)

Gilroy identifies a connection between this imagery and Britain’s sense of self, to “know who we are as well as who we were” (107); yet, he remains sceptical as to whether the imagery can achieve that goal in today’s world. Importantly, he refers to the absence of more recent wars and conflicts from cultural memory, how “the mysterious evacuation of Britain’s postcolonial conflicts from national consciousness has become a significant cultural and historical event in its own right” (108). For Gilroy, the emphasis on World War II and the Nazis suggests “a turning away from the perceived dangers of pluralism and from the irreversible fact of multiculture” (108). A similar logic can be applied to Winspear’s series: in constructing a sense of self through narrativizing past warfare, it mostly remains silent about the effects of British domestic colonialism and overseas imperialism. An Incomplete Revenge detects discrimination against a mobile ethnic minority group, the Romani people, but this is depicted to exist more on an individual rather than a systemic level. While the colonies feature as vacation or work destinations for the series’ main characters, multiethnic Britain and colonial migrants are made visible in Leaving Everything Most Loved, set in 1933, where Maisie investigates the murder of an Indian woman, Usha Pramal. The workings of the Empire brought Usha to England, as a governess in a white civil servant’s family departing India, but she considers India her home. In contrast to how the series details the poverty of white working-class Londoners (see, e.g., Consequences), the novel does not depict Indian-born people as being at home in London; there is, however, a small community of “Anglos and Indians” living together or having intermarried (Leaving loc. 1987). The only person of

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Asian origin portrayed as living in London and socializing with upper-class Britons is Maisie’s mentor Dr Khan, an Oxford-educated “man of great wisdom” (Maisie Dobbs 107). Similar to An Incomplete Revenge, the novel acknowledges racism’s presence but, again, it appears more as individual racism. Usha’s brother notes how people of Indian descent could not obtain the position of commissioned officers during World War I. Yet, he attributes Scotland Yard’s inability to solve Usha’s murder to Inspector Caldwell’s prejudice against Indian people, not to the institution itself: “He does not like the colour of my skin” (loc. 675). The novel also plays down the Indian independence struggle with “what was happening in India, and how it would affect Britain” (loc. 427), India not looking “like a picnic” now (loc. 2408). Thus, the reality of the British colonial rule in India is left unacknowledged. In marked contrast to this, later novels depict the effect of German bombing of England with “[b]lood on the streets” (Consequences 10). A similar logic of evasion informs A Dangerous Place, where Maisie investigates the murder of a Sephardic Jew in Gibraltar. The novel notes how Britain gained “control” of Gibraltar centuries ago (loc. 825), how people from different countries of origin live there “under a British flag” (loc. 775), with tourists visiting this “little piece of England” (loc. 1399) whose position is, in fact, of strategic importance to Britain’s security. It is in Spain, however, where a violent civil war is being fought and where Maisie travels to nurse those who were fighting “for freedom from oppression” (Grave Hour loc. 593). Even if the novel criticizes Britain for turning a blind eye to certain acts of the German and Spanish fascist regimes, the series overlooks Britain’s culpability in the violent practices of its own empire. In Usha’s case, the novel highlights her exceptional journey as an Indian woman in a patriarchal society instead of her position as a colonized subject. Maisie’s investigations in domestic and foreign environments are facilitated not only by her social mobility, but also by the routes and means of transport created by expanding empires. Her travels are therefore connected to a certain spatial (b)ordering of the world, where mobility is a sign of social privilege or imperial power. While Usha moves to London as a governess, Maisie travels to India for personal growth, having “the desire to see, to feel, to smell another country” (Leaving loc. 1629). Although the series seldom critiques Britain’s imperial project, it directs readers’ attention to the evil actions of other empires or authoritarian regimes and to European zones of conflict that might somehow affect Britain. In This Grave Hour recalls how Britain was “flooded” by Belgian World War I

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refugees (loc. 151) and emphasizes Britain’s support to Jewish refugees from Germany, alluding to the British effort to accommodate them. Journey to Munich acknowledges how “places like Dachau are filling up with Jews” (79), while pointing out how an American ambassador would like to send British Jews to Africa. Yet, A Dangerous Place does not really place Gibraltar—which until today remains under British rule—on a continuum of British imperialism, even if it recognizes its strategic importance to the Empire.

Conclusion: The Absent and Present Empire In the series, Maisie is a geographically mobile detective and ‘spy’: in these roles, she explores the nation’s past and present and becomes an instrument of state and imperial power, extending the state’s influence outside its borders. Her different roles also increase her mobility as a woman in a patriarchal society. However, while the series positions its female investigator against the patriarchal structures of British society, it also fundamentally implicates her in its imperial structures through the representation of wars and conflicts. The novels represent the British as heroic, self-sacrificial and unified people but, as this chapter has argued, they also indirectly communicate post-imperial anxieties to today’s readers. The series evokes the loss of Empire not only through Maisie’s journeys in the present or former colonies of the Empire—Gibraltar, India, Canada, the US—but also through the rise of the US superpower and a new world order. The ‘peripheries’ of the Empire feature in the paratextual material—the book covers—but, excepting A Dangerous Place, are absent as settings, as readers only briefly learn of Maisie’s journeys in these (mostly Anglophone) regions where she also recovers after the deaths of her husband and unborn child. In this way, the former Empire becomes a haunting presence that also marks the series’ historical amnesia over British imperial aggression, an amnesia facilitated by the genre’s literary strategies that make possible the shaping of history and memory. Notably, Winspear’s books are published at a time when, as Scottish historian William Dalrymple argues, “our imperial history is not taught in schools—our children go from Henry VIII to the Nazis, omitting that very interesting period in between when we had the greatest empire the world has ever known” (Jeffries). In American Agent, the murdered female journalist drafts in her article how British aviators were trying “to protect this small island” (loc. 2944), which highlights

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war heroism but drastically downplays Britain’s imperial position at the time. Recalling the two world wars in the series is infused with loss and triumph; as Anne Deighton notes, “triumph on the battlefield” suggests “memories of power” (100). Britain may be wounded like its World War I veterans but not defeated in the face of new enemies. While the series portrays prejudiced individuals, it avoids discussion on the crimes committed in the name of the British Empire, such as economic or sexual exploitation; in comparison, it condemns the Holocaust and the “bloody blitzkrieg” (American loc. 223) of Nazi Germany. The later novels acknowledge the growing co-operation between the British Secret Service and foreign intelligence agencies, especially the US, signalling new geopolitical realities and conflicts with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Franco’s Spain. Thus, even if the series at times criticizes actions taken by the British government in wartime, it also seems to harken back to the day when Britain adopted a leadership role in protecting itself and dealing with continental conflicts. Through Maisie’s investigations, the series interpellates its contemporary readers into reaffirming Britain’s imperial power and hegemonic position; the Empire is made intact through literary imagination, whereas it has already disappeared in reality. Yet, Britain’s future remains uncertain. In Consequences of Fear, a post-Brexit novel published in 2021, the predominant emotion is fear: Maisie “wondered who was with her country and who was against it” (196). While Nazi Germany plays the role of the villain and potential occupier in the latest novels, for contemporary readers the idea of Britain in peril perhaps also conjures up another image: Europe as Britain’s other “against which a ‘new’ Britain can be redefined” (Gifford 10), Britain as a unified country in opposition to European conflicts and disintegration. After all, Maisie’s anxiety about Britain’s future communicates little faith in finding allies in Europe.

Works Cited Anderson, Jean. 2014. ‘What Price Justice? French Crime Fiction and the Great War’. In The Great War in Post-Memory Literature and Film. Editors, M. Löschnigg and M. Sokolowska-Paryz. Berlin: De Gruyter. 201–15. Anderson, Jean, Carolina Miranda and Barbara Pezzotti, editors. 2015. ‘Introduction’. In Serial Crime Fiction: Dying for More. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 1–7.

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Bendixsen, Synnøve K.  N. 2016. ‘The Refugee Crisis: Destabilizing and Restabilizing European Borders’. History and Anthropology, 27:5. 536–554. Bush, Barbara. 2006. Imperialism and Postcolonialism. London: Pearson. Deer, Patrick. 2020. ‘Crime Fiction and War’. In The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction Editors, J. Allen, J. Gulddal, S. King and A. Pepper. London: Routledge. 343–52. Deighton, Anne. 2000. ‘British–West German Relations, 1945–1972’. In Uneasy Allies: British-German Relations and European Integration Since 1945. Editors, K. Larres and E. Meehan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 27–44. ———. 2002. ‘The Past in the Present: British Imperial Memories and the European Question’. In Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past. Editor, J-W.  Müller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 100–20. Gifford, Chris. 2008. Making of Eurosceptic Britain: Identity and Economy in a Post-Imperial State. London: Routledge. Gilroy, Paul. 2005. Postcolonial Melancholia: The Wellek Lectures. New  York: Columbia University Press. Grayzel, Susan R. 2002. Women and the First World War. London: Routledge. de Groot, Jerome. 2010. The Historical Novel. London: Routledge. ———. 2016. Remaking History: The Past in Contemporary Historical Fictions. London: Routledge. Jeffries, Stuart. 2015. ‘The best exotic nostalgia boom: why colonial style is back’. The Guardian. 19 Mar. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/ mar/19/the-­best-­exotic-­nostalgia-­boom-­why-­colonial-­style-­is-­back. Johnsen, Rosemary Erickson. 2009. Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. King, Alex. 1988. Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance. New York: Bloomsbury. Landsberg, Alison. 2015. Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge. New York: Columbia University Press. Löschnigg, Martin, and Marzena Sokolowska-Paryz, editors. 2014. ‘Introduction: “Have you forgotten yet…?”’. In The Great War in Post-Memory Literature and Film. Editors, M.  Löschnigg and M.  Sokolowska-Paryz. Berlin: De Gruyter. 1–16. MacCallum-Stewart, Esther. 2006. ‘The Cause of Nowadays and the End of History: First World War Historical Fiction.’ Working Papers on the Web, 9. https://extra.shu.ac.uk/wpw/historicising/. Accessed 24 June 2020. Massey, Doreen. 2001. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Osborne, Brian S. 2017. ‘Reflecting on the Great War 1914–2019: How Has it Been Defined, How Has it Been Commemorated, How Should it Be Remembered?’ In Commemorative Spaces of the First World War: Historical

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Geographies at the Centenary. Editors, S. Naylor, L. Cameron and D. Harvey. London: Routledge. 209–24. Plain, Gill. 2001. Twentieth-century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pyrhönen, Heta. 2019. ‘Reading Affects in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep’. In Criminal Moves: Modes of Mobility in Crime Fiction. Editors, J.  Gulddal, S. King and A. Rolls. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 60–76. Scaggs, John. 2005. Crime Fiction. London: Routledge. Sèbe, Berny. 2021. ‘“Showcasing Empire”: Past & Present Or A Brief History of Popular Imperialism, from Britannia to Brexit.’ Printemps, 93. Sheller, Mimi. 2004. ‘Automotive Emotions: Feelings the Car’. Theory, Culture & Society, 21: 4/5. 221–242. Sokołowska-Paryż, Marzena. 2015. ‘The Great War in Detective Fiction.’ In The Great War: From Memory to History. Editor, K. Kurschinski. Toronto: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. 79–98. Thacker, Andrew. 2006. ‘Traffic, Gender, Modernism’. Sociological Review, 54:1. 175–89. Wallis, James, and David C.  Harvey, editors. 2018. ‘Introduction: Conflicting Spaces—Geographies of the First World War 1’. In Commemorative Spaces of the First World War: Historical Geographies at the Centenary. Editors, S. Naylor, L. Cameron and D. Harvey. London: Routledge. 1–14. Winspear, Jacqueline. 2019. The American Agent. London: HarperCollins. Kindle. ———. 2004. Birds of a Feather. London: Soho Press. Kindle. ———. 2015. A Dangerous Place. London: HarperCollins. Kindle. ———. 2012. Elegy for Eddie. London: Allison & Busby. Kindle ———. 2017. In This Grave Hour. London: HarperCollins. Kindle. ———. 2016. Journey to Munich. London: HarperCollins. Kindle. ———. 2013. Leaving Everything Most Loved. London: Allison & Busby. Kindle. ———. 2011. A Lesson in Secrets. London: HarperCollins. Kindle. ———. 2003. Maisie Dobbs. London: Soho Press. Kindle. ———. 2010. The Mapping of Love and Death. London: Harper Collins. Kindle. ———. 2005. Pardonable Lies. London: Picador. Kindle. Winter, Jay. 2006. Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ‘Women Spies of Historical Spy Fiction.’ https://crimereads.com/the-­women-­ spies-­of-­historical-­crime-­fiction/. Accessed 29 June 2020.

CHAPTER 3

The Fingerprints of Fascism: Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther Novels, Nazi Noir, and the Continuing Presence of the Past Eric Sandberg

The European Union has twenty-seven member states, twenty-four official languages, and an area of four million square kilometres. Its oldest members have independent histories stretching back hundreds, even thousands, of years, while its youngest were formed in the 1990s. It uses nine different currencies, and its richest nations have GDPs more than five times as high as its poorest. Its systems of governance range from liberal social democracy to semi-authoritarian populism. This extraordinary level of  diversity becomes even more pronounced if European  non-member states are considered. If it is not language, then, or geography, or money, or even a shared set of values, what binds this enormous and varied area together? The answer can be given in one word: Nazis. This sounds, of course, flippant. But while a shared history connects the nations and peoples of Europe as much as institutional and economic

E. Sandberg (*) Department of English, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Dall’Asta et al. (eds.), Contemporary European Crime Fiction, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21979-5_3

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structures, this collective past is as diverse as other aspects of the European experience, involving millennia of migration and transformation, cooperation and competition, war and peace. Much of this history is too distant to have a contemporary impact: the lost Kingdoms of Burgundy, for example, have left little but their name. Other historical events remain potent, but local: the Battle of Kosovo, fought in 1389, continues to shape Balkan politics, yet few outside the region know or care. The rise and fall of the Third Reich, however, impinged on almost every corner of Europe, and its impact persists in the twenty-first century. World War II and Holocaust memorials are part of the urban landscape of Europe, but at the same time fascist politics remain a potent force. The openly neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, for instance, held two seats in the EU parliament until leading members were convicted in 2020 of operating a criminal organization, while the Sverigedemokraterna won 73 parliamentary seats in the 2022 Swedish general election, making it the second largest party in the country, despite being co-founded by a man who served with the Waffen-SS. The Nazi past remains, in other words, relevant across Europe, albeit with very different meanings in different places.

Nazism: A Collective Cultural Legacy The effects of the Nazi past are equally apparent in the European cultural landscape. Books, films, and television series regularly look back to the Nazi era for settings, plots, and themes. Instances are too numerous to make exemplification particularly useful, but the Nazi past is a persistent, even obsessive, feature of contemporary European culture, ranging from Hungarian ‘art-film director’ László Nemes’ 2015 Holocaust drama Son of Saul (Scott) to Finnish director Timo Vuorensola’s 2012 Iron Sky, an ‘overextended comedy sketch’ about Nazis on the moon (Felperin); from Franco-American writer Jonathan Littell’s Prix Goncourt-winning The Kindly Ones (2006, English translation 2009) to the serial crime fiction of a German author like Volker Kutscher. Kutscher’s work is apposite for this discussion, as it is representative of a prominent, pan-European cultural trend: the use of the crime or detective genre as a fictional matrix through which to engage with the history and legacy of fascism in general, and National Socialism in particular. This combination of a popular and potentially frivolous genre and a deadly serious theme may seem inappropriate, distasteful, or even immoral. Theodore Adorno’s claim that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ (34) is a

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starting point for many considerations of the ethics of Holocaust representation, with some scholars seeing the dictum as denying the possibility of an ethically valid artistic engagement with Nazi atrocities (Feldman 228). Such engagement, they argue, risks the generation of aesthetic pleasure alongside or in place of more appropriate reactions such as shock, repulsion, and grief (Felstiner 242). This prohibition has been applied with particular force to fictional representations, which are seen, in comparison with documentary and eyewitness accounts, as particularly dubious (Epstein 639–640). Claude Lanzmann’s testamentary masterpiece Shoah emerges out of this sensibility. The film’s first interviewee claims that ‘no one can recreate’ the events he experienced (Lanzmann 3), and Lanzmann himself has argued that in the context of the Holocaust ‘fiction is a transgression’ (qtd. in Norris 100). But even if fiction is permitted, many would nonetheless agree that only ‘austere and demanding works’ and ‘highbrow cultural productions’ are suitable for engaging with the traumas and atrocities of the Nazi era (Donahue xii). This high-culture stipulation would apply with particular force to crime fiction, as the genre has long been excluded from literary respectability. Major crime writers like Dorothy L. Sayers have been described by serious cultural commentators as examples of ‘literary glibness and spiritual illiteracy’ (Leavis 338), while others have seen the genre as a whole as ‘wasteful of time and degrading to the intelligence’ (Wilson 66). These are Anglophone examples, but crime fiction has been subject to similar censure elsewhere. In Germany, for example, the notion of Schundliteratur (trash literature) has had a lasting effect on cultural discourse, (Karolle-­ Berg 439) and the distinction between Unterhaltungsliteratur (entertainment literature) and Ernstliteratur (serious literature) remains robust (Hall, ‘Nazi’ 2). As John Whittier Treat has argued in a related context, ‘we intuitively know that a discussion of atomic-bomb literature will be necessarily different from the discussion of, for example, detective stories’ (25). The former inspires ‘a degree of care and even trepidation’ that the latter, he implies, does not (25). Similarly, in his discussion of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s detective novels, Sven Birkerts notes that their attempt to grapple with ‘complex moral issues’ (vi) is open to criticism as ‘an exploitation of what should be addressed in only more demanding works’ (xi). If the suffering represented in traditional crime novels ‘does not assimilate easily to genre constraints’ (Birkerts xii), how much more true might this be of the mass trauma and criminality associated with the Nazi era?

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Despite this sort of critical discourse, however, crime fiction has been and continues to be widely used across Europe (and beyond) as a means of exploring the continent’s Nazi legacy. In fact, it is particularly well suited to doing so. The genre as a whole is, as Thomas Leitch writes, ‘invested, indeed over-invested, in the past’ (157), and is thus an appropriate vehicle through which to work through the collective history of Europe. Crime fiction is in many of its forms imbued with a ‘pessimistic vision of the universe’, and there is a clear resonance between this sense of ‘a world full of evil’ and the representation of the Nazi era (Cawelti 150). The genre also regularly displays an ‘ambivalent relationship’ to institutions of state power (Pepper 2). This is of obvious relevance in the context of regimes, like the Nazis, that use the justice system to perpetrate rather than prevent or punish crime. Given this correlation between form and content, it is unsurprising that the use of crime fiction and its tropes to investigate the Nazi past has been so widespread. Katharina Hall has identified over 150 transnational crime novels (as of 2013) that deal ‘with the National Socialist past and its legacy in the postwar era’ (‘Nazi’ 288). Examples appear as early as Hans Hellmut Kirst’s 1962 novel Die Nacht der Generale (The Night of the Generals, 1963), in which the individual crimes of a psychotic Nazi serial killer (memorably played by Peter O’Toole in Anatole Litvak’s 1967 film adaptation) are concealed by the historical crime of the Nazi occupation of Poland, and as recently as 2020 with Volker Kutscher’s latest Gideon Rath novel, Olympia, which is set around the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Crime tropes appear in high-culture text’s like Nobel Prize Laureate Patrick Modiano’s 1978 Rue des Boutiques Obscures (Missing Person, 1980) in which an amnesiac detective gradually discovers his own culpability in events that took place during the German occupation, and in much more obvious genre texts like Henning Mankell’s 2000 Danslärarens återkomst (Return of the Dancing Master, 2004) which explores connections between the historical Nazi party and Sweden’s contemporary neo-Nazi movement. As these examples indicate, crime fiction offers valuable literary tools for the understanding of Nazism as a central component of the European past.

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Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther Novels While it is in some ways reductive to consider a substantial, diverse multi-­ national body of work through the lens of a single author, Scottish novelist Philip Kerr offers a strong case study of the ways in which the Nazi past has come to occupy a position of particular importance as a ‘buried history’ in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century European literary and popular culture. Kerr’s body of work is diverse, including techno-thrillers (A Philosophical Investigation, 1992), dystopian science fiction (The Second Angel, 1998), alternate history (Hitler’s Peace, 2005), straight crime fiction (Research, 2014), and even children’s fiction (The Children of the Lamp series, 2004–2011). However, he is best known––or ‘most revered’––for his series of historical crime novels focusing on the Berlin-­ based policeman and private eye Bernie Gunther (Otts 88). The fourteen novels in the series trace Gunther’s career from the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazi Party to power, through the war years, to its aftermath in a divided Germany and beyond. The series is broken into two parts. The first three novels, March Violets (1989), The Pale Criminal (1990), and A German Requiem (1991), which were published by Penguin in a 1993 omnibus edition as Berlin Noir, are frequently referred to as the ‘Berlin Noir Trilogy’ (Acocella). The remaining eleven novels, starting with The One from the Other (2006), were published after a fifteen-year hiatus, with the final novel, Metropolis, released posthumously in 2019. Kerr has said in interviews that the gap occurred because he wanted to write ‘a lot of other stuff’ rather than ‘the same thing again and again’––‘a lot of crime writing’, he notes, ‘feels like you are on a treadmill’ (Cogdill). One of the advantages of this hiatus was that the first three novels had time to ‘achieve a critical mass’ of readers ready, indeed eager, for further instalments in the series (Cogdill). As Petra Rau notes, by the time he re-launched the series a number of writers had begun working within the same sub-genre of ‘historical noir set in the 1930s or in the war years’, thus filling the gap left by the demise of the Cold War spy novel (45). Kerr claimed that he was a ‘much better writer’ by the time he came to the later novels (Picker). While readers may well disagree with his own assessment of the series, it can certainly be read as a single sustained engagement with the Nazi past. As its commercial success testifies, Kerr’s work has many fans, but it has been subject to criticism. Joan Acocella, for example, notes that the visceral, even obscene quality of the first three novels, their ‘glut of florid

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nastiness’, lays them open to critique as not just ‘ambiguous’ but also ‘frivolous’. This is similar to the charges of ‘pornography, kitsch, and sensationalism’ that were directed against, for example, Littell’s The Kindly Ones, although the lower cultural profile of Kerr’s work insulates it from this sort of attention (Sanyal 47). Acocella ultimately comes to see this ‘luridness’ as ‘an act of realism’. This position could be related to A. D. Harvey’s discussion of the work of the Italian wartime journalist and writer Curzio Malaparte, whose scenes of violence and human degradation have ‘an almost surreal effect’ that allows him ‘to show the essence of reality, in a way that would not be quite possible from a careful transcription of ascertainable facts […]’ (305). Other critics focus on Kerr’s failure to deal effectively with Gunther’s ‘problematic hybrid identity as insider/ outsider’ in relation to the Nazi regime by positioning him as a generically typical ‘upholder of justice’ (Hall, ‘Nazi’ 297). Rau, for example, accuses Kerr (and other writers of Nazi Noir) of expressing ‘a fascist sensibility that uses genre as a way of “having your fascist cake and eating it”’ (45). Her point is that Kerr’s work offers the ‘unpalatable’ aspects of the era it represents (‘racism, misogyny and homophobia’) accompanied by repeated scenes of intense violence in a ‘historicised and revitalised’ context that makes their production and consumption (ostensibly) ‘excusable’ (66). ‘In the crumpled overcoat of Bernie Gunther’, Rau writes, ‘every reader can be a little fascist without pleading guilty to that charge’ (66). These claims indicate, if nothing else, that crime fiction shares the more general difficulties literature faces when representing historical crimes. ‘Witnessing’, as Rau writes, ‘does not necessarily have the function of testimonial but can simply become an alibi for both the writer’s and reader’s reprehensible pleasure in violence’ (65). But focusing on the problematics of Kerr’s fiction can efface the role his novels (and others like them) play in a twenty-first-century reworking of historical memory. When asked in a 2008 interview about his decision to choose 1930s Berlin as the setting for his series, Kerr emphasized the relationship between crime fiction and the era. The Nazi regime and its activities as a whole ‘seemed like the biggest crime there had ever been’, and thus highly suitable for the sort of investigation central to the crime genre (Frostrup). This sense of scale is vital to a fuller understanding of Kerr’s project, and his exploitation of the patterns of different sub-genres of crime writing (notably the hardboiled/ noir, but also the spy thriller and the puzzle mystery) to re-open the ‘cold case’ of fascism in a multi-national, pan-European context.

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Crime Writing as Didactic/Memorial Fiction One thing to consider here is the pedagogic role of popular fiction. Kerr was sensitive to this factor, noting in a 1996 interview that ‘one of my pet theories is that the modern thriller has replaced the didactic novel’ (Field 44). People ‘read books like Jurassic Park to find out about things’ (Field 44). Kerr is not talking about the sort of ‘moral education’ long associated with literature (Casement 101), but rather objective facts about, for example, genetic manipulation or chaos theory (as in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park) or artificial intelligence in Kerr’s The Grid. The Bernie Gunther series could thus be seen as introducing readers to, or reminding them of, the horrors of an era now rapidly changing from living memory to recorded history. While it may seem that no such reminder would be necessary, recent data suggests otherwise. A 2019 survey in Austria, for example, found that while 87% of respondents had heard of the Holocaust (Schoen), detailed knowledge about it was considerably less widespread and not always accurate. Only 51% of respondents were familiar with Adolf Eichmann, despite the fact that he is (barring Hitler himself) the highest-profile Austrian Holocaust perpetrator (his nationality was known to only 14% of respondents), while more than a third believed that two million or fewer Jews were murdered during the Holocaust (‘New Survey’). A recent survey carried out in the UK reveals a similar lack of historical knowledge, with 64% of respondents either ignorant of the number of victims or seriously underestimating the figure (‘We Release’). Kerr’s novels can thus be seen as contributing to the maintenance of cultural memory by playing a part in what Anthony Lake has described as popular genre fiction’s role in ‘the need to disseminate knowledge about the Holocaust’ (92). When told in Kerr’s The Pale Criminal that ‘people in this country [Germany] have very short memories’, Bernie Gunther’s reply bluntly indicates his alignment with this position: ‘Not me. […] I never forget. I’m a fucking elephant’ (502).1 This is true both in broad outline and insofar as the novels provide specific details about the Nazi era. Eichmann, for example, appears as a character in The One from the Other (as do many other historical figures throughout the series), and readers unfamiliar with his role in the Holocaust will learn at least something about the boy who ‘had gone to the same school as Adolf Hitler’ and what ‘he was to become’––a central figure in the administration of the Holocaust (One 36). Readers can also

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learn about less well-known aspects of Eichmann’s career such as his 1937 meetings with representatives of both the Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah and Haj Amin al-Husseini, the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The versions of these encounters Kerr presents are of course fictionalized, and are certainly not historically neutral. The role of al-Husseini in the genesis of the Holocaust is, to say the least, controversial and, given the current situation in the Middle East, highly politicized. Kerr has the Grand Mufti proposing ‘a solution to end all solutions’ to the ‘Jewish problem’ (One 31), and implies that these ideas were instrumental in Eichmann’s rise to prominence: ‘whatever he had said to his superiors on his return from Egypt had obviously made an impression’ (One 35). This reading of the historical record has been seriously disputed,2 which certainly problematizes the didactic role of Kerr’s novels. This is true to some extent of all historical fiction, which offers a version of historical events that is more obviously selective or partial than traditional historiography, yet carries with it, when it is successful, a sense of authenticity and lived reality. Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, for example, has aroused considerable controversy for its representation of Thomas More and its (alleged) anti-­ Catholic bias, and also more generally caused disquiet for ‘blurring the line between history and fiction’ (Hower 86). Tensions between notions of historical accuracy and historical interpretation, or between fact and fiction, are even more acute in relation to more recent and thus potentially more emotionally powerful issues like those emerging out of the Nazi era. Kerr’s work can thus be seen as offering readers access to a range of historical Nazi-era personalities and events that many would otherwise be unfamiliar with, and thus fulfilling a didactic function, but also operating as, like ‘academic history, a secondary source for the past and a primary source for its present […]. It is a way to make meaning out of what has been’ (Hower 91). Given that Kerr’s work circulates across Europe, both in English and in multiple translations (Kerr noted that the Bernie Gunther novels had been translated into forty languages as of 2015 [‘Introducing’]), one could more specifically align its didactic memorialization—its reflection on the past from the vantage point of the present—with what Marek Kucia has described as the ‘Europeanization of Holocaust memory’, or the ongoing ‘process of developing a transnational European memory’ (98). For Kucia, the process by which the Holocaust has shifted from being ‘an important object of national memories in the West’ to ‘an object of transnational global/cosmopolitan memory’ that is also a ‘cornerstone of the new

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European identity’ (98) is largely associated with institutions such as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Yet cultural products, like Kerr’s novels, have a significant role to play in this process.

Crime Fiction and the Nazi Past Treating the Bernie Gunther novels as didactic, with all the complexities this entails, also risks ignoring the particularity of the series. Any fiction set in the Nazi era, from popular works like Heather Morris’ 2018 best-­selling romance The Tattooist of Auschwitz to more challenging material like Daša Drndić’s Trieste (2007), could fulfil an educational function. But Kerr is, after all, writing crime fiction, and it is to the genre’s resources that he turns for many of his effects and interventions. One trope that occurs repeatedly throughout the series is the contrast between the hardboiled detective’s need to pursue justice (as Hall notes, the series ‘draws heavily on the American hard-boiled detective genre’ [‘Nazi’ 293]) and a broader social indifference. As Raymond Chandler argued, the hard-boiled ‘does not believe that murder will out and justice will be done––unless some very determined individual makes it his business to see that justice is done’ (13). Gunther is precisely this sort of individual, though he disassociates himself from the role––‘I’m no knight in shining armour’ (Pale 487). In the first book in the series, March Violets, he refuses a bribe from industrialist Hermann Six to conclude an investigation Six hired him to conduct which now implicates him. Gunther is, as his employer notes, going to be ‘tiresome’ (204). In the second, The Pale Criminal, Gunther kills SS Doctor Lanz Kindermann for his role in a plot to frame Berlin’s Jewish population for the murder of a series of ‘Aryan’ girls. Gunther knows that Kindermann’s life ‘is in no danger’ from the authorities, and his extrajudicial execution ensures that justice is done (499). As the series moves into the post-war years, Gunther pursues fugitive Nazis, as in A German Requiem when he poisons his former boss Arthur Nebe, head of the Nazi criminal police and Einsatzgruppe B. Later novels like The One from the Other see Gunther following ‘Nazi war criminals’ to Argentina (One 385). Even Metropolis, a prequal set in 1928, has the young policeman Gunther ‘keen to catch’ a killer of prostitutes, in contrast to many of his colleagues and fellow citizens who ‘believe that many of these girls got what was coming to them’ (131).

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However, in none of these cases is the moral arithmetic clear. Often Gunther is acting as much to secure his own safety as to ensure justice is done, or pursuing a ‘kind of justice’ that looks very much like revenge (One 383), as in his execution of Kindermann in The Pale Criminal. The doctor was responsible not just for multiple murders but also, and perhaps for Gunther more importantly, for the accidental death of ‘a girl who had once been important to’ him (383). And as Rau points out, Gunther’s execution of Kindermann is inflected with a homophobic impulse, and can be seen as a ‘retributive act of violence’ for Gunther’s ‘homosexual panic’ rather than as a necessary act of vigilante justice (63). On other occasions, even when Gunther’s motives are less opaque, his pursuit of justice leads him to collaborate with criminals, as in Metropolis where a gang leader tortures a confession out of a suspect while Bernie waits next door, his ears literally ‘plugged with his fingers’ (322). Kerr is certainly aware of this moral indeterminacy, and expects his readers to register it as part of the ethical landscape of his novels. Indeed, this is part of his work’s didactism, a generically typical lesson in ambiguity which is applied here to a historical epoch that may too often be presented in terms of black and white. Gunther’s quest for justice (however equivocal) takes place against a backdrop of systematic state criminality that radically diminishes the impact of his actions. This is typical of the hardboiled, in which governmental and legal systems are frequently compromised. Fredric Jameson has described Chandler’s work as taking place ‘in the darkness of a local world […] as in a world without God’, a place where ‘the rule of naked force and money is complete and undisguised’ (10), but the pattern is ubiquitous. So entrenched is corruption in Dashiell Hammett’s Personville (or ‘Poisonville’ as its inhabitants and Hammett’s detective call it [128]) in Red Harvest (1929) that it proves impossible to restore order without recourse to a higher authority––here the National Guard. In Gunther’s world, however, there is no authority to which an appeal can be made. Even Metropolis, set before the Nazi rise to power in 1933, represents a world in which ‘a lot of good cops were capable of some very bad behaviour’ (328). In novels set completely or in part during the Nazi era (Kerr’s post-hiatus novels often blend a post-war present with Gunther’s memories of a pre-war or wartime past), the police are not just capable of ‘bad behaviour’––the term is utterly inadequate––but are defined by it. Arthur Nebe, who appears in a number of novels in the series, is a perfect example. In Metropolis, he as an early supporter of Hitler and a suspect in

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Gunther’s investigations into the murders of prostitutes and beggars. ‘If there was anyone’, he muses, ‘in the Berlin police who approved of ending useless criminal lives it was Commissioner Nebe’ (333). In The Pale Criminal Nebe claims he is ‘no longer a Nazi’ (261), but this does not stop him from collaborating with the regime by participating in, if only by omission, the framing of the Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe for the Reichstag fire of 1933, and once war breaks out, his collaboration entails active participation in the Holocaust. Given this situation, the activities of the individual investigator are almost meaningless. In The Pale Criminal, Gunther uncovers and punishes Kindermann, but the novel ends with Kristallnacht, the mass outbreak of anti-Semitic violence that was the intended outcome of his plot. In novels set during the war, the futility of the investigatory processes so central to the genre is even starker. In A Man Without Breath, which centres around the German investigation of the Soviet mass murder of Polish officers at Katyn, and Gunther’s investigation of a number of peripheral murders, he claims to be ‘tired of people thinking that any of this shit [i.e. murder and murder investigations] really matters’ in a context where ‘law and order’ are a pretence (117). In the same novel, when he arrests two German soldiers for rape and murder, he acknowledges that it is ‘absurd’ to charge them when (in the words of one of the soldiers) the ‘SS has done a lot fucking worse’ but no one is ‘charging them bastards with murder’ (179). In a world in which ‘everyone else was getting away with murder every day’ the execution of these two killers is simultaneously an ethical imperative and an absurdity (188). A similar tension is found in Prague Fatale when Gunther is forced to investigate the death of an SS security service Captain, a ‘mass murderer who’d been murdered’ (252). Worse yet is the fact that Gunther’s own hands are far from clean: he has killed ‘forty or fifty Russian POWs […]’ in a mass shooting (252). While mitigating factors are presented at various points (nearly all of his victims were ‘members of an NKVD death squad’ [252]), the fact remains that the detective-hero of this series is himself a mass murderer, and thus has very little if any ethical ground to stand on. This is a fictional indication of the historical complexities of the European experience of Nazi-era history, in which different nations (and individuals) at different times adopted strategies of resistance, accommodation, and collaboration for different reasons. As Kerr’s fiction indicates, there was nothing simple about these choices, or their continued resonance in contemporary Europe.

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Conclusion: A European Stain Other ways in which Kerr’s novels mobilize the tropes of the detective and hardboiled genre would certainly be worth discussion. For instance, the sense of narrative, temporal, and geographical enclosure typical of the genre is a prominent feature of the series. Although the novels are wide-­ ranging, set from 1920s Berlin to 1950s Cuba, they perpetually return to the seemingly inescapable Nazi past. Or consider the genre’s paradigm of explicability: mysteries occur in crime fiction, but they are subject to the rational processes of investigation. In Kerr’s novels, however, individual acts of detection are to some extent lost or rendered meaningless by the context of inexplicable and incomprehensible violence. In March Violets, for instance, when Gunther’s investigation takes him to Dachau he asks–– rhetorically––how he can ‘describe the indescribable’ (229). The horror he encounters defies the sort of logical analysis around which much of the genre is built. I would like to conclude, however, by returning to the question of the pan-Europeanism of the Bernie Gunther novels. Kerr’s work not only circulates across Europe, offering a vision of the Nazi past filtered through a crime fiction lens, but it also represents this past as encompassing ever larger circles of individuals, social groups, nations, political systems, and historical eras. This expansion begins early in the series when Gunther’s post-war life is disrupted by his encounters with the US Secret Service. In A German Requiem, he attempts to ‘clear [his] own guilt for what had happened’–– his own involvement in the crimes of the Nazi regime––by locating the missing (and presumed dead) ‘Gestapo Müller’ (734) for an Allied war crimes unit. His investigation, and thus his attempt to move beyond the past, is complicated by the fact that in the new Cold War dispensation ‘it’s the Russians who are wearing the black hats’ while the Nazi security apparatus is now ‘working for the Americans’ (750). The series as a whole is clear about the violent totalitarianism of the Soviet system, which, whatever its ideological differences, provided the Nazis with a model of ‘police methods’ (the NKVD and its successors are ‘the finest secret police force anywhere in the world’), leadership (Stalin ‘stands head and shoulders above’ the leadership of the West, and even Hitler), and ‘loyalty and dedication’ to the nation (German 783–784). For Müller, this is the ideal model for a reborn ‘Fatherland’ (784). But if the Soviet state offers an ideal version (because successful) of Nazism, America comes off little better. The hypocrisy of recruiting Nazis to fight communism is clear enough,

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but in The One from the Other Gunther discovers that the CIA is financing research on a malaria vaccine by ex-concentration camp doctors that involves infecting German POWs and ‘expendable’ mental patients (353). Similarly, in If the Dead Rise Not, the techniques used by the American-­ backed Batista regime in Cuba to fight Castro’s communist insurgency (arrested suspects are ‘bruised and bloodied and full of fear’ of the ‘bullet in the back of the head’ that awaits them) are directly compared to Nazi war crimes (and those committed by Gunther himself) (320), while in Field Grey (2010), the Americans are described as ‘the master race’ who rule ‘the world with a Colt in one hand and a stick of chewing gum in the other’ (19). For a European readership, this is all relatively safe: linking fascist sensibility and violence to the two great powers that bracketed Europe during the Cold War is perhaps provocative, but not uncomfortably so. As the series progresses, however, Gunther’s experiences and investigations point towards a pan-European involvement with Nazism. When Gunther is interrogated by the French secret service in 1954  in Field Grey, they acknowledge the existence of wartime collaboration in the form of the Carlingue or the French Gestapo, but lay the blame on ‘criminals […] Armenians, Muslims, North Africans’, ignoring the fact (as Gunther puts it) that ‘almost as many Frenchmen as Germans had been Nazis’ (409). In the same novel, a scene set in the narrative past involves a visit to the French internment camp of Gurs, used to detain Spanish refugees, French socialists, and German Jews and communists. Conditions at this camp are, Gunther claims, ‘much worse than at Dachau’ (245). A similar discovery awaits him in the 2015 novel The Lady from Zagreb when he visits one of the Ustaše-run wartime concentration/extermination camps at Jasenovac in Croatia, where Jews, Serbs, and Roma are murdered and the ‘usual cruelties have been refined to a hellish level’. Even the Germans stationed at the camp ‘couldn’t take it anymore and left’ (285–287). Gunther’s post-war investigations in Greece (narrated in the 2018 Greek Bearing Gifts) uncovers a less graphic wartime history, but one that nonetheless indicates the geographical spread of this bitter legacy. Even the British, who (perhaps unsurprisingly given Kerr’s nationality) come out of the series relatively unscathed, are in The Other Side of Silence shown to be as duplicitous and potentially murderous as anyone else, ‘more than equal to the task of killing […] in cold blood’ (328). The point made by the overall trajectory of the Gunther series, with its gradually expanding investigative circles, is that the Nazi past neither can

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nor should be safely contained. Instead, it is a lived and living reality, a wound in the body politic of modern Europe. The events that took place from 1933 to 1945 cast a shadow across the continent that also spreads across time, from the pre-war years of the Weimar Republic, seen as little more than the waiting room of fascism, to the reconstruction era of a post-­ war Europe haunted by its past. Gunther and the other characters in Kerr’s novels want nothing more than to put the war behind them, but are unable to do so. As Gunther notes in Greeks Bearing Gifts, ‘officially, that’s all behind us now’ but the ‘fingerprints of fascism’ are, it seems, indelible (3). Even the developing European Union is implicated: for Gunther, the events of this novel involve a ‘new method of conquering Europe’ through business and finance, and the signing of the Treaties of Rome in 1957 (which created the European Economic Community, EEC, the forerunner of the EU) is part of a ‘coup d’état by a group of politicians who did not believe in democracy’ (116). An alternative view put forward in the novel is that ‘the whole point of this new EEC’ is to ‘forget about the horrors of the war and become good Europeans instead’ (463). The success of Kerr’s novels, and of the many other writers of historical fiction dealing with the same period, indicates that this desire is partial. Kerr’s use of the crime genre to explore this collective past is part of the process not so much of healing a wound as of acknowledging its persistence, probing its boundaries, and disrupting any comfortable sense of the otherness of evil.

Notes 1. Hall aligns Nazi-era historical crime fiction with Alltagsgeschichte, social history that ‘explor[es] the role of the private citizen in Nazi society via firsthand accounts’ (‘Crime Writer’ 51). 2. See, for example, Jeffrey Herf’s ‘Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the Nazis and the Holocaust: The Origins, Nature and Aftereffects of Collaboration’.

Works Cited Acocella, Joan. 2016. ‘Nazi Comb-Overs’. 6 October 2016. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-­turner/nazi-­comb-­overs-­philip-­kerr-­berlin-­noir. Adorno, Theodor. 1983. ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’. In Prisms: Essays on Veblem, Huxley, Benjamin, Bach, Proust, Schoenberg, Spengler, Jazz, Kafka. Translated by Samuel and Sherry Weber. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 17–34.

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Birkerts, Sven. 2006. ‘Foreword’. In The Inspector Barlach Mysteries: The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion. By Friedrich Dürrenmatt, translated by Joel Agee. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. vi–xiii. Casement, William. 1987. ‘Literature and Didacticism: Examining Some Popularly Held Ideas’. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 21:1. 101–111. Cawelti, John G. 1976. Adventure, Mystery, Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chandler, Raymond. 1950. ‘The Simple Art of Murder’. The Saturday Review of Literature, 15 April. 13–14. Cogdill, online. ‘Philip Kerr, WWII and Bernie Gunther’. Mystery Scene, n.d. https://www.mysteryscenemag.com/article/3083-­p hilip-­k err-­w wii-­a nd­bernie-­gunther. Donahue, William Collins. 2010. Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink’s ‘Nazi’ Novels and Their Films. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Epstein, Leslie. 1976. ‘The Reality of Evil’. Partisan Review, 4. 633–640. Feldman, Yael S. 1992. ‘Whose Story Is It, Anyway? Ideology and Psychology in the Representation of the Shoah in Israeli Literature’. In Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’. Editor, S.  Friedlander. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 223–239. Felperin, Leslie. 2012. ‘Iron Sky’. Variety, 12 February 2012. https://variety. com/2012/film/reviews/iron-­sky-­1117947071/. Felstiner, John. 1992. “Translating Paul Celan’s ‘Todesfuge’”. In Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’. Editor, S. Friedlander, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 240–258. Field, Michele. 1996. ‘Philip Kerr: Scottish Cynicism & Thriller Plots’. Publishers Weekly, 243:15. 8 April. 43–44. Frostrup, Mariella. 2008. ‘Open Book’. BBC Radio 4, 25 May. https://www.bbc. co.uk/sounds/play/b00bfk07. Hall, Katharina. 2012. ‘The Crime Writer as Historian: Representations of National Socialism and its Post-War Legacies in Joseph Kanon’s The Good German and Pierre Frei’s Berlin’. Journal of European Studies, 42:1. 50–67. ———. 2013. ‘The “Nazi Detective” as Provider of Justice in Post-1990 British and German Crime Fiction: Philip Kerr’s The Pale Criminal, Robert Harris’s Fatherland, and Richard Birkefeld and Göran Hachmeister’s Wer übrig bleibt, hat recht.’ Comparative Literature Studies, 50:2. 288–313. Hammett, Dashiell. Red Harvest. London: Cassell, 1974. Harvey, A.  D. 1998. A Muse of Fire: Literature, Art and War. London: Hambledon Press. Herf, Jeffrey. 2014. ‘Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the Nazis and the Holocaust: The Origins, Nature and Aftereffects of Collaboration’. Jewish Political Studies Review, 26:3. 13–37.

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Hower, Jessica S. 2019. ‘“All Good Stories”: Historical Fiction in Pedagogy, Theory, and Scholarship.’ Rethinking History, 23:1. 78–125. Jameson, Fredric. 2016. Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality. London: Verso. Karolle-Berg, Julia. 2015. ‘The Case of the Missing Literary Tradition: Reassessing Four Assumptions of Crime and Detective Novels in the German-Speaking World (1900–1933)’. Monatshefte, 107:3. 431–454. Kerr, Philip. 2011. Field Grey. London: Quercus. ———. 1993a. ‘A German Requiem’. Berlin Noir. London: Penguin. 525–836. ———. 2018. Greeks Bearing Gifts. London: Quercus. ———. 2015a. ‘Introducing Bernie Gunther’. Dead Good, 12 November. https:// www.deadgoodbooks.co.uk/philip-­kerr-­bernie-­gunther/. ———. 2015b. The Lady from Zagreb. London: Quercus. ———. 1993b. ‘March Violets’. Berlin Noir. London: Penguin. 1–246. ———. 2019. Metropolis. London: Quercus. ———. 2008. The One from the Other. London: Quercus. ———. 2016: The Other Side of Silence. London: Quercus. ———. 1993c. ‘The Pale Criminal’. Berlin Noir. London: Penguin. 249-524. Kucia, Marek. 2016. ‘The Europeanization of Holocaust Memory and Eastern Europe.’ East European Politics and Societies, 30:1. 97–119. Lake, Anthony. 2016. ‘“But What’s One More Murder?” Confronting the Holocaust in Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther Novels’. Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies, 38:1. 88–107. Lanzmann, Claude. 1995. Shoah: The Complete Text of the Acclaimed Holocaust Film. Translated by A. Whitelaw and W. Byron. Boston: De Capo Press. Leitch, Thomas. 2020. ‘The Many Pasts of Detective Fiction.’ Crime Fiction Studies, 1:2. 157–172. ‘New Survey by the Claims Conference Finds Critical Gaps in Holocaust Knowledge in Austria’. Claims Conference: Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, http://www.claimscon.org/austria-­study/. Norris, Margot. 2000. Writing War in the Twentieth Century. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Ott, Bill. 2018. ‘My Friend Bernie Gunther’. The Booklist, 114:17. 88. Picker, Lenny. 2013. ‘Have Gunther, Will Unravel: PW Talks with Philip Kerr’. Publisher’s Weekly. 22 February. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-­ topic/authors/interviews/article/56063-­have-­gunther-­will-­unravel-­pw-­talks-­ with-­philip-­kerr.html. Sanyal, Debarati. 2010. ‘Reading Nazi Memory in Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes’. L'Esprit Créateur, 50:4. 47–66. Schoen Consulting. Claims Conference Holocaust Poll—AUSTRIA March 2019. Claims Conference: Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. http://www.claimscon.org/wp-­content/uploads/2019/05/Austria-­Topline-­ Results-­English-­5.2.19.pdf.

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Scott, A. O. 2015. ‘Review: “Son of Saul” Revisits Life and Death in Auschwitz.’ New York Times, 17 December. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/ movies/review-­son-­of-­saul-­revisits-­life-­and-­death-­in-­auschwitz.html. Rau, Petra. 2013. Our Nazis: Representations of Fascism in Contemporary Literature and Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ‘We Release Research to Mark Holocaust Memorial Day 2019’. 2019. Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, 27 January. https://www.hmd.org.uk/news/we-­release­research-­to-­mark-­holocaust-­memorial-­day-­2019/.

CHAPTER 4

Noir Bearing Gifts: The Greek Shoah and Its Memory in Philip Kerr’s Greeks Bearing Gifts Christos Dermentzopoulos, Lampros Flitouris, and Nikos Filippaios

This chapter examines the historical crime fiction novel Greeks Bearing Gifts (2018) by Philip Kerr, which is the next to last volume of his Bernie Gunther series.1 Philip Kerr (1956–2018) was one of the leading authors of a particular style of historical noir, including his Berlin Noir trilogy (1989–1991), which introduced his detective, Bernie Gunther. In his fourteen novels featuring Gunther, Kerr offers what we might see as hard-­ boiled epic, (re)telling the history of Germany and to an extent Europe from the end of the Weimar Republic, through World War II to the first fragile years of post-war reconstruction and of course the separation of the German state. In Greeks Bearing Gifts, Kerr deals thoroughly with the years following the German Occupation (1939–1944) and the Civil War (1943–1949) in Greece and especially with the extermination of the Jews of Thessaloniki by the Nazis and their Greek collaborators, as well as the violent sequestering of their property, which continued after the war.

C. Dermentzopoulos • L. Flitouris • N. Filippaios (*) University of Ioannina, Ioannina, Greece e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Dall’Asta et al. (eds.), Contemporary European Crime Fiction, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21979-5_4

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In Greeks Bearing Gifts, Bernie Gunther travels to post-war Greece, in 1957, in order to solve a case which involves the traumatic memory of the aforementioned ‘Greek Shoah’. As Gunther gets deeper into this case, he gradually hears about and as such unearths the traumatic memories of the country’s Jews. These memories were censored after the war by the Greek state and also by the city of Thessaloniki, for reasons of national unity and local reconciliation, mainly in order to promote a historical memory of the unity of the Greek people against the Nazi penetrators, but also due to the anti-Semitism of some of the city’s residents. Gunther’s attempt to bring into the light the violent crimes of the Nazi and their Greek allies is based on his democratic and humanist ideals and as a way of opposing this ethnocentric propaganda. To be more exact, Gunther’s anti-nationalism leans towards a particular humanist account or understanding of Marxism that we will unpack further in the final parts of this chapter. These elements of the narrative connect Kerr’s novel with the recent efforts in Greece to re-­ examine these violent and tragic events in the context of a larger continent-­ wide effort to think through the ongoing effects of violent conflict in the twentieth century. Our analysis of the novel assumes that its main subject is the Greek Shoah, the memories of it by those who survived, and the effort of those in the present to reveal the truth. Bernie Gunther undertakes the role not only of the detective, the solver of the crime, but also of the historian; the common feature that links these two identities is a both cerebral and painful investigation of the past. However, this dyadic role, of the detective and the historian, is a crucial feature of historical crime fiction, for which Greeks Bearing Gifts stands as a representative example. Thus, for this chapter’s theoretical context, we eclectically combine ideas and theories drawn from academic studies on crime fiction and historical fiction. In addition, we also turn to historical studies concerning the novel’s subject, the extermination of the Jews of Thessaloniki during the German Occupation of Greece. In contemporary historical crime fiction, historical memory—that of the individual, which is personal and unofficial, and also the collective and official or public version—is not steady and immutable, but rather is always implicated in political, social and ideological conflicts. Christine Berberich notes, “rather than merely solving the crime, novels such as these reflect on how history has been passed down and commemorated, and how that

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engages with individual choices both in the past and in the present” (6). Thus, in historical crime fiction, the past proves not just to be a social construction, something that is subject to change and revision, but also a site whose meaning is contested, and where the struggle to assert meaning crystalizes divisions between the dominant social, political and economic strata, on the one hand, and the cultures and mentalities of the various minorities, on the other (Berberich). As Kate M.  Quinn points out, “indeed, any marginalized group or minority may find the crime genre offers an ideal vehicle to challenge past assumptions from the perspective not just of the present but even from the standpoint of an imagined future” (316–317). As an elaborated example of historical crime fiction, Greeks Bearing Gifts is based, on the one hand, on the tradition of detective fiction and, on the other, on the genre of the historical novel, whose socio-political dimension was highlighted by Georg Lukacs in his classic study of this subject, The Historical Novel (1955). In the final chapter of this book, Lukacs turns his attention to the last incarnation of the genre, which he calls “the historical novel of democratic humanism”, or—to be more accurate—“the historical novel of militant anti-Fascist humanism” (261). Here Lukacs analyses the work of writers such as Anatole France, Romain Rollan, Heinrich Mann and Alfred Döblin, who tried to oppose the rise of totalitarian regimes in interwar Europe, through the literary genre of the historical novel. In Greeks Bearing Gifts this revelation of the historical truth regarding the extermination of the Greek Jews of Thessaloniki and its censorship in the following years is based on the same humanist, democratic values; these ideals are expressed by Bernie Gunther, who hides them behind the typical cynicism and irony of the hard-boiled detective. Generally, in Kerr’s novel this legacy of “the historical novel of democratic humanism” is intertwined with the elements of the crime fiction genre. Tzvetan Todorov in his study on detective fiction has delved into the distinction of two timelines in the crime novel: the story of events that constitute the crime and the story of the detective’s retrospective attempt to solve it (Todorov). Based on Todorov’s theory, Ellen O’Gorman claims that the crime-solver adopts the identity of the historian by forming an interpretation of the historical past in contrast with the official and hegemonic one, according to his/her ethical code (Gorman 22–24). In Greeks Bearing Gifts, Bernie Gunther gets involved personally and sentimentally in the investigation and dangerously follows his inner moral code (Major 3–4), in order to bring to justice former Nazis and their collaborators who

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were not convicted of the horrific crimes they committed against Greek Jews. Without a doubt, the novel is characterized by didacticism, as Kerr’s clear goal is to inform especially non-Greek readers about the events of the ‘Greek Shoah’ and moreover to urge them to support the contemporary efforts carried out by both academic and public historians to bring the historical truth into the light. However, this didacticism is detached from any simplistic moralistic approach. This is mainly accomplished via flashbacks of the long history and the tragic fate of the Jews of Thessaloniki, which are carried out by the fictional characters who inform Bernie Gunther about the case. The narrative is based on these individuals’ subjective and experiential view of these historical events and are filtered through Gunther’s determining perspective. This literary technique could also be considered as an example of ‘historiographic metafiction’ in that it draws attention to both the limits of fiction and history—how the blurring of fact and fiction contributes to an awareness of the historicity of fiction and the fictionality of history. Linda Hutcheon discussed a group of postmodern novels, mainly from the United States, as representative examples of ‘historiographic metafiction’ and she connects this term to the concept of ‘interdiscursivity’, referring to the interaction of various discourses (e.g. literary, scientific, philosophical and journalistic) in postmodern fiction: “One of the effects of this discursive pluralizing is that the (perhaps illusory but once firm and single) centre of both historical and fictive narrative is dispersed” (12). She refers to Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which also combines the historical novel and crime fiction, with a definitive postmodern view. So, ‘historiographic metafiction’ could speak to or about the style of historical crime fiction (Chioti 18–19). In Greeks Bearing Gifts, the discourses of literature and historiography are in constant interaction, through the framed flashbacks which go beyond the given limits between an objective historical past and a subjective personal memory. However, it is important to note that in Kerr’s novel this move between history and memory is limited by the aforementioned turn towards historical and political didacticism. In turn, this pedagogical tendency is limited by the popular and entertaining dimension of the crime fiction genre, to be more exact by the features of suspense, violence, mystery and irony which dominate the hard-boiled style.

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The Historical Context: The Jewish Community of Thessaloniki and the Memory of the Greek Shoah In recent years, more intense and organized efforts are being made to unearth and re-examine the violent and tragic events of the extermination of the long-standing Jewish community of Thessaloniki by the Nazis during the German Occupation of Greece. As such, there is an important collection of traumatic memories of the inhabitants of this northern Greek city, which for decades were not only silenced but also censored. The core of the Thessalonian Jews consisted of descendants of those expelled from Spain in 1492 and those who arrived in the city in waves of immigration from Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth century. In 1912, when Thessaloniki was integrated into the Greek state, the Jews of the city already had a long-standing social, political and cultural presence; they were numerous but also divided politically and along class lines. They were a distinct population group in a city that after 1912—and especially after the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922 and the arrival of Greek refugees from Anatolia—was gradually dominated by the Greeks on an economic, political, social, cultural and therefore ideological level. The German Occupation (1941–1944) and the extermination of almost all the Jews of the city by the Nazis led to the catastrophic homogenization of what was previously a fairly diverse population and crucially a seismic change in its social structure. In 1940, the city’s Jewish population was 50,000, or about 20% of the total population, which numbered 260,000; less than 5% of Thessaloniki Jews survived Auschwitz. Already in 1942 the Nazis launched the plan to exterminate all the Jews of Thessaloniki and seize their institutional and personal property, due to their obligatory participation in a fake registration process. The anti-Semitic Christian collaborators rejoiced at the expulsion of the Jews and even benefited financially. Their number is probably far larger than was initially acknowledged by the reassuring myth of absolute support of the Greeks of Thessaloniki for their Jewish fellow citizens. The famous treasure of the Jews—that is, the money and jewels that this community had amassed and with which it believed it could ensure its survival—had in fact been largely looted by the Nazis. However, part of this treasure wasn’t found by the Nazis, who abandoned the city and Greece in 1944, having been defeated in the war (Mazower; Fleming). Only 900 Jews from Thessaloniki survived. Most of the camp survivors wanted to achieve their immediate repatriation. The collapse in their

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economic fortunes and the forced seizure of Jewish property in Thessaloniki by the Nazis and their local collaborators created extremely unfavourable living conditions for the survivors. The confiscated Jewish houses after the departure of the Nazis often passed, legally, into the ownership of Greeks, while their businesses also passed into new hands. Thus, several families of survivors were forced to emigrate to Palestine or the United States (Benveniste). The extermination of the Jews of Thessaloniki was almost total and represented one of the highest relative ‘eradication’ rates in Europe. For many decades this tragic event was completely silenced by both historians and the state. In Greece, as in other European countries, after the war, survivors of the Thessaloniki Shoah spoke only to each other, as there were no ears willing to listen to them. In Greece, the silence is related to the fact that the winners of the Civil War included many of those who had collaborated in the deportation of Jews or those who benefited from their extermination. At some point, however, survivors around the world began to write and talk about their Shoah experiences in order to pass their stories on to their children, and as a dynamic response to those who wanted to deny that the eradication and extermination had taken place. Thus, narration became a way of dealing with this trauma and preserving the memory of what had happened. In Greece, interest in the study of the Shoah began in the early 1990s, following delays to a trend that had already emerged in the rest of Europe. This effort has been pursued both by academic and public historians, as well as by journalists and film directors. The most important fruits of this effort are the documentary Salonika City of Silence (2006), directed by Maurice Amaraggi, and the historiographic study The Holocaust in Thessaloniki: Reactions to the Anti-Jewish Persecution, 1942–1943 (2021) by Leon Saltiel. The film could be considered as a more artistic and emotional approach to the subject, focusing on the city of Thessaloniki, as an important landmark interwoven with memory, which is both personal and collective: a lieux de mémoire, according to Pierre Nora (1999). On the other hand, the book is a result of Saltiel’s long academic journey to excavate the Holocaust of Thessaloniki. Kerr’s novel is another example of this re-examination of the collective traumatic experiences of the Thessalonian Jews2 but one that assumes the form of a detective novel while at the same time bending the form of the genre to accommodate its complex and difficult subject matter.

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Greeks Bearing Gifts Before moving into an analysis of the novel’s main ideas, it is necessary to provide a brief summary of the plot. We are in 1957. The now ex-private detective Bernie Gunther, hidden behind the fake identity of an employee in a large German insurance company, travels to Athens to investigate the sinking of a naval vessel belonging to the German Siegfried Witzel, a former Wehrmacht soldier who remained in Greece after the German Occupation. However, after an encounter between Gunther and Witzel, the latter is found by the former brutally murdered. Gunther is drawn to the investigation of Witzel’s assassination, excavating the violence and dirty secrets of the German Occupation which have been buried in the post-war era. Witzel’s murderer is an ex-Nazi officer, Alois Brunner, who has returned to Greece to find a part of the hidden properties of the Greek Jews who were exterminated by the Nazis in Thessaloniki in 1943. Brunner, a smart and ruthless but now paranoid man who has not given up on his Nazi past in the slightest, is pursued by the German and Greek authorities, and also by Mossad, which has sent its agents from Israel to Greece. As the plot progresses and becomes more and more complicated, the Greek police, Mossad agents and other minor but significant characters become entangled around Gunther and his investigation. It is important to note that some of the characters that appear in the novel are real historical figures, who played a significant role in the extermination of the Greek Jewish community of Thessaloniki during the German Occupation. Alois Brunner (1912–2010) was in charge, under Adolf Eichmann, of the deportation of Jewish people from many countries, particularly Greece. After World War II, Brunner was hunted by the German and the Israeli states and also by Interpol, but he escaped arrest until his death, in Syria (Jewish Virtual Library). Of course, Kerr combines real-life events with imaginary elements to construct a literary representation of Brunner and other significant Nazi figures including Max Merten (1911–1971), a German prosecutor and Nazi officer who was also responsible for the transportation of Greek Jews to Auschwitz. After World War II, Merten was actively involved in the political life of West Germany. In fact, in 1957 he returned to Greece to testify at the trial of his interpreter, Arthur Maisner, during the Occupation (who also appears in the novel). After many turbulent events, involving the Greek government and also the authorities of West Germany, Merten managed to escape trial by the Greek courts (Hassid). In Kerr’s novel, Merten appears as an old friend of

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Gunther, a turn of events which helps Gunther to find a new and profitable job in a respected insurance company. However, Mertens’ involvement in the case is far deeper and more complicated. The involvement of real historical figures in the novel gives it a charge or frisson of authenticity and raises a set of fraught ethical questions about the relationship between the real and fictional and what fiction can hope to do or achieve vis-à-vis more standard approaches to history and historical truth. At the end of the novel, and to acknowledge this issue, Kerr has added a section with accurate historical information for each of the real-life characters who have participated in the plot. As mentioned above, the main part of the novel is dominated by a series of accounts told from the perspective of secondary characters who not only help Gunther to solve the case but also, and more importantly, tell us about the long history of the Jews of Thessaloniki. These flashbacks also convey the traumatic experiences of this community, facing extermination by the Nazis and the seizure of their property in collaboration with a section of the Greek population. In order to maintain the literary character of the narration and to avoid didactic historical retrospective, Kerr focuses not only on the idiolect but also on the overall personality of the person speaking. For example, in the following excerpt, Gunther’s colleague in the insurance company and informal guide to the labyrinth of modern Greek city life, Achilleas Garlopis, adds the following comment after his account of the history of the Thessalonian Jews: Anyway, I don’t want to embarrass you, sir, with a lachrymose tale of Jewish suffering in Greece—you being a German n’all—so, to cut a long story short, most of the Jews in Thessaloniki were deported to Auschwitz in 1943 and gassed to death. (147–148). The sharp satirical tone is a key element of the noir style of both literature and cinema. In this excerpt this feature appears in the form of an unorthodox and critical view on the Shoah and its position in both personal and historical memory, one that might be called ‘Holocaust impiety’ (Berberich; Auer).3 The excerpt also shows, in a satirical manner, the difficult relationship between the Greeks and the Germans, especially during the initial post-war years. In addition, this ironic view both reflects Gunther’s hard-boiled persona and suits the wary, cunning, cynical but nevertheless likeable character of Garlopis. The tragic fate of the Jews of Thessaloniki is also pursued in a monologue given by the Greek police lieutenant Stavros Leventis, whose

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professional hostility to Gunther is also matched by grudging respect for his doggedness and his capacity to find answers when none would appear to be forthcoming: I won’t detain you, Commissar, by trying to explain how, over the many centuries, so many Jews in the diaspora, fleeing one persecution after another, ended up in Salonika; nor will I take up your time to explain what happened between the two wars and how Salonika became Thessaloniki and Greek, but in this most ancient city where change was a way of life, everything changed when the German army arrived and, I’m sorry to say, that change became a way of death. The alacrity with which the Nazis began to take action against Salonika’s Jews was astonishing even to the Greeks who, thanks to the Turks, know a bit about persecution, but for the Jews it was devastating. (187)

At this point, Leventis connects this collective traumatic experience with his individual life story, namely, his failure as a young Greek policeman to apprehend and punish a Nazi officer who murdered a rich Jew, Jaco Kapantzi, in cold blood. Kapantzi was killed because he provoked the Nazi officer during the train journey to the concentration camp, but Leventis reveals that Kapantzi has helped his father before World War II. The following excerpt is representative of his personal involvement in his fate: Perhaps this will sound strange to you now, Commissar. ‘Why bother?’ I hear you say. After all, what’s the fate of one man when more than sixty thousand Greek Jews died at Auschwitz and Treblinka? (...) And the point is this: Jaco Kapantzi was my case, my responsibility, and I’ve come to believe that in life it’s best to live for a purpose greater than oneself. And before you suggest there’s something in this for me, a promotion, perhaps, there isn’t. Even if no one ever knows that I have done this I would do it because I want to do something for Greece and I believe this is good for my country. (189)

Thus, in Leventis’ retrospective narrative, the historical dimension is deeply intertwined with the personal one and the antifascist, humanist perspective with an inner moral code. This is a representative example of how ‘historiographic metafiction’ is utilized in the novel. Though in Greeks Bearing Gifts this postmodern technique is not free and open in a parodic way, it is limited by a very specific political purpose: the revealing of the censored story of the Thessalonian Jews.

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These flashbacks, which blur the barriers between history and literature, operate as crucial elements in Gunther’s attempt to solve the case and also as excerpts of a censored and suppressed historical truth. The most critical of these flashbacks is narrated by an Israeli Jew with Greek roots. Bernie Gunther meets the Mossad spy, Rachel Eskenazi, who has come to Athens to catch Alois Brunner. Eskenazi speaks about her life in Thessaloniki as a Greek Jew, about her capture by the Nazis and her transportation to Auschwitz; finally, she informs Gunther that, though her relatives died there, she escaped death just by chance, but not without avoiding a nightmarish experience. In the personal story of the Israeli spy, we follow the fate of all the Greek Jews of Thessaloniki. The tone of her narrative is as serious and tragic as the one told by Leventis and also sharp and realistic. In fact, in this narrative, the boundaries between traumatic personal memory and the tragic historical experience of an entire group become almost invisible. The meeting between Gunther and Eskenazi takes place in the Panathenaic Stadium, an important monument of Ancient Greek civilization. This place evokes a set of particular historical memories, from the original ancient Greek Olympics to the first modern Olympic Games of 1896, which took place in this stadium, but also the Olympics of 1936, organized by Hitler’s government in Berlin. As such, the Panathenaic Stadium stands as a complex and multifaceted lieux de mémoire. The multifarious character of Eskenazi’s narrative also refers to two fundamental elements of the crime fiction genre and especially the noir style. These elements are directly linked with the representation of the Shoah. Firstly, a feeling of suspense is dominant, as an invisible sniper lurks in the shadows, poised to press Gunther into helping the Israeli secret agent. According to Todorov, suspense is a key feature of the style of crime fiction which he refers to as ‘noir’ (the ‘thriller’, in the English translation), in which “everything is possible, and the detective risks his health, if not his life” (47). The second fundamental element is the use of black humour, which operates to both undercut and emphasize the aforementioned tension and seriousness. When Eskenazi warns Gunther that a sniper has him in his sights, Gunther muses: I said nothing but I was suddenly feeling very uncomfortable, like I had a persistent itch on my scalp and all the Drene shampoo in the world wasn’t going to fix that. I sat down again, quickly. Now I really did want a cigarette. (297)

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Laura Major notes that in Kerr’s first three novels featuring Bernie Gunther, it is through “the sardonic, wise-cracking fashion of the hard-­ boiled detective” and “in ironic thought and speech” that “Gunther resists the Nazis” (2019: 5). Moreover, according to Antony Lake, irony and humour are utilized throughout the whole series (2016). Gunther begins his career as an officer of the Kripo (Kriminalpolizei—Berlin’s criminal police). Thus, he inevitably participates, without having a choice, in the crimes and violent acts of the Nazis. This part of his life haunts him for years, and irony and humour are his attempt to deal with guilt. However, “when that irony reaches the limits of its representational power, the series turns its attention to its protagonist’s guilt about his role in the Holocaust” (Lake 2016: 105). This remark applies also to the feelings that Gunther expresses towards Eskenazi: ‘Would it make any difference now if I said I’m sorry?’ ‘Good God’. The woman next to me laughed and then covered her mouth. ‘That’s a surprise. I’m sorry but you’re the first German I’ve met since the war who ever said sorry. Everyone else says, “We didn’t know about the camps” or “I was only obeying orders” or “Terrible things happened to the Germans, too”. But no one ever thinks to apologize. Why is that, do you think?’ ‘An apology seems hardly adequate under the circumstances. Maybe that’s why we don’t say it more often’. I reached for my cigarettes and then remembered I’d given them to Arthur Meissner. (297)

Insofar as history in Greeks Bearing Gifts is deeply connected with personal memory, Kerr suggests that truth—historical truth—can only ever be subjected, despite the presence of figures of narrative and political authority like Gunther and Eskenazi. Moreover, in the efforts by the Greek authorities to cover up the crimes of the Nazi invaders and their native collaborators, we can see how official history—or History with a capital H—is better understood as an ideological social construction. And yet Kerr does not want to go as far as to embrace an ‘anything goes’ postmodern historical relativism and deny that certain historical events took place—that is, that particular episodes and events happened and had very real and far-reaching consequences. This kind of truth is represented at the

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level of narrative by Gunther’s investigation and the expectation that the excavations of the hard-boiled detective will reveal what really took place— even if Gunther is unable to bring all the perpetrators to justice. As a criminal investigator and at the same time a historian, Gunther constructs the ‘story of the investigation’ not to solve a specific, individualized crime, but rather to show how official or state-sanctioned versions of history are riddled with omissions, fabrications, and outright lies. As a detective, and as a historian, Gunther’s actions are rooted in humanist and democratic ideals, which are more typically hidden behind the cynical and sardonic outlook and behaviour of the hard-boiled gumshoe. As such, Gunther’s socio-political perspective is aligned with a humanist understanding of Marxism, a perspective detached from the two extremes of the Cold War: the post-war Capitalism of the West and the Communism of the Eastern Bloc. Gunther’s attempt to reveal the truth about the Greek Jews takes place in the context of a larger antifascist, anti-­ authoritarian and democratic struggle. Gunther’s preference for ‘democratic Marxism’ is explicitly mentioned in at least two parts of the novel, yet it is not clearly associated with the Shoah. However, in the following excerpt, the connection between Marxism and a particular account of history is clear. The dialogue that takes place is between Gunther and Elli Papantoniou, a young and beautiful lawyer with whom Gunther has a love affair: ‘I thought we weren’t going to talk politics’. ‘This isn’t politics. This is history’. ‘There’s a difference?’ ‘Don’t you think there is?’ ‘Not in Germany. Politics is always about history. Marx certainly thought so’. ‘True’. ‘I’m a Marxist’, I said. (259–260)

In Greeks Bearing Gifts, such politicization of history and historicization of politics come together in the novel’s efforts to excavate the traumas suffered by the Jewish community of Thessaloniki. Gunther’s claim to be a Marxist makes sense not in the specific context of the Cold War and the fracturing of leftist politics into different Marxist sects but rather in a more general antifascist and humanist sense (e.g. opposing the alignment of

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states and capitalism and trying to give dignity and truth to the exploited and oppressed). Gunther’s investigation may not have all the answers but it demonstrates how crime fiction can excavate historical truths and in doing so can bring about a measure of justice for those caught up in the traumatic events of the past.

Conclusion Greeks Bearing Gifts is not only a representative novel of historical crime fiction but also a work in which crime fiction is imbued with a set of concrete socio-political ideologies. In fact, with this novel, Philip Kerr connects crime fiction with public history, as he dynamically intervenes in the recent efforts to critically reflect on the extermination of the long-standing Jewish community of Thessaloniki by the Nazis during the German Occupation of Greece. In doing so, Kerr, as British novelist, writing from the perspective of a former Nazi cop whose sympathies are aligned with the murdered Jews of Thessaloniki and to a humanist version of Marxism, enacts and participates in a more general European project underscored by efforts to better understand the past (and past crimes) and by a politics of antifascism, critical thinking and democratic values. The dynamic and clear-eyed political intent of the novel is in constant interaction with elements of the hard-boiled style—for example, the graphic depiction of violence and the dark sense of humour—as they are expressed by the actions and thoughts of Bernie Gunther. In Greeks Bearing Gifts, Kerr, as Marxist, as British crime fiction writer and as European, shows us how an activist political stance can be effectively incorporated into a crime novel that can entertain as well as educate. Acknowledgement  The research presented here has been financed by the research project DETECt: Detecting Transcultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives (Horizon 2020, 2018–2021) (Grant agreement number 770151).

Notes 1. Greeks Bearing Gifts is the thirteenth volume of Kerr’s literary series with Bernie Gunther, which began in 1989 with the novel March Violets. Philip Kerr died of cancer on 23 March 2018 and Greeks Bearing Gifts was published on 2 April 2018. The series ended with the posthumous novel Metropolis (2019).

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2. There is a strong debate, not exclusively in academic circles, about the possibility of representing the experience of the Shoah through literature and art in general. Many intellectuals and writers consider that every attempt at representation falls into the void, or worse, having as—so would say—motto the famous phrase of Adorno: ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ (qtd. in Major 2019: 1). On the other hand, some scholars discuss the possibility and value of this representation. This debate becomes more intense when the Shoah is represented in popular culture and moreover in cinema. Contemporary popular culture could be a dynamic tool in the hands of important artists and auteurs, in order to draw the attention of the general public and especially the younger generations to the unforgettable crime of the Shoah, in a subversive and modern way, by overcoming the boundaries of the highbrow and the lowbrow and by renewing the ways of transmitting historical memory. We believe that Greeks Bearing Gifts is a representative example of this dimension of contemporary popular culture. For some selective studies on the debate on the artistic representation of the Shoah, especially in the context of cinema and popular culture, see Richardson (2005), Marshman (2005) and more recently Auer  (2015); more specifically for the Shoah in crime fiction, see Berberich (2019), Major (2019) and Lake (2016). 3. In the context of the Holocaust Impiety writers, directors, mainly representatives of popular culture, portray the Shoah in a subversive way, which does not seem to align with the tragedy of a crime unique in the history of mankind. Contemporary examples of the Holocaust Impiety trend, which seems to oppose the famous phrase by Adorno, are Kerr’s Berlin Noir trilogy (1989–1991) in the field of literature and Quentin Tarantino’s film Inglorious Basterds (2009) in the field of cinema.

Works Cited ‘Alois Brunner (1912–c. 2010)’. The Jewish Virtual Library. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/alois-­brunner (accessed 14 June 2022). Auer, Stefan. 2015. ‘The Holocaust as Fiction’. Eurozine, 8 April, www.eurozine. com/the-­holocaust-­as-­fiction/ (accessed 14 June 2022). Benveniste, Henriette-Rika. 2019. ‘Allatini Dormitory, 3 Paraskevopoulou Street: Despair and Hope in Salonika after the Shoah’. Historein, 18:2, doi:https:// doi.org/10.12681/historein.14360. Berberich, Christine. 2019. ‘Detecting the Past: Detective Novels, the Nazi Past, and Holocaust Impiety’. Genealogy, 3:4, 70., doi:https://doi.org/10.3390/ genealogy3040070.

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Chioti, Vasiliki. 2020. ‘Elliniki Krisi, Mnimi kai Taftotita Se Mavro Fonto: Dyo Mithistorimata, Ena Thematiko Tripticho: Petros Markaris, Wolfgang Schorlau’ (‘Greek Crisis, Memory and Identity with a Black Background: Two Police Novels, A Thematic Triptych: Petros Markaris, Wolfgang Schorlau’), MA Thesis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, http://ikee.lib.auth.gr/ record/328677/files/GRI-­2021-­29978.pdf. Fleming, Katherine Elizabeth. 2010. Greece: A Jewish History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hassid, Samuel. ‘The Trial of Max Merten in the Changing Mirrors of Time and Place’. greece.haifa.ac.il/images/events/holocaust_greece/samuel_hassid.pdf (accessed 22 June 2022). Hutcheon, Linda. 1989. ‘Historiographic Metafiction Parody and the Intertextuality of History’. In Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction. Editors, P.  O’ Donnell and R.  C. Davis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 3–32. Katharina Hall. 2013. ‘The ‘Nazi Detective’ as Provider of Justice in Post-1990 British and German Crime Fiction: Philip Kerr’s The Pale Criminal, Robert Harris's Fatherland, and Richard Birkefeld and Göran Hachmeister’s Wer Übrig Bleibt, Hat Recht’. Comparative Literature Studies, 50:2, 288–313. Kerr, Philip. 2019. Greeks Bearing Gifts: A Bernie Gunther Novel. New  York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Lake, Anthony. 2016. “But What’s One More Murder?’ Confronting the Holocaust in Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther Novels’. Atlantis, 38:1, 89–107. Lukács, György. 1963. The Historical Novel by Georg Lukacs. Boston: Beacon Press. Major, Laura. 2019. ‘Fictional Crimes/Historical Crimes: Genre and Character in Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir Trilogy’. Genealogy, 3:4, 60., doi:https://doi. org/10.3390/genealogy3040060. Marshman, Sophia. 2005. ‘From the Margins to the Mainstream? Representations of the Holocaust in Popular Culture’. eSharp, 6:1. Mazower, Mark. 2005. Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950. London: Harper Collins. Molho, Michael, and Joseph Nehama. 1948. In Memoriam: Hommage Aux Victimes Juives Des Nazis En Grèce. Thessaloniki: Imp. N. Nicolaidès. Nora, Pierre. 1999. Rethinking France: Les Lieux De mémoire, Vol. 1–4: The State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. O’Gorman, Ellen. 1999. ‘Detective Fiction and Historical Narrative’. Greece and Rome, 46:1, 19–26., doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/s001738350002605x. Quinn, Kate M. 2020. ‘Crime Fiction and Memory’. In The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction. Editors, J. Allan, J. Gulddal, S. King and A. Pepper. London: Routledge, pp. 310–317.

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Richardson, Anna. 2005. ‘The Ethical Limitations of Holocaust Literary Representation’. eSharp, 5. Saltiel, Leon. 2021. The Holocaust in Thessaloniki, Reactions to the Anti-Jewish Persecution, 1942–1943. London: Routledge. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1977. The Poetics of Prose. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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CHAPTER 5

Confronting Memories: The Case of Babylon Berlin Massimiliano Coviello

In Screening Twentieth Century Europe: Television, History, Memory (2020), Ib Bondebjerg explores how twentieth-century European history is represented and culturally mediated in a variety of German and British documentaries, docudramas, and historical TV dramas. He underscores the importance of storytelling in the development of the audience’s relationship with the past and of a collective historical conscience. European TV series, in particular, offer a unique opportunity here in that they activate what Landsberg (2004) calls the prosthetic memory of the audience, leading to a negotiation of cultural roots and identities. Thus, the fictionalized depiction of historical events and their characters can pave the way for new forms of cultural encounter and community building: It is a cultural encounter with another time and historical characters and events, it is an encounter with an often very different national past and real-

M. Coviello (*) Link Campus University, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Dall’Asta et al. (eds.), Contemporary European Crime Fiction, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21979-5_5

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ity, and when we are watching a fiction from another European country, it also becomes a transnational, mediated cultural encounter. (Bondebjerg 2020: 13)

The transnational dimension of European TV dramas is enabled by the proliferation of co-productions, adaptations, and creative networks that are growing more independent of their national context of origin (Bondebjerg et al. 2017). Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, European productions have progressively become a suitable environment for mediated cultural encounters and collective memory (van Dijck). This development is also due to distribution networks linked to non-linear audiovisual media services, in line with creative fan practices of appropriation, and is rooted in “encounters between national audiences and non-­ national TV drama” that “enhance reflexive understanding of cultural others” (Bondebjerg et al. 2017: 5). Crime is a genre that can be defined through its evolution in time, its historical and cultural specificities, and the various contexts of production (Turnbull 8). The crime genre plays a major role in connecting European TV seriality to the construction of transnational communities and memories. This relationship takes a number of different forms. Firstly, the broad appeal of crime TV series results in a production that is quantitatively relevant. The large-scale circulation of the crime genre testifies to a widespread interest in the narrative and thematic complexity of European popular culture. Crime is a lens through which we can investigate the darkest places and anxieties of contemporary societies. Secondly, the proliferation of subgenres amplifies the range of geographical specificities, which become popular by embodying national stereotypes that are consumed and reinterpreted at a transnational level. For instance, the Nordic noir and the Mediterranean noir genres reinforce an interest in the specific cultural traits of European countries while “engag[ing] deeply in questions about localities, regionality, Europeanness, and the business of cross-­ cultural exchange” (Hansen, Peacock & Turnbull 3). The third and final factor regards the narrative structure of the crime genre and, more specifically, the mechanism of detection, a pivotal plot-building device that places an emphasis on the role of time (Todorov). Crime series characters often have a problematic relationship with the past and move between concealing their past actions and acknowledging them in the present. Detection therefore becomes a useful narrative device to explore not only the

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mysteries hidden in the past but also the ways in which the past continues to impinge on the present, laying bare its often traumatic effects and open wounds. A noteworthy trend in recent European crime drama involves the reflection on collective and personal memory, often in relation to major traumatic events of the twentieth century. Examples include Romanzo criminale—La serie (Sky, 2008–2010), set in Rome during the so-called anni di piombo (Years of Lead, between the late 1960s and the late 1980s), and which tells the story of the notorious Magliana criminal gang and its relations with political terrorism and Italian institutions; Deutschland 83/86/89 (RTL/SundanceTV, 2015/2018/2020), a cycle of three miniseries set in Germany between 1983 and 1989, addressing the attempts to come to terms with World War II crimes in the context of the Cold War; and Peaky Blinders (BBC, 2013–present), which revolves around the Shelby crime family in Birmingham and the efforts of the protagonist Tommy to overcome the traumatic consequences of World War I. In these and other TV crime series, the investigation and diagnosis of major historical events intersect with the protagonists’ personal experiences. The characters face tumultuous reckonings with their own past as they struggle to make sense of their broken lives in the context of wider historical events. Directed by Achim von Borries, Henk Handloegten, and Tom Tykwer, Babylon Berlin (Sky/ARD, 2017–present) is exemplary of this trend. Set during the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), this award-winning drama follows the life and investigations of commissioner Gereon Rath (played by Volker Bruch) as he relives the trauma he experienced on the World War I battlefield. As the tormented commissioner and his charismatic assistant Charlotte Ritte (played by Liv Lisa Fries) move from the slums and nightclubs of Weimar Berlin to the centers of its political and military power, we wait for the German capital, along with the rest of Europe, to fall into the hands of the Nazis. Bondebjerg argues that in most historical European TV series “there is a general tendency to deal with the history of [...] the twentieth century by combining an everyday perspective with more traditional large-scale history” (Bondebjerg 2020: 171). In Babylon Berlin, the sociopolitical chaos and the artistic and cultural ferment of the Weimar years are intertwined with the everyday life of a commissioner who is struggling with his past. At the same time, in his investigations he must deal with the violence and crimes that, within a few years, will lead to the rise of the Nazi regime and the outbreak of World War II. In this way, the

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everyday life and investigations of Gereon and Charlotte become a powerful tool for questioning the cultural and social crisis of the Weimar Republic and its effects on European history. This chapter addresses Babylon Berlin and its peculiar historical reconstruction as an emblematic example of the importance of crime narratives in European popular culture. More specifically, I argue that the German TV series becomes an important space for reflecting not only on the legacy of past traumas but also on the ongoing consequences of these traumatic historical experiences for our consideration of national and transnational identities and reconciliation in the present. In what follows, Babylon Berlin will be analyzed on a number of levels. Section two examines how the co-­ production and international distribution, managed by Netflix and other Over-the-Top streaming services, enabled the series to reach a transnational audience. The wide-ranging financing network, connected to a revived German TV production culture interested in enhancing the “multilayered brand images of Berlin” (Eichner 203), offered audiences in Germany and across Europe the chance to reassess their understanding of this period of history through the lens and values of contemporary TV culture. Section three focuses on the key locations used in the series and examines how the overlay between the ‘real’ spaces and locations of contemporary Berlin and their equivalents in the imagined Berlin of the Roaring Twenties offers audiences a way to reflect on the ongoing connections between past and present. This process of negotiation and mediation is further developed through a range of intertextual references that connect the culture of the Weimar Republic, notably film production of the time, and the mise-en-scène of the series. Later sections of the chapter analyze the world-building in Babylon Berlin, notably the ways that the narrative and its attendant investigations allow the two main characters, Gereon Rath and Charlotte Ritter, to move through every echelon and aspect of Weimar Berlin and in doing so explore its social tensions and contradictions. The final part of the chapter investigates how Babylon Berlin uses the crime genre to interrogate traumas of Germany’s history and the ongoing consequences of these traumas for our understanding of the present. The representation of the cultural ferment of the Roaring Twenties, the tragedy of the veterans of World War I, Germany’s political instability after its military defeat, and the national and later global economic crises become a way of exploring topical issues such as

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contemporary political corruption, the financial crises of late capitalism, and the emergence of new identities based on the complex joins between nationality and ethnicity, and the rebirth of Populism.

Berlin as a Production Site and Narrative Cityscape Babylon Berlin is the most expensive German drama ever and the first series ever co-produced by a public-service channel (ARD) and a commercial channel (Sky Germany). In his essay on the production culture of transnational TV dramas in Berlin, Lothar Mikos (2020: 383) outlines the financing network, composed by Medienboard, Filmstiftung NRW, and The German Motion Picture Fund, and the 40 million euro budget allocated for the first two seasons of Babylon Berlin. These huge investments had the ultimate goal of bringing the series to a global audience and, by extension, of attracting global production and distribution companies such as Showtime, Starz, Amazon Prime Video, and Netflix. In total, Babylon Berlin aired in ninety countries: Netflix purchased distribution rights for the USA, Canada, and Australia; HBO distributed the TV series in Eastern Europe; and the support of the EU Creative Media Programme was also significant. This complex knot of financing, production, and distribution networks make Babylon Berlin an exemplary case study to understand “the European success of [...] transnational co-productions that manage to keep local creative” (Bondebjerg, 2020: 178). The new German television wave started in 2015. German as well as American TV series like Deutschland 83, 4 Blocks (TNT Serie, 2017–), Berlin Station (Epix, 2016–2019), You Are Wanted (Amazon Video, 2017–2018), Dark (Netflix, 2017–2020), Counterpart (Starz, 2017–2019), and Dogs of Berlin (Netflix, 2018–) revived the centrality and popularity of the German capital as a location and production site for national and transnational audiovisual content. The reason for this growth is twofold: the involvement of new global players, which changed German TV drama production; and the increase in political and economic interests in the Berlin-Brandenburg media cluster (Mikos 2020: 373–374). In the aftermath of the Cold War and during the early stages of the German reunification process, “the mediated image of Berlin became an imagined city, a city where twentieth-century history is present in locations, sets and iconic buildings, and a city with a brand value” (Eichner & Mikos 46).

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The importance of Berlin as both the epicenter of a new production culture and a mediated space, filled with iconic locations and a specific ‘local colour’ (Eichner & Waade), fits the production, narrative, and aesthetic requirements of crime and drama fiction. Its remarkable urban spaces can be tied to, and seen in, numerous significant historical events of the last century—events that left visible and distinctive marks on the city’s squares (Alexanderplatz and Potsdamer Platz), buildings (the Reichstag building), monuments (the Brandenburg Gate, the Berlin Television Tower, and the Holocaust Memorial) and of course on the remains of the Berlin Wall. But an older Berlin, tied to the interwar years, is also visible in and through these ‘real’ locations, and an accompanying sense of historical authenticity is an important way of engaging audiences for several reasons: First, the physical place of contemporary Berlin that corresponds to the first-­ hand memories of local audiences; second, the imagined place of the Weimar Republic and the Roaring Twenties, which stems from our cultural and historical knowledge; and third, the mediated place shaped by popular films. (Eichner 204)

The ‘authentic’ representation of the past and its hidden mysteries are crucial to the appeal and success of a crime series like Babylon Berlin. The production, sustained by an international distribution network, and driven by narrative complexity, has benefited from the transformation of the Berlin cityscape into a palimpsest of “historical memory and forgetting” (Huyssen 49) which in turn speaks to the larger issue at stake in this chapter: the way in which our understanding of history is shaped by the account of the past we are offered in and by contemporary historical crime dramas.

Detecting Babylon’s Locations Having contextualized the production of Babylon Berlin in the wider scope of Berlin’s cultural history, thanks to which the city becomes not only a production site, but also a twentieth-century cityscape and an imaginary landscape of the new millennium, we can now analyze the specific locations deployed in the TV series and their main stylistic features. Filmed in the capital and at the Babelsberg Studios in nearby Potsdam, and featuring more than 300 locations and 150 characters, Babylon Berlin is an impressive audiovisual experiment in the reconstruction of 1920s Berlin.

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Uli Hanisch, Production Designer of Babylon Berlin, “constructed a historic Berlin that corresponds to the mediatized image of the city” (Mikos 2021: 185). The plethora of references to topical places from 1920s Berlin is striking. The building complex of the former Deutsche Bank in Mauerstraße, in the central Mitte neighborhood, has been used both as a costume warehouse and for scenes filmed inside the Rote Burg (the Red Castle), the police headquarters. The Delphi cinema in Weißensee, which first opened its doors in 1929 and closed in 1954, a cult site for the shooting—and screening—of trademark German silent movies, was transformed into the cabaret Moka Efti, one of the most fascinating locations in the show. Many of the streets and environments featured in the series were entirely recreated in the Babelsberg Studios, which opened in 1912. In the third season, the Babelsberg Studios become a sort of ‘set within a set’ in which a masked murderer kills the victims during the shooting of the film Dämonen der Leidenschaft. The use of green screens and post-production CGI also revived the visual memory of the spaces of the German capital,1 most notably in the recreation of the site of clashes between police and protesters from the Communist Party, also known as Blutmai, since the demonstrations provoked several days of riots. Even in cases where the use of particular locations in the series could not be linked to or with their historical equivalents, such as the example of Alexanderplatz, which was a construction site in the 1920s but was reimagined in the series as a lively square and transport hub, the resulting anachronisms generated interest and debates among audiences, keen to eke out connections and disparities between the series’ representation of Berlin and the historical record. More generally, though, the stylistic details of the sets are based on careful cross-references to and re-­ elaborations of the Weimar culture (Gay; Kaes, Jay & Dimendberg). This term refers to a variety of artistic expressions (in particular the cinema) from the period which have collectively generated a wider historical imaginary, comprising both received understandings of history and the historical record and relevant cultural representations (Elsaesser). As such, and as we shall see in the next section, Babylon Berlin successfully synthesizes distinctive elements from the Weimar culture and archival understandings of what the city was really like to recreate an imagined Berlin that allows audiences to think carefully about the complex joins between past and present and the ongoing legacies of the past vis-à-vis the lived experiences of the present.

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Like a Weimar Film Babylon Berlin opens a conversation built on references to the Weimar cinema, an expression that summarizes and conveys “a mentality and political conjuncture, identified with the still fascinating phenomenon ‘Weimar culture’, lasting from 1918 to 1933” (Elsaesser 20). The conversation unfolds in many aspects of the show, starting with the opening titles by Saskia Marka. Effects such as distorted angles, intense colors, the circular cutting of the image, or superimpositions can be traced back to Expressionism. The lettering has a very simple, Art Deco aesthetic. The circle surrounding the name of the TV series at the center of the frame produces a hypnotic visual effect and, at the same time, suggests “that Berlin is always in motion, always changing, vibrating and is also dangerous at the same time” (Marka). Some of the characters in the series are developed from screenplays and plots dating back to the Weimar cinema. Anno Schmidt, the alias of Rath’s brother who was believed dead in the trenches during World War I, is a tribute to the main character of Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, Lang, 1922). The character of Ernst Gennat, head of the murder squad, is based on a real person: he was an expert criminologist during the German Reich who also inspired the fictional character of inspector Karl Lohmann in Fritz Lang’s M (M—Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder, 1931) and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, 1932). Moreover, in some cases, German films from the 1920s are included in the episodes, especially when characters are watching a movie. In the third episode of season one, Charlotte goes to the movies to watch People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag, 1930), a silent movie directed by Robert Siodmak and Edgar Georg Ulmer. In the fifth episode, Rath enters a screening room where several producers are watching The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel, 1930), the first German non-silent movie, directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring Marlene Dietrich as the cabaret dancer Lola. Finally, the third season, which focuses on a series of murders committed during the shooting of the talking picture Dämonen der Leidenschaft, pays tribute to some of the masterpieces of Weimar cinema. The lighting and set design dominated by distorted geometries of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, Weine, 1920) become a source of inspiration. And the presence of doppelgängers during the shooting of this film evokes The Student of Prague (Der Student von Prag, Rye, 1913) and Metropolis (Lang, 1927).

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This abundance of quotations and references feeds the TV show’s transmedia storytelling (Jenkins), which includes a bespoke podcast and video interviews with directors, cast, and crew, and additional information on filming techniques and historical details shared on the official social media of the TV series.2 The broad articulation of this fictional universe, especially regarding the series’ historical details, becomes a source of excitement for the forensic fandom (Mittell 288–291), eager to get involved in debates about the meaning and significance of all aspects of the series’ historical reconstructions.3 As such, Babylon Berlin revisits, remediates, and updates the history, imagery, and emotions that characterize Germany in the interwar period. The format creates a dense network of intertextual references that evoke and reclaim the themes, styles, and atmospheres of Weimar culture and induce the viewer to reflect on their present anxieties and uncertainties. In particular, intertextuality is enabled by a logic of reconstruction that is “predicated on an awareness of Weimar cinema writ large as part of today’s cultural vocabulary of fear, especially fear about the political future” (Hall 318).

Babylon and Its Narrative Complexity Babylon Berlin is not necessarily about Nazi Germany and the attendant crimes committed by its key players “but instead [tells] the story of all that went just before, all the things that helped pave the way for what was yet to come” (Bondebjerg, 2020: 179). In order to tell this more expansive and indeed complicated story, the series dispenses with crime fiction’s more familiar structure, featuring a single protagonist and a single line of enquiry. On the contrary, it gives us two co-protagonists, hundreds of locations, and a plethora of inter-related and overlapping storylines. In other words, the series maintains the audience’s attention and curiosity by virtue of the complex TV model (Mittell), now a consolidated European phenomenon whereby episodes are interconnected via horizontal storytelling. This format allows the main narrative arcs to evolve across consecutive seasons, and while particular cases or incidents might be resolved at the end of particular episodes or seasons, the more general effect of this complexity is an overwhelming sense of decay and rottenness breeding in the main institutions of power. As is traditionally expected of period dramas, Babylon Berlin pays a great deal of attention to historical detail. The events of the three seasons take place in 1929: the first two seasons cover the three-month period

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from April to June, while the third takes place from September 20 to October 29, a five-week period that includes the infamous Black Tuesday, the start of the Great Depression. But this emphasis on historical authenticity is also overlaid by the narrative shape offered by crime fiction. Volker Kutscher’s crime novels (2018a; 2018b) lie at the crux of Babylon Berlin, providing essential crime plots and the typical German noir mood. Through the trope of detection, the characters and the audience are able to access Berlin’s remotest corners, exploring its ideological clashes, destructive drives, and sexual revolution. Narrative and visual elements are so effectively developed that audiences experience something akin to a time warp, that is, they are parachuted directly into Berlin at one of its most fraught, fascinating, and painful historical moments. The series’ crime plotlines provide a valuable interpretive key to understand the transformation of institutions over time, such as the advent of new techniques and technologies in the fight against crime. The development of photo archives for criminal profiling, fingerprint files, and ballistic and forensic analysis are among the systems of social control and surveillance (Foucault) that are part of the series’ ongoing enquiry into the challenges of finding and apprehending criminals—a task made even more fraught by the specter of Nazism that hovers over the series as a whole. This double move prompts reflection on the tension between crimes committed by individuals and by societies and systems.

Gereon Rath and the Serialization of the Traumatic Experience Gereon Rath’s character perfectly combines the figures of the detective and veteran. Thanks to this twofold aspect, Rath’s storyline brings together the stylistic elements of the crime genre and the war movie, in order to better think about the ongoing effects of trauma and traumatic memory (Caruth; LaCapra): how the crime plot both obscures and activates Rath’s memories of violent conflict. Haunted by visions of the trenches and battlefields of World War I and hence afflicted by the kinds of traumatic neuroses examined by Freud (1990), the police commissioner finds himself trapped in and by the same memory or scene which we see at the start of the first season and then again at the end of the second season and as many as ten times across the series as a whole. Our first exposure to this “memory trauma plotline” (Bondebjerg 2020: 182) comes in the very first

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episode via a whirling, disorientating montage sequence. Rath’s eyes are open but his sight is blurred by the hand of Dr Anno Schmidt, who is about to hypnotize him, talking in a soothing voice. The commissioner’s breathing is regular and deep as he follows Anno’s instructions, which transport him back to the violent origins of his torment. What the audience sees and what the character relives is not a flashback, a fictional device typically used to contextualize and set in motion a particular story; on the contrary, the scene operates as an obstruction to the development of the main narrative. A kaleidoscopic blur of fragmented sounds and images conjures Rath’s afflicted psyche; eventually these fragments begin to cohere into a semblance of memory: a church in Cologne, the call to arms, a marriage, a death, an impossible love. Upon arriving back in Berlin after the war, Rath is haunted by the specter of his brother who perished in the trenches of Northern France and by a sense of survivor’s guilt made more intense, for Rath, by his secret romance with his brother’s wife Helga (who later becomes Rath’s wife). This sense of trauma and guilt is sharpened by the rudiments of investigation—the fact that his first task as detective is to retrieve a sadomasochistic tape involving Konrad Adenauer, the Mayor of Cologne. This quest for the tape’s fragments transports Rath into the dark, cosmopolitan heart of the metropolis, where he is confronted by a blackmail plot involving illegal pornographers, hallucinatory trips to Berlin’s notorious nightclubs, and violently repressed socialist demonstrations. Rath witnesses a nationalist coup orchestrated by the Schwarze Reichswehr (the Black Reichswehr), an extra-legal paramilitary organization born of the resentment regarding the harsh reparations imposed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty. He must also disentangle from convoluted machinations involving the mafia Russian Trotskyists who are seeking to gain control of a train filled with gold. After a frantic unraveling, which Rath is unable to exercise complete control over, the commissioner is returned to the primal scene of his torment, captive to a traumatic past that continues to jeopardize his present. In presenting his character in this light, the series shows how Rath and traumatized war veterans like him struggle to adjust to the chaos of modernity and urban hyperstimulation (Benjamin). But Rath is also a detective, a role which requires him to excavate and show mastery over the past in order to bring the investigations of the present to some kind of order—and the series as a whole struggles, deliberately so, to reconcile these two antagonistic moves. Indeed, the overlapping, interconnected storylines of the three seasons are intended to draw attention to and

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amplify this contradiction—between Rath’s failures to master his own traumatic memories and his efforts to find out what happened in the past to satisfactorily solve the crimes of Weimar Berlin. As the series progresses, it becomes increasingly difficult for him to do so insofar as these crimes are shown to be intertwined with a wider sense of State corruption. This device, familiar to crime fiction readers, in turn draws attention to a related set of fault-lines running throughout contemporary Europe.

Charlotte Ritter: A Police Flapper of the Weimar Urban Modernity Unlike her literary counterpart in Kutscher’s crime novels—a girl from the bourgeoisie who works for the police to pay for law school—Charlotte Ritter in the TV series comes from the lumpenproletariat. Her attempt to climb the social ladder by working in the city’s cabarets, and then her role as assistant to Commissioner Rath, makes her emblematic of a particular kind of precarious subjectivity, although she is also a determined go-getter in the face of injustice and pervasive gender discrimination. As such, Ritter’s character “embodies the precarious and changing identity of women, as well as the cultural and social mobility of female identity, symbolizing the rapid changes of Berlin’s urban modernity” (Morsch). Her physical appearance is that of the ‘flapper,’ a model of femininity known for its transgressive approach to fashion, social conduct, and the female body. An expression of the Weimar Sex Reform movement (Grossman 153–171), this ‘new woman’ “became omnipresent, both physically and in images used in advertising, the media and party-political propaganda on hoardings in the cities’ streets” (Boack 255). Also known by the French neologism garçonne, Ritter embodies this new type of femininity, adopting both a non-conformist lifestyle and sexuality (Bard 1998) and breaking down the traditional dichotomy between the ‘masculine’ public and ‘feminine’ private. Part of her success at doing so is engendered by her role as detective and by her place in and connection to the city. As both detective and ‘femme flâneur’ (Gleber 76) Ritter moves with confidence between Berlin’s high society and underworld and in doing so enacts or personifies the energies and chaos of the city. At the beginning of the series, Ritter works as a typist at the Red Castle, the police headquarters in Alexanderplatz, and at night, she moonlights at the city’s most glamorous cabarets as a dominatrix and prostitute, in order

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to support her family. One of these spots, the Moka Efti, hub of Berlin’s nightlife and a magnet for all kinds of shady business, features one of the most impressive, revealing sequences of the series; at the end of the first episode, accompanied by a roll of drums, Swetlana—a singer and Soviet spy—takes to the stage and starts singing ‘Zu Asche, zu Staub.’ Like Ritter, Swetlana is characterized by androgyny: she wears a man’s top hat, gloves, and black leather raincoat and draws a thin moustache on her face. She goes on stage to the audience’s wild applause, the same audience that, a few years later, will flood the city to greet their Führer. The spectators are hypnotized by the music and dance. The song is an ode to ashes and dust, that is, to a life beyond death where only the light dies. Swetlana raises her forefinger to the sky and disappears in a cloud of smoke, leaving behind only the darkness, a figurative night which is prophetic of the political darkness that will soon ensnare city and nation. In connecting Ritter and Swetlana, the series draws attention to the twin forces of sexual liberation and urban chaos that characterize Berlin more generally—and that compel Ritter to do her job as detective while threatening her very existence. Indeed, while Rath’s vision as detective is impaired by drugs and his troubled past, making it difficult for him to adequately read the city, Ritter is much better equipped to navigate its secrets and excesses—perhaps because she is closer to and defined by these same forces. To the commissioner she becomes not only a support in his investigations but most importantly an indispensable guide in the task of disentangling and making visible the intricacies and dark truths of the city. Thanks to her double role as a flapper and detective, Ritter’s character captures the essence of urban modernity, its threats and yet also what it offers—the promise of the new: new social experiences, new identities. As such, and like other female and perhaps also proto-feminist detectives, she “represent[s] a great challenge to the norms and conventions of the crime genre, as well as an important key to interpreting how gender identities are socially re-­ negotiated” (D’Amelio & Re).

Conclusion: Remediating European Memories As in the two previous seasons, the third opens with a hallucination that anticipates some of the main plot elements, to be disclosed only in the season’s finale. Gunshots are fired inside the Berlin stock market, corpses are hanging from the ceiling, the main room is paved with insolvent bills of exchange and papers left behind by brokers. After reaching the exit

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door, the commissioner is overwhelmed by a surging mob. It is October 25, 1929: as the American economic system is collapsing, Germany and the rest of Europe are hit by an unprecedented financial crisis. In the subsequent five years, this crisis will play a pivotal role in fueling the wide social appeal of the Nazi party and the spread of its dictatorial terror. The voiceover of Dr Anno Smith guides the commissioner into this horrifying flash forward only to predict, in the end, the arrival of a new type of figure marching on the streets of the city. Like the previously outlined scene featuring Swetlana’s cabaret act, this sequence exemplifies how Babylon Berlin presents a symptomatology of the psychic, cultural, and social processes that will subjugate the German people into a single mass that is at once seduced by and frightened of the Nazi power. Indeed, the series as a whole is scattered with ‘prophetic’ frames that outline and anticipate the tensions running through Berlin and Germany at the end of the 1920s. The narrative formula, combining and reworking formal elements of the crime and noir genres, and using intertextual mechanisms and references to draw together Weimar culture and later efforts to represent this culture, offers a powerful lens through which to assess the legacies and ongoing significance of this historical moment. The logic of repetition, the plot complexities, and the montage sequences conjure a Weimar aesthetic—that is, a “strategy for comprehending the fragments of an untotalizable whole. […] a technique that challenges synthesis and closure” (Kaes, Jay, & Dimendberg xvii). In doing so, Babylon Berlin reopens the traumatic wounds of the interwar period and builds a fictional world where the past can be reworked in order to better understand its traces in the present. The fragility of the Weimar Republic, its economic and social inequalities, the racial hatred bubbling beneath the surface, and the stock market crisis of 1929 lend themselves to comparisons with the current precariousness of European democratic systems, from our increasing intolerance toward migrants and outsiders to the financial crisis of 2007–2008. In terms of its production and reception, this same logic is evident. While the transnational success of its distribution and circulation practices points to what can be achieved through European co-operation, the specter of disillusion and collapse which haunts the narrative can also be understood as allegory of the fragility of the democratic project that underpins the European Union and of the risks of political radicalization: Babylon Berlin clearly has an international audience in mind. Rather than being the story Germany tells itself about its own history, the show comes

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across as the story about its own history that it tells others. […] Which is to say, Babylon Berlin is not only concerned with making sense of what Friedrich Meinecke once called ‘the German catastrophe’. It wants to make broader points about democracy and its institutions, how they survive staggering inequality and a general loss of faith in them. (Daub)

To conclude, one can explain the cultural impact and symbolic value of Babylon Berlin on three levels: first, the TV series shows the origins of one of the most traumatic episodes in twentieth-century European history; second, it enables the creation of a space for sharing collective memories and traumas; and lastly, it helps us to better understand the hidden deceptions of the present that threaten the democratic foundations of our societies. Acknowledgment  The research presented here has been financed by the research project DETECt: Detecting Transcultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives (Horizon 2020, 2018–2021) (Grant agreement number 770151).

Notes 1. On the RISE Visual Effects Studios website, a video shows the original shot compared to the enhanced final image on the screen: https://risefx.com/ rise-­visual-­effects-­studios-­work-­project-­detail.php?id=1. Accessed May 30, 2021. 2. Most of the audiovisual material from the show is available at the media library of the national television channel Das Erste’s website: https://www. ardmediathek.de/sendung/babylon-­b erlin/Y3JpZDovL2Rhc2Vyc3Rl LmRlL2JhYnlsb24tYmVybGlu/. For the social media storytelling of the show, see in particular Babylon Berlin’s official Facebook account: https:// www.facebook.com/babylonberlinseries. Accessed May 30, 2021. 3. See the unofficial fan website dedicated to the show: https://babylon-­ berlin-­series.blogspot.com/. Accessed June 1, 2021.

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Open Access  This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

PART II

Contemporary European Crime Narratives about the Post-World War II Era

CHAPTER 6

Crime for a Higher Cause: The Baader Meinhof Complex and The Left Wing Gang Gunhild Agger

Among the vast number of post-colonial conflicts calling for international attention, the Israel-Palestine case has maintained its status as the main cause of a never-ending chain of killing and revenge, with both sides locked into an irresolvable narrative about justice and belonging. In the beginning of the miniseries Blekingegade (The Left Wing Gang, TV 22009), Jamil Ramelleh, a representative for The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), mobilizes traumatic memories: “You remember Shatila 1982. Israel bombed a camp and killed 3000 persons.” His aim is to trigger the radicalization of a small Danish support group practising international solidarity by committing economic crimes for a higher cause—namely, that of Palestinian independence. The Left Wing Gang was premised on the more notorious Rote Armee Fraktion or Red Army Faction (RAF), which started as a small group of rebels in the late 1960s, longing to replace criticism in words with solidarity in action. The rapid radicalization of Rote Armee Fraktion is reflected in Uli Edel’s film The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008). As in The Left Wing Gang, the

G. Agger (*) Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Dall’Asta et al. (eds.), Contemporary European Crime Fiction, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21979-5_6

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connection to PFLP is emphasized. In Dustin Zielke’s words, “Edel presents the terror of the RAF in light of the torch passed from the secular terrorisms of the Cold War-era to the rising religious terrorisms of the Middle East” (Zielke 2009). In historical drama, anniversaries are regularly used to highlight significant events or periods. On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of 1968, Tor Førland suggested that “The cultural earthquake that changed norms and relations in Paris, Berlin and New York apparently did the same, only less violently, in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Oslo and Helsinki” (Førland 318). Førland contemplates the legacy of social upheavals of the late 1960s in or for Europe post 1989. To the same end, Christine Gerhardt asks, “Is any era ever truly over? What are the politics of narrating it? […] What are the legacies of 1968 and of 1970s terrorism? In West Germany? Internationally?” (Gerhardt 257, 264). Taking up Førland’s and Gerhardt’s questions, the purpose of this chapter is to examine the politics of narrating the ultra-radical legacy from 1968, juxtaposing two fictitious versions to provide a new perspective on both, and indeed their current relevance. The Baader Meinhof Komplex and The Left Wing Gang are based on actual events and persons as well as former interpretations of the events re-­ enacted in documentaries and fiction. The two contributions are produced at approximately the same time, in a period when distance has replaced proximity, giving more liberty to the producers’ interpretations. The two groups’ attitude to violence and terrorism is divergent, but both productions ask the fundamental question: Why were these young people willing to sacrifice so much for the sake of international solidarity? In the case of Danish TV series The Left Wing Gang, the issue of whether a ‘less violent’ approach to the legacy of 1968 is reflected in the theory and practice of the protagonists is relevant. Addressed to broad international audiences, both productions assimilate a variety of genres into what is a docudramatic structure to alleviate the gloomy heritage and make it fit into the mediascape of the contemporary production era. The RAF has been the subject of numerous films and documentaries (Gerhardt 2018, Pfitzenmayer 2007). The Baader Meinhof Complex may not be the most critically acclaimed example, but I will argue that up until now, it is the most comprehensive and, as suggested by its title, the most ‘complex’ version. In a Danish context, The Left Wing Gang represents the latest conclusive version of fictive re-enactments of 1968-inspired international solidarity movements. In the wake of widespread memorialization of 1968 and the opening of Stasi archives, the German case is thoroughly

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researched (Slocum 2005; Einwächter and Kaczmarek 2009; Shaw 2015), while the Danish case is less theorized. In both cases, the politics of narrating the legacy of 1968 will be highlighted by focusing on the docudramatic structure and the use of multiple genres to engage audiences and pursue particular political arguments.

Terrorism and Media Notwithstanding the ubiquity of terrorism, there is no commonly accepted definition of what it is (Sloan and Anderson 2009). Etymologically, terror is derived from the “Latin terror, from terre ̄re to frighten”. The prevalent meaning of the verb to terrorize is “to coerce by threat or violence” (Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary). For obvious reasons, the UN has tried in vain, for years, to agree on a definition. Instead of an impossible search for a unanimous definition, Jørgen Staun argues that researchers should focus on developing a more specific framing: “the very thing that separates terrorist violence from ordinary criminal violence—and thus makes it terrorism—is that the act is instilled with political or politico-religious meaning. It is the message that makes terrorism. There is a sender (the terrorist), a message generator (the victim) and a receiver (the public)” (Staun 2010). Maura Conway (2012) takes this a step further, arguing that media must be considered a decisive definer in terrorism. Furthermore, Hanno Balz defines terrorism as “propaganda of the deed” (Balz 2014: 276). In 2008, the founders of the journal Critical Studies on Terrorism noted that terrorism was a “growth industry” (Jackson, Toros, Heath-Kelly, and Jarvis 2017). Terrorism continues to appeal to the arts and media industries (Berendse and Cornils 2008: 12). According to Elaine Martin (2011), 9/11 represents a pivotal moment in the focus of terrorism films. Before 9/11, for example, cultural representations of German and Italian left wing terrorism of the 1960s and 1970s focused, often in painstaking detail, on the minutiae of particular operations and their immediate consequences. After 9/11, cinematic representations of terrorism emphasized spectacle over detail. Linked to the spectacular character of the 9/11 attack in New  York and the subsequent description of the falling Twin Towers by witnesses (“just like a movie”), “terrorism has taken on a highly optical character in the early twenty first century” (Shaw 2). Shaw develops this observation further by pointing out that cinema and terrorism share the following features: theatricality, visuality, drama and performance (Shaw 4).

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It should be noted, however, that this shift does not necessarily mean that post-9/11 films are able to accommodate critical insights into America’s involvement in the ‘War on Terror’. Indeed, these films typically require or presuppose the involvement of the Department of Defense and the CIA as a basic condition for being produced at all. The Die Hard series (1988–2013), for instance, “offer[s] audiences an explanation of why well-intentioned individuals have to use murderous violence in the face of the threat to family members and the nation” and thus legitimizes use of extreme violence for the public good (Dodds 336). Correspondingly, beginning with the Jewish-American blockbuster Exodus (Otto Preminger 1960), Israeli films have often featured “the good terrorist”, fighting for a just cause (Shaw 80). Martin points to the growing array of subgenres as a conceptual frame for understanding the development in terrorism films—“docudramas, hostage-takings, suicide bombings, pseudo-­ terrorism cases and radicalization films” (Martin 209). Aiming to identify crucial patterns in the way cinema has dealt with terrorism, Shaw takes up this challenge on a significantly broader scale, mapping the international history of terrorism films from silent cinema to Hollywood blockbusters. According to Shaw, from the 1970s and 1980s the history of terrorism films has been characterized by increasing complexity in the development of genres. As commercial interest, and not ideology, has been the primary motivation for producing films about terrorism, filmmakers have had to appropriate an array of familiar (to audiences) generic frameworks in order to accommodate and make more palatable (and exciting) their representations. The result of genre appropriation and assimilation processes can be observed in The Baader Meinhof Complex and The Left Wing Gang.

RAF and the Dark Heritage For generations of Europeans born immediately after World War II, the German Baader Meinhof Group, known from 1970 as Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), epitomized secular left wing terrorism. Fighting real and imagined spectres from their parents’ Nazi past, the group inaugurated the prospect of a socialist revolution in West Germany inspired by the ideas of Marx, Lenin and Mao (Gerhardt 2018: 15). The RAF shared the common leftist sympathy for revolutionary movements in non-­ industrialized countries, adapting their organization’s form. Small revolutionary groups organized as urban guerillas (‘Stadtguerilla’, Rote Armee Fraktion 1971) would destabilize the institutions of capitalist society,

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challenge the state’s monopoly of violence, finally leading to a more widespread uprising, eventually resulting in a socialist revolution. In this fight, the use of ‘counter-violence’—or terrorist actions—was considered an appropriate means. The group’s rapid process of radicalization generated a social shock to conservative German society—especially the German Social Democratic Party. Rapidly the group’s means shifted from analyses, demonstrations and verbal protests to crimes including setting fire to warehouses, bank robberies, killings and later a widespread terrorist bombing campaign directed at selected individuals as well as institutions such as the US military in Frankfurt and the Springer Press. Hostage-taking and hijacking airplanes followed in a still more desperate escalation which was supported by PFLP. Although terrorist actions continued until 1998, the fight ended in the suicide and disillusionment of many of its participants or their exile into the DDR—and reinforcement of the power of the state. During the 1970s, the German film industry dealt with left wing terrorism in an oblique way. After the film law passed in 1974, films with left wing issues on their agenda were not eligible to receive public funding. Partly because of this, and partly because the issues were still raw and contemporaneous, a parable-like approach dominated the first films from the main directors of New German Cinema—Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta: “Also if West German cinema during the 1970s was eager to confront terrorism, it evaded to thematize it directly” (Ahrens 2007: 3). The collective episodic film Deutschland im Herbst (Fassbinder, Schlöndorff et  al. 1977–1978) was the first film to apply a more direct approach (Gerhardt 2018: 101 ff.). On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the German Autumn, an authoritative docudrama was produced—Das Todesspiel (Heinrich Breloer 1997). Thomas Elsaesser claims that European cinema typically values moments of historical conflict—the so-called dark heritage. From the turn of the century, this became distinct in Germany: “The New German Cinema became critically successful and culturally significant when it began to “represent” its terrible history in the form of stories about Nazism and the war” (Elsaesser 2005: 311). The common dark heritage, which in Germany and Italy was represented by Nazism and Fascism respectively, had a significant impact on the leftist movements of these societies, helping to ferment opposition to the previous generation who were deemed to be complicit, and encouraging an understanding of the Israeli repression of Palestine as a modern Holocaust. Reflecting on the periodic return of the RAF in German cinema, Elsaesser (2014) points to the most traumatized

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phases of German history: “It has typified what can be called the counter-­ history to the RAF’s own pre-history, the Holocaust in German media and memory.” This counter-history involves “a move that had all the signs of displacement (in space and time), reversal (of cause and effect) and disavowal (of the never fully examined German anti-semitism)” (Elsaesser 2014: 118). Typically, the RAF prisoners in Stammheim were able to present themselves as victims and their captors as perpetrators, thus reversing their roles and shaming the repressive state.

Internationalization of German Heritage The Baader Meinhof Complex spans the decade 1967–1977, covering the main events and participants in the group. The immediate occasion of The Baader Meinhof Complex was that Norddeutsche Rundfunk wished to commemorate the 30-year anniversary of the abduction and subsequent killing of Hanns Martin Schleyer (chair of the German employers’ confederation and former SS officer) in a docudrama. Prompted by the increasing number of films released between 2000 and 2008 that focus on aspects of the RAF (Gerhardt 2018), Bernd Eichinger believed that he and his generation—as time witnesses—were historically obliged to deliver their interpretation of the whole story. Referring to Stefan Aust’s authoritative documentary book (1986, revised 1997), the film was based on multiple authentic sources, and reproduced in the smallest detail the historical ‘reality’ of the era: from preferred clothing style to number plates and weapons models. Eichinger’s idea was “to portray the past ‘as it really was’, giving depth to the images by which such history is now invariably represented” (Cooke 2012: 99). Eichinger had ample experience from producing international historical blockbusters, for instance Der Untergang (2004) and The Name of the Rose (1986). As for Der Untergang, Eichinger wrote the manuscript for The Baader Meinhof Complex. Uli Edel, the director, shared Eichinger’s interest in politics and heritage. Crew and cast behind the production could deploy the whole track record collected by German cinema on traumatic historical issues. The production value of The Baader Meinhof Complex—its locations and prolific cast—signals that it addresses not only a German but also an international audience (Cooke 2012: 98–99). Among the prominent actors, Bruno Ganz (der Führer in Der Untergang) figures as Horst Herold from Bundeskriminalamt, Belmondo look-alike Moritz Bleibtreu as Andreas Baader and Martina Gedeck (Christa-Maria Sieland in Das Leben der Anderen) as Ulrike

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Meinhof. It is no wonder then that the film received nominations for prestigious international film awards—the BAFTA, the Golden Globe and the Oscar. “[A]ttacked by RAF faithful and victims alike” (Zielke 2009), the portrayal of the RAF seemed provoking to both—and convincing to a majority of critics. Roughly 2.5  million Germans watched the film in 2008. It was widely distributed internationally. Given that authenticity is key to the producers’ understanding of how the events are narrated, I shall trace how this is achieved in the docudrama and how the various genres that are deployed end up supporting rather than undermining its effects. The first ten minutes epitomize the way in which The Baader Meinhof Complex combines facts and fiction and administer the docudramatic approach. The film takes, as its point of departure, the detached atmosphere of the youth rebellion and its music, focusing on efforts to set the human body free and to establish new non-authoritarian, non-hierarchical family relationships. Janis Joplin’s “(Oh Lord, Won’t You Buy Me A) Mercedes-Benz?” (1971) ironically reflects the relationship between materialism and salvation, accompanying an idyllic holiday at Sylt in June 1967. Associations with paradise are evoked by naturist scenes of children, women and men. Ulrike Meinhof relaxes reading Neue Illustrierte Revue. This beginning sets in motion a triple perspective bringing together public, private and media. First, 1968 is established as the genesis of personal liberation at the level of family and gender relations. Next, the public sphere is involved. The significance of popular media for maintenance of a conservative world view is visualized via the frontpage eye-catcher of the Iranian Shah and Farah Diba, his beautiful wife. Third, an alternative media aspect is developed during the following scene, characterizing the environment of the left wing journal konkret.1 In this way, the theme of leftist counter-publicity is introduced, kept up by the intellectual elite, among others Stefan Aust and Klaus Reinar Röhl (Hans-Werner Meyer), Meinhof’s husband.2 While the idea of 1968 as the epoch of universal love fades, the two other aspects are continued by what follows, thereby accentuating the political engagement of the film’s narrative strategy. Meinhof’s oppositional analyses in print media are visualized, for instance, by the “Open Letter to Farah Diba”, reproduced in original print on screen. Later, we hear Meinhof’s voice reading this letter while we watch a re-­ enactment of demonstrations near the Berlin Opera. The ‘optical character’ of the events is underlined by the double move of re-enactment and mediation.

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Scenes demonstrating the brutality of the police culminate in the killing of the student Benno Ohnesorg, as it turns out later, by Karl-Heinz Kurras, an East German member of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei.3 The response of the radical demonstrators is shown by the arson attack on the Schneider warehouses, arranged by Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek). The arrest of the two perpetrators provokes protesting students led by ‘Rudi Dutschke, the Anarchist’ as the conservative media would have it, re-enacted and then duplicated in ‘real’ television news footage. The violence peaks in the attempted assassination of Rudi Dutschke by Joseph Bachmann (Tom Schilling), an anti-communist agitator, which again we see as a re-enactment and in mediated form. For viewers who either were present on the streets or watched the mediated representations of these events at the time, the link between fiction and facts provides direct access to the past, mobilizing remembrance, revitalizing its scent. For the majority of viewers who have no personal experience of the period, the constant shift between facts and fiction heightens the authentic feeling of the film. The dual narration facilitates the addressing of both target groups. The broad appeal is followed up by adapting a variety of genres.

Hollywood Genres The Baader Meinhof Complex is an adaptation of Stefan Aust’s documentary book, endowing it with the authority of Aust’s painstaking research. Aust himself is even given in a minor role in the film, played by Volker Bruch, a move that functions as “guarantor of authenticity” (Firth 2015). A more cinematic designation would be to label the film a biopic. According to Dennis Bingham, “The biopic narrates, exhibits, and celebrates the life of a subject in order to demonstrate, investigate, or question his or her importance in the world” (Bingham 2010: 10). The three publicly known main characters are Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, and by focusing on their individual and collective exploits, the film highlights their three different approaches. Ulrike Meinhof is haunted by the divide between theory and action. Andreas Baader by contrast appears as a one-dimensional action man, careless, charming, rude, much like Clyde in Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn 1967).4 Gudrun Ensslin, who is no simple Bonnie, represents the utmost consequence in theory and action and as such is the most complex figure in the film. Uncoincidentally, it is Ensslin who first brings up the history and spectre

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of Nazism, while sitting with her baby, watching television in her parents’ home, smoking a cigarette. They watch Meinhof accusing the US of contemplating the use of atomic weapons in Vietnam. Further, acting on the information of the Six-Day War in June 1967, Meinhof shows a front page from Bild with the headline “Schlacht um Jerusalem”. As her father raises the concept of a ‘preventive war’, Meinhof asks him whether the Nazi assaults on Poland, France and Russia were also preventive. Later Meinhof, explaining the group’s choice of actions while accusing the state of ‘Fascism’, maintains that words without action are worthless. In doing so the film shifts from biopic to crime and/or action formula, where explosive set pieces are used to heighten episodic suspense. The protagonists steal cars and weapons, they rob banks, hurting and killing people. Trained for guerrilla warfare by the PLO and the PLFP in Jordan, they throw bombs at embassies, police headquarters and the Springer Press. Their antagonists are primarily represented as agents of government (Labour Kanzler Helmut Schmidt in news reportages) and state (Horst Herold, leader of the Bundeskriminalamt 1971–1981). While Schmidt seems immovable, Herold understands the complexity of the matter: “We must recognize that the conflicts in the Third World, the conflicts between Palestine and Israel, the American bombings of the Vietnam are matters of fact.” During the radicalization process, Herold’s status as a mouthpiece for common sense increasingly prevails. Pushing the genre repertoire further, the film pursues the perpetrators into prison, evoking key aspects of the prison film genre, such as mutual hostility between inmates and prison personnel, hunger strikes, and defence lawyers acting as ties between the inside and the outside world. Connected to this, the law court genre is also deployed—highlighting how the challenges posed by the film’s protagonists threaten to sabotage a wider notion of community founded on the rule of law. These mainstream genres orientate audiences and in turn help in the popularization of the left wing terrorism theme. Focusing on the father–daughter relationship, Elsaesser compares the position of Ulrike Meinhof to that of Antigone, a move which in turn gives the film an air of tragedy. Ever since Hegel’s analysis of Antigone in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Sophocles’ tragedy has remained a solid reference in Germany for questioning the legitimacy of the state. Like Antigone, Meinhof challenges the institutions and the discourse of the state, preferring suicide to compromise. Elsaesser points out that between the 1970s and the 1990s public sympathy shifted from Meinhof and the other perpetrators of violent

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protests to their adversaries, “the Claudius and Creon figures” (Elsaesser 2014: 115). The Herold character is an example of this shift. In this sense, the role of the Greek chorus is played by ordinary German citizens. In the beginning, sympathy and understanding prevail, even if the general public and by extension audiences may not actively support the fight against capitalism and imperialism. After the RAF’s first killings, however, the film pursues a more reflective and as such critical stance on this struggle, and in doing so explores how or how far the violence alienates those who would otherwise be sympathizers. In this way, the perpetrators as well as the Claudius and Creon figures can be interpreted as recurring in a tragic frame. Shaw argues that the theme of terrorism “has proven to be infinitely adaptable and capable of being assimilated into numerous film genres” (Shaw 2015: 283). In the case of The Baader Meinhof Complex, biopic, law court and prison drama, crime and action fiction, hostage taking, and radicalization dramas are entwined with a touch of tragedy, thereby enhancing the film’s popular appeal. To defeat the threatening satiety of the Baader-­ Meinhof subject, replicated in different versions since 1978, the audience is offered a variety of popular genres. They serve to distinguish the film from earlier, less genre-orientated versions, endowing it with a quality signalling Hollywood rather than Germany.

The Left Wing Gang: “It is all about politics” In a Danish context, the dominant cinematic attitude to the significance of 1968 is associated with themes of rebellion, love and, as a common cause of dramatic conflict, (extra)marital relations and mechanisms of group psychology and coercion (Heaven and Hell (Morten Arnfred 1988), Groovy Days (Peter Bay 1996), The Commune (Thomas Vinterberg 2016), the TV series Album (DR 2008) and The Legacy (DR 2014–2017)). While terrorism has been a recurring theme in Danish cinema, 1968 has not generally been associated with this kind of political violence—except for Manslaughter (Per Fly 2005), partly inspired by the Blekinge gang. Running counter to the trend, The Left Wing Gang highlights the radical heritage of 1968  in the shape of prolonged international solidarity in action. During the period 1972–1989, the Blekingegade gang committed forgery, theft of weapons and money from bank security vehicles, and a series of robberies of banks, a department store, Daells Varehus, and the general post office in Købmagergade, culminating in the killing of a police officer in 1988. Its members were part of a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist

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group, pursuing the aim of international solidarity by procuring money for the PFLP.  A mixture of talent, audacity and precaution kept the group below police radar for 17 years. Their robberies were carefully planned, scrupulously rehearsed, quickly enacted and difficult to trace. Nobody suspected these good-looking intellectuals with interesting jobs and nice houses of being criminals, not even their wives. As international networks seemed to be involved, their crimes were investigated by PET, the Danish Police Intelligence Unit. As such, the results of these investigations were classified. Additionally, Jørn Moos, detective chief superintendent, conducted a standard criminal investigation, trying to locate and map a pattern to the crimes. Due to a random traffic accident involving Carsten Nielsen, a group member, a breakthrough occurred in 1989. Documents found in his car revealed the gang’s meeting place in Blekingegade, hence the nickname of the group. The weapons arsenal and documents from the flat resulted in the discovery of some of the crimes and subsequently a trial. In a German documentary, Jørgen Moos calls the arsenal “one of the biggest illegal weapon deposits found in Europe” (Die Spur der Bombe, ARD 2014). Though denied by Jørgensen et al. (2009: 41), the findings indicate that left wing European terrorist groups worked together pooling information and weapons and sharing connections to the PFLP.  The Blekingegade gang was charged. Due to limitation periods and insufficiency of evidence, the members were never convicted of terrorism or murder, only of robberies, forgery, fencing and offences against the weapons code. The sentences varied from one to ten years in prison. Once released, the members kept trying to convince the public that “It is all about politics”. This is the headline of a long article on the group’s efforts to reclaim their legacy published in 2009 by Niels Jørgensen, Torkil Lauesen and Jan Weimann. Seizing upon the renewed interest in their activities as an opportunity for political engagement, they ask “Who possesses the ownership of history?”5 Challenging the authority of official media versions, their main argument remains the same as during the trial: “If we, by carrying out illegal actions in Denmark—with limited violence—could retrieve big money that could help the population and the liberation movements in the 3rd world, then we would consider these illegal acts justified” (Jørgensen, Lauesen and Weimann 2009: 20, my translation). The miniseries The Left Wing Gang tells the story of this exclusive small group, dedicated to crime in pursuit of what they perceived as a higher cause. Previously, their story was told by Peter Øvig Knudsen in the book

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The Blekinge Gang (2007) and in Anders Riis Hansen’s TV documentary of the same title (2009), fueling public interest in the gang and prolonging debates. For TV 2, The Left Wing Gang announced a gradual move towards international co-production (Hansen 2021), as seen in the cast and the variety of genres. A cast with a potentially international profile contributes to the production value—besides Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jan Weimann) and David Dencik, Thure Lindhardt (Bo Weimann), Pilou Asbæk (Carsten Nielsen) and Ulrich Thomsen (Jørn Moos). As in The Baader Meinhof Complex, the dominant docudramatic approach was mixed with other genres to heighten its appeal and make it fit into a contemporary international mediascape. In Denmark, at the time of transmission, interest in the gang’s activities had already peaked. Audience ratings of less than 1 million were disappointing to TV 2, and the critical reception in Denmark was mixed. Nevertheless, the international nature of the production venture resulted in the series being sold to 49 countries (Agger 2020: 331).

“We Are Not Rote Armee Fraktion” The series starts with a disclaimer. “Plot, dialogue and characters are fiction inspired by the events taking place in and near the group, later notorious under the name Blekingegadebanden […] It is not the intention to press charges against anyone for actions they have not committed.” The disclaimer is necessary in the perspective of the group’s members’ verdicts. Although somebody from the group did kill a police officer, nobody was found guilty of homicide; the legal system does not accept common guilt. The title sequence sets the tone, reminding the audience of the origins of the group’s demand for international solidarity. A chronological timeline of the Israel–Palestine conflict is set out, marking particularly catastrophic years for the Palestine cause—1947, 1949, 1956, 1964, 1967, 1970, 1972, 1975, 1982, 1983, 1985, 1986, 1988. The sequence is accompanied by Arabic music and includes photographs of the violence perpetrated against Palestinians, urging viewers to reflect on the motives of the group’s solidarity actions. This pledge for understanding is challenged by a crucial scene during the first episode. Jan Weimann and Niels Jørgensen (David Dencik) meet Jamil Ramelleh (Zeev Sevik Perl), their contact in the PFLP, in Paris. They deliver eight million Danish kroner (approximately 1,278,600 US dollars), the result of their robbery of a bank security vehicle in Lyngby. In

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return, Jamil asks them to take the son of a Swedish Tetrapak director as a hostage, and demand 300 million dollars in ransom. Weimann answers: “We rob banks. We are not Rote Armee Fraktion.” Shadows on his face reveal his doubts. Conversely, Niels Jørgensen is enthusiastic. Finally, they agree to take the risk. Having been observed at the planned scene of the crime, however, they abort the mission out of caution. Both reactions are typical of the group—their uncompromising commitment to the PFLP and their scrupulous planning, leaving next to nothing to chance. The naïve innocence of 1968 rebels in, for instance, Album or The Legacy is here replaced by professional calculation. This emphasizes the focus of the narrative strategy—the questionable value of idealism when it is implemented through crime. A significant, apparently accidental, meeting between Jan Weimann and Jørn Moos, detective chief superintendent, takes place during the first episode, launching the well-known mechanisms of knowledge distribution in the crime genre. Crossing the police yard, Weimann is introduced to Moos as a computer specialist. Weimann has the upper hand, possessing more knowledge about Moos than Moos has about him. During the subsequent investigation and manhunt, Moos’ task is to gradually decipher the patterns of the crimes, imagining how the perpetrators look and act. The two meetings provide the frame for the following events—the escalating radicalism of the group and the intensified manhunt by the police. The plot revolves around the lines indicated by these early cues, and the merging of genres is anticipated.

Rehearsal and Performance The series follows a clear chronology of events, known from the media. Each episode marks a major event, signalled by a year (except the first one, summarizing 1982–1985). We witness the planning, rehearsal and subsequently the execution of increasingly demanding crimes. As part of the docudrama, we are confronted with the news of the group’s crimes in newspapers and other media, but because of the secrecy, the juxtaposition between contemporary mediated versions and re-enacted events is a less developed part of the narrative than in The Baader Meinhof Complex. Instead, the narrative focus is the group’s rehearsal and execution of planned crimes. By pointing out the elaborate planning and thorough rehearsals, the role of “theatricality, visuality, drama and performance” (Shaw 2015) is highlighted. Hence, the underscore is subdued, giving

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auditive priority to voices and real, often enlarged, sounds. In this way, the soundtrack supports the priority of silence. In the context of theatricality, tropes from crime and action genres are deployed. Crime fiction typically pits investigator against criminal in a battle of wits, thereby drawing parallels and similarities between them— and undermining the moral distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Here, the parallels between Moos, the investigator, and Weimann, the perpetrator, are continuously exhibited. The legal activity of the investigator mirrors the illegal activity of the leading offender. Even their private lives showcase their similarities. They inhabit the same kind of houses in the same kind of suburbs. Both are workaholics. Both lead a ‘normal’ family life, discussing current issues with parents-in-law or children, and both experience jealousy on the part of their wives. Emilie Moos (Emma Marott) almost gives up waiting for her husband, and desperately, having waited for him all night, Tine, Jan Weimann’s wife (Helle Fagralid), asks: “Who is she?” implying he must have a lover. Just as Moos is challenged by his superiors, the authority of Weimann is questioned by group members. On the one hand, the juxtaposition points out the common determination of the two characters. On the other, the position of Moos as the persistent underdog tips the balance; we cannot help feeling sympathy for Moos’ endeavours and thus the commonsense approach he represents. As in The Baader Meinhof Complex, history is decisive for the politics of narrating. Being among the first computer hackers in Denmark, the Weimann brothers had access to big data, including the files of the police. As an employee at Regnecentralen (the Danish Institute of Computing Machinery), one of Bo Weimann’s first initiatives is to register the addresses of all Jews in Denmark (the so-called Z-file). This implies a historical reference. During World War II, almost all 7000 Danish Jews were illegally transported to neutral Sweden by boat. Bo Weimann’s file seems to denounce this act of salvation, delivering information of potential use to the PFLP in the struggle against the state of Israel. A more traditional connection to World War II is pursued by Jan Weimann. For legitimacy of his group, he refers to the Danish resistance movement during the German occupation of 1940–1945: “They went out, they liquidated, they sabotaged. They knew that they might be caught, but they did not give up fighting. Afterwards, they were executed, they were forgotten. Nobody remembers today who they were and what they did, but they are a part of us” (my translation). Via this reference, the series contemplates the group’s

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understanding of the limits and achievements of violence in theory and practice. The historical reference also forces the question of whether the group should sanction killings (or in resistance terms ‘liquidation’) as a legitimate means of achieving their political ends. This is discussed in the group, implying the radicalization genre. Unable to reach an agreement, they vote. The result is three to two against the proposal. The Swiss member sent by the PFLP to argue its case and cause strongly disagrees. It is telling that the line of ‘limited violence’ has previously been followed in practice. A witness on a bicycle has observed members of the group escaping after the Lyngby robbery; after one moment of hesitation, he is neither stopped nor liquidated. Later, his testimony is crucial in convicting Niels Jørgensen of the robbery. In the case of the Købmagergade robbery, accidental circumstances became fatal in the killing of a police officer. Targeting a large international audience, The Left Wing Gang applies a similar spectrum of genres as The Baader Meinhof Complex. The manhunt activating crime and action genres permeates the superior structure and thus the politics of narrating. Left wing radicalism is explored from a historical perspective including the occupation era. Administering a docudramatic approach, facts are merged with fiction. Though the crimes of the group are performed seeking to minimize ‘necessary’ violence, the drama of radicalization is constantly present, implying hostage-taking drama. The biopic contributes to critically exposing the activists’ double life.

Conclusion With the purpose of understanding without sympathizing, The Baader Meinhof Complex and The Left Wing Gang seek to air and represent the international solidarity so decisive for the left wing mindset of 1968 during and after the Vietnam War. This is the premise for the politics of narrating. In both productions, the demand for authenticity is met by the reproduction of factitious material from the media and a historically precise representation of material objects and ideas from the time in question. Crucial for understanding the politics of these texts is their deployment and mixing of different generic archetypes—docudrama combined with biopic, man-hunt crime, radicalization and action fiction, as well as, in The Baader Meinhof Complex, lawcourt and prison drama. As always in docudrama, the end is already known, but by adapting and assimilating the ‘real’ lives and experiences of key players into particular generic situations

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and registers, these texts ask us to think about the complex relationship between the real and the fictional. In both cases, an important part of the cinematic strategy is to highlight the mechanisms that drive the radicalization of small political-ideological groups, inviting large audiences to take a stand—and to reflect on the meaning and significance of distinctions between political action and criminality in a contemporary context. Preoccupied with recent history, these productions also ask viewers to reflect on the complex relationship between past and present, between the crimes committed by the Nazis in World War II in service of the fascist state and the crimes committed by left wing terror groups in pursuit of diametrically opposed political causes, that is, against apparently democratic states that nonetheless show sympathies with neo-imperialist endeavours. Trying to distance itself from Germany’s Nazi past, the RAF applied terrorism in its fight against the capitalist state, thereby mirroring the actions taken by the Nazis in the early 1930s. The mastery of the media in the “operational theater” of terrorism (Elsaesser 2014: 123) became a legacy of the RAF, and showing and reflecting on this reversal, whereby perpetrators demand our sympathy and victims our censure, is one of the lasting achievements of The Baader Meinhof Complex. In The Left Wing Gang, meanwhile, the distinction between terrorism and crime is presented as more unstable. Pursuing the role of ‘good terrorist’ fighting for a just cause, Jan Weimann draws a parallel to the Resistance movement during the German occupation of Denmark. For years, the group’s allegedly ‘less violent’ attitude seemed to bear fruit, meaning that it could provide funds for the PFLP without capture or censure. However, the series also explores the hypocrisies and contradictions buried within this stance—what it excludes and fails to fully acknowledge. Violent crime, even if it is politically motivated, is never without consequences, as the ‘accidental’ killing of a police officer shows us. In this sense, what both productions explore is the nature and legacy of political action in general and the events of 1968 in particular.

Notes 1. Founded in 1957. 2. Klaus Röhl and Ulrike Meinhof were members of the Communist Party, since 1956 prohibited in Western Germany. There was a period during which Röhl’s journal konkret was funded by the Stasi. When the Stasi

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Archives opened, it appeared that East Germany had supported and protected RAF members (Wivel 2007: 47, 240). 3. The United Socialist Party. 4. B changed the norms of representing violence and sex on screen,. The style of the power couple Bonnie-Clyde is not far from Baader-Ensslin’s: “Baader and Gudrun Ensslin form an outlaw dynamic duo of sorts, a West-German-­ terroristBonnie and Clyde. Soltau 2014.: 36. 5. Jørgensen died in 2008, having previously approved the line of argument.

Works Cited Agger, Gunhild. 2020. Det grænseløse tv-drama. Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur. Ahrens, Jörn. 2007. ‘Die Zelluloid-Zeit. Die Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) im deutschen Spielfilm’. Zeitgeschichte-online, https://zeitgeschichte-­online.de/ themen/die-­zelluloid-­zeit. Balz, Hanno. 2014. ‘Throwing Bombs in the Consciousness of the Masses’. In Media and Revolt. Editors, K, Fahlenbach, E, Sivertsen and R. Werenskjold. New York: Berghahn. Berendse, Gerrit-Jan and Cornils, Ingo. 2008. ‘Introduction: The Long Shadow of Terrorism’. In Baader-Meinhof Returns. History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism. Editors, G.-J.  Berendse and I.  Cornils. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Bingham, Dennis. 2010. Whose Lives Are They Anyway?: The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press. Conway, Maura. 2012. ‘Introduction: Terrorism and Contemporary Mediascapes— Reanimating Research on Media and Terrorism’. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 5:3. 445–453. Cooke, Paul. 2012. Contemporary German Cinema. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Dodds, Klaus. 2008. ‘Screening terror: Hollywood, the United States and the construction of danger’. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 1:2. 227–243. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2014. German Cinema. Terror und Trauma. New  York: Routledge. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2005. European Cinema Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Einwächter, Sophie G. und Kaczmarek, Ludger. 2009. Terrorismus im Film: Repräsentationen von Terrorismus im Spiel und Dokumentarfilm. Internationale Arbeitsbibliographie. Hamburg Universität: Hamburg. Firth, Catriona. 2015. ‘The concealed Curator. Constructed Authenticity in Uli Edel’s Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex’. In Exhibiting the German Past: Museums, Film, and Musealization. Editors, P.  McIsaac and G.  Mueller. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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Førland, Tor. 2008. ‘Introduction’. Scandinavian Journal of History. 33:4. 317–325. Gerhardt, Christine. 2018. Screening the Red Army Faction. Bloomsbury. Hansen, Kim Toft. 2021. ‘Medier og historie’. Palle Schantz Lauridsen og Erik Svendsen: Medietemaer. Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur. Jackson, Richard; Harmonie Toros; Jarvis Lee, and Charlotte Heath-Kelly. 2017. ‘Introduction: 10 years of Critical Studies on Terrorism’. Critical Studies on Terrorism. 10:2. 197–202. Jørgensen, Niels & Lauesen, Torkil & Weimann, Jan. 2009. ‘Det handler om politik’. Social kritik 117. Martin, Elaine. 2011. ‘Terrorism in film media: An international view of theatrical films.’ Journal of War & Culture Studies. 4:2. 207–222. Pfitzenmayer, Anna. 2007. Fiktionale Produktionen: RAF, Linksterrorismus und “deutscher Herbst” im Film. Eine kommentierte Filmographie (1967–2007). https://zeitgeschichte-­o nline.de/themen/fiktionale-­p roduktionen-­ raf-­linksterrorismus-­und-­deutscher-­herbst-­im-­film Rote Armee Fraktion. 1971. Das Konzept Stadtguerilla. https://socialhistoryportal.org/raf/text/307145 Shaw, Tony. 2015. Cinematic Terror. A Global History of Terrorism on Film. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Sloan, Stephen and Anderson, Sean K. 2009. Historical Dictionary of Terrorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Soltau, Noah. 2014. ‘The Aesthetics of Violence and Power in Uli Edel’s Der Baader Meinhof Komplex.’ Imaginations. 5:2. 29–45. Staun, Jørgen. 2010. ‘When, how and why elites frame terrorists: a Wittgensteinian analysis of terror and radicalisation.’ Critical Studies on Terrorism. 3 3. 403–420. Slocum, David J., editor. 2005. Terrorism, Media, Liberation. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Zielke, Dustin. 2009. ‘Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex’. The journal of religion and film. 13:2. 1–3. Wivel, Peter. 2007. Baader Meinhof. København: Politiken.

CHAPTER 7

No Future and Spectrality in David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet Marco Amici

David Peace, born and raised in Yorkshire, is one of the most original voices in contemporary British literature. His debut novel, entitled 1974 and published in 1999, is the first installment of the Red Riding Quartet, a crime series which includes 1977 (2000), 1980 (2001) and 1983 (2002). The tetralogy received deserved critical notice and was subsequently adapted in 2009 by Channel 4 as a three-part TV drama series. Set in Peace’s native Yorkshire during the same timeframe as each titular novel, the Red Riding Quartet explores a bleak world crawling with brutality and perversion. As a crime writer, Peace seems to look mainly at the example of the noir novel, in its more radicalized and socially engaged form: a type of writing which generally depicts a world characterized by rampant amorality and normalized corruption. In an article that was originally published in 1976, French noir author Jean-Patrick Manchette summarized the main aspects of the genre as follows:

M. Amici (*) Department of Italian, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Dall’Asta et al. (eds.), Contemporary European Crime Fiction, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21979-5_7

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In the violent and realist criminal novel of the American type (the roman noir) the order of the law is not good; it is transitory and in contradiction with itself. Phrased differently, evil dominates historically. Evil’s domination is social and political. Social and political power is exercised by bastards. More precisely, by unscrupulous capitalists, allies of or identical to gangsters brought together in organizations, having in their pay politicians, journalists, and other ideologues, as well as justice, the police, and other henchmen. (Manchette 2009)1

Developing further on the notion of crime fiction as social commentary, Manchette points to the criminogetic nature of society itself, and at the structural intersection between crime and history. This is an approach towards crime writing which seems to perfectly apply to the Red Riding Quartet, where the narrative of fictional and real crimes is contextualized within a dysfunctional society characterized by the constant overlapping of legal and illegal practices.2 In addition, much attention is paid by the author to the historical and cultural context in which the events take place, resulting in the enhancement of the gritty realism of the tetralogy. Taking the cue from the link between crime fiction and society as outlined above, in this chapter I propose a reading of the Red Riding Quartet using the frameworks of punk and spectrality as interpretative keys for unlocking the social meaning of the texts, and for expanding the scope of this Yorkshire noir to a larger set of political concerns. Punk, as noted by Roger Sabin, “is a notoriously amorphous concept” associated with “a subculture best characterised as being part youth rebellion, part artistic statement” (Sabin 2), which emerged in the United Kingdom and the United States during the second half of the 1970s.3 Punk expresses itself mainly through music, but in the context of this study I will consider some of its wider cultural and political values, vis-à-vis Peace’s writing. Further, spectrality is understood from Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology, first introduced in Specters of Marx (1994), as a deconstruction practice which challenges the dichotomy of life and death, presence and absence, and, as pointed out by Martin Hägglund, the notion of being no longer and that of being not yet (Hägglund 2008: 82). Spectrality, in this sense, provides an interpretative bridge between the different temporalities of the Red Riding Quartet, in order to analyse the works’ wider political significance. To use punk and spectrality as theoretical tools for interrogating Peace’s work, it is necessary to clarify in advance some aspects related to the time and space of the Red Riding Quartet.

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From 1974 to Year Zero As previously mentioned, Peace is an author who pays a lot of attention to locating his narratives in their actual time and place. The Red Riding Quartet is characterized by both the meticulous evocation of the Yorkshire social landscape of the 1970s and 1980s, and recurrent allusions beyond the regional to historical events, such as the Northern Ireland conflict, the Silver Jubilee of Elizabeth II and the 1983 UK general election. These allusions do not contribute to or expand the plot of the novels, but they are knitted into the narratives to reproduce the everyday commentary on facts of national interest, or to resonate with the bleak landscape and the emotional turmoil of the characters. Central to this aspect is the role of media, with particular reference to radio broadcasting, which, in 1977, is a recurrent intermedial reference opening each chapter of the novel, as in the following example: John Shark: Next caller? Caller: I Just want to say, she’s a good Queen, she’s Britain. John Shark: Is that it? Caller: Yes. The John Shark Show Radio Leeds Wednesday 8th June 1977. (Peace 2000: 170)

Despite the fact that the writer’s gaze throughout the four novels is constantly focused on Yorkshire, which assumes the characteristics of a noir microcosm, the Red Riding Quartet has often been investigated in relation to wider concerns. Katy Shaw, who has extensively analysed Peace’s work, points out how the author uses Yorkshire and the Yorkshire Ripper’s crime “as a lens through which to re-examine the period of the 1970s and 1980s” (2018: 13). Through the prism of crime, it is possible to observe the transition from welfare liberalism to neoliberalism: Charting the crimes, politics, and social tensions of their times, Peace’s novels acknowledge that, across the 1970s and 1980s in the UK, contextual developments in policing practices, and the growing interpenetration of the realms of politics and policing, crime and business, mark a broader privileging of neoliberal economics. (Shaw 2016: 59)

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Peace’s interest in hidden or ‘occult’ histories, which stems directly from the influence of James Ellroy, and his use of crime fiction to rewrite official history weaving together facts and fiction, provides another critical perspective on the Red Riding Quartet.4 Peace is particularly interested in questioning institutional narratives, and West Yorkshire, according to him, “is very much a place of defeat and hidden histories”, where people “know that Official History is only ever written by the winners and that it’s always/usually a lie” (Verguson 2008). Inevitably, from this perspective, the quartet can be read as a sort of counter-narrative of Thatcherism, as if the official narrative and rhetoric of the time were a direct emanation of the political ideology promoted by Margaret Thatcher. It is also worth noting that the tetralogy ends on 9 June 1983, the date of Thatcher’s triumphant re-election. Even though the results of the election are not mentioned in the closing of 1983, the symbolic value of the date cannot be ignored and, significantly, can be linked with the conclusion of GB84 (2004), whose content was initially planned to constitute the final part of the Red Riding Quartet. GB84, which focuses on the 1984–1985 UK miners’ strike, is very much a continuation of the tetralogy, and provides an ideal conclusion of the work started with 1974.5 In the final apocalyptic image evoked by Peace in GB84, we see the miners, whose coming defeat marked a point of no return in British history, marching together one last time towards an un-named monstrous female figure representing Margaret Thatcher herself: —Here where she stands at the gates at the head of her tribe and waits— Triumphant on the mountains of our skulls. Up to her hems in the rivers of our blood—A wreath in one hand. The other between her legs—Her two little princes dancing by their necks from her apron strings, and she looks down at the long march of labour halted before her and says, Awake! Awake! This is England, Your England—and the Year is Zero. (462)

The discourse on politics and history whose haunting presence is felt throughout the Red Riding Quartet seems to find an ideal conclusion in this passage where conventional notions of time and place are unravelled. The murderous history of “Yorkshire, bloody Yorkshire” (Peace 2001a: 305), started in 1974, ends with GB84, so that readers cannot find, as pointed out by Cristopher Vardy, any “germ of change or transformation: progress, movement, and any sense of a futurity based on hope of transformation are all stalled” (Vardy 2018: 12). Peace’s interest in exploring

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the transition between the 1970s and the 1980s as a crucial passage in British history marks the most distinctive feature of his work as social commentary.6 Even if this theme is not openly articulated in the novels of the Red Riding Quartet as it is in GB84, it clearly informs both the political background and the structures of the fictional world.

UK Decay Barry James Anderson, or simply BJ, is one of the few recurrent characters in the Red Riding Quartet. A rent boy who lives on the margins of society, BJ is at the scene of the crime that closes the first volume of the tetralogy. He is the informer who provides journalist Edward Dunford and policeman Peter Hunter—respectively the main characters of 1974 and 1980— with dangerous information about police corruption and colliding interests between crime, business and politics. In 1977 he is presented as the closest friend of one of the alleged victims of the Yorkshire Ripper. He is also one of the three narrating voices in 1983, where some of the questions from the previous novels are answered. It is in this latter book that BJ acquires new importance, and a different light is shed on the role he has played in the previous novels. Furthermore, attentive readers will notice that the arc of this character is characterized by a change in his appearance. In 1974, the character is introduced as a “pencil thin” kid, a “Bad fucking Bowie” wearing “a fat maroon suit with an orange feather cut” (Peace 1999: 20). Towards the end of 1983, he has a shaved head and he wears a heavy military coat with badges: “I put my cap and army coat on. I shine my best badge: UK Decay” (Peace 2002: 365–366). These last few but significant details suggest that the character has embraced a punk aesthetic: pin badges are an essential accessory of punk visual style, and UK Decay, in fact, were an influential English punk band formed in 1978. Shortly before this last passage BJ, who is being discharged from a hospital, walks “across carpet with a swastika held high in hand” (365). Also in this case, there is a reference to punk style, as swastikas were used by 1970s punks with ironic effect to provoke and disgust the establishment. This shift can be interpreted as an aesthetic subversion which corroborates the final development of BJ’s character: a fragile and tormented character whose existence has been haunted by the horrors he witnessed, who, in the final pages of 1983, is finally able to confront his fear and his abuser. Having at its core the idea of subversion against convention and the dominant social order, in music and society, punk’s influence can be considered

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at a further level. Matthew Worley comments that, at its roots, “punk signified a negation that enabled agency and empowerment” (2017: 254). In his final act of rebellion against Reverend Laws, who is finally revealed as the ringleader of a paedophile circle, BJ embodies the same spirit of negation: a radical form of revenge against the corrupted and perverted society which has caused him to live in fear. Above and beyond the character of BJ, I propose that punk can be used further to investigate the Red Riding Quartet and to expand its scope as social commentary. First, it should be noted that, among the great number of references to popular culture of the 1970s and 1980s employed by Peace, those related to punk seem to have special importance. Mark Fisher has underlined how Peace uses musical references embedded in the text as “background sounds”. Music, according to Fisher, “functions as a hauntological trigger” to establish a dialogue with the past (Fisher 2014: 82). The role played by punk music, in this sense, is quite explicit, especially if we consider 1977, where the four sections of the novel are all named after punk songs: “Police and Thieves” and “What’s My Name” by The Clash, “Bodies” and “God Save the Queen” by the Sex Pistols. References to punk in a novel set in 1977 Britain, the year in which the impact of punk subculture was magnified by its “collision” with the celebrations of Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee, may seem an obvious choice, but punk can inform a reading of the whole tetralogy at different levels. For example, at the level of style, punk can be associated with the presence of rhetorical devices of repetition. Peace himself has underlined how music deeply influences his writing style: Initially I started collecting as much music as I could from the years I was writing about (and not only the ‘good stuff’) and this has helped a lot in terms of the accuracy of vocabulary and phraseology, as language changes so quickly. But I also get a lot structurally from music, in terms of rhythm and timing, repetition and phrasing, and so forth. (Peace 2001b)

Punk music, in this regard, can be seen as an influence in the use of repetitions, anaphora and epistrophe that characterizes Peace’s prose, in order to produce an effect that can be described as incantatory (Simpson 2017: 257). This characteristic, which has become the author’s trademark style, progressively occupies more space, to the point that the quartet as a whole can be described as “a punishingly repetitive series, grinding away again and again at the same spaces and scenes, images and tropes, details and phrasings” (Simpson: 257). The practice of repetition, together with

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the extensive use of paratactic and telegraphic sentences, a set of stylistic devices also borrowed from James Ellroy’s crime writing, produces the distinct rhythm and timing of the quartet’s prose.7 When this rhetorical strategy is pushed to the extreme—as in the passage below—Peace’s writing produces an unsettling effect, generating a form of suspense which is unusual in crime fiction as it is driven by linguistics rather than plot, and embodying the inescapability of trauma which informs the actions of many characters in the tetralogy. I was thinking of her, thinking of her, thinking of her, praying Carol stayed gone, thinking of her hair, thinking of her ears, thinking of her eyes, praying Carol stayed gone, thinking of her lips, thinking of her teeth, thinking of her tongue, praying Carol stayed gone, thinking of her neck, thinking of her collarbone, thinking of her shoulders, praying Carol stayed gone, thinking of her breasts, thinking of the skin, thinking of her nipples, praying Carol stayed gone, thinking of her stomach, thinking of her belly, thinking of her womb, praying Carol stayed gone, thinking of her thighs, thinking of the skin, thinking of the hair, praying Carol stayed gone, thinking of her piss, thinking of her shit … praying Carol stayed gone …. (Peace 2000: 193)

Peace’s style, with its obsessive rhythm and accumulation of simple units of text, can be compared with the main characteristics of punk music, which embraces expressive authenticity by combining noise and basic musical structures, distortion and driving repetitive rhythm. “Besides being simple in form”, Alison Stone tells us, “punk songs also tend to be repetitive […] and this highlights the songs’ rhythmic dynamism, as repeated rhythm patterns generate bodily momentum” (Stone 2018: 54). Reaffirming the idea of music as a “sensory force”, something “to be felt, not thought about” (ibid.), punk expresses itself through a musical language that resonates with Peace’s style. The affinity between punk, as a cultural phenomenon, and Peace’s crime writing also finds expression in their potential as social commentary. As Matthew Worley puts it, punk “gave vent to frustrations of both socioeconomic and existential origin at the precise moment when Britain itself was passing through a period of uncertainty and change” (2017: 7). A comparable vision of British society of the 1970s and 1980s is articulated in the novels of the quartet. Moreover, as Dick Hebdige points out, “the rhetoric of punk was drenched in apocalypse: in the stock imagery of crisis and sudden change” (2002: 27), which is another element of affinity

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with the Red Riding Quartet. Besides the prominent use of apocalyptic allusions throughout the whole tetralogy—“The trees black. / The sky blood. / The shops gone. / The people dead (Peace 2000: 118)—the phrase “when the two sevens clash”, systematically repeated throughout 1977, is also a reference to a song by the reggae band Culture about an impending apocalypse based on a Rastafarian prophecy.8 1977 is undoubtedly the volume of the tetralogy in which apocalyptic elements are most marked, with the inclusion of biblical references and the dissonant presence of the Silver Jubilee celebrations. The novel closes with a stream-of-consciousness monologue revealing the thoughts of burn-out crime reporter Jack Whitehead, one of the two protagonists and narrating voices of the novel. It is a violent, visionary ending in which the delusional mind of the journalist—the moment before a horrific exorcism, involving the driving of a nail into his head, is carried out on him—weaves together memories of his dead wife, disturbing details of the murders committed by the Yorkshire Ripper, references to the Jubilee, brutal visions from Yorkshire’s historical past and allusions to current corruption. At the end of the monologue a final allusion to punk closes the book: […] and I stand at the door and knock, the keys to death and hell and the mystery of the woman, knowing this is why people die, this is why people, in 1977 this is why I see—He brought the hammer down—No future. (341)

The fact that Peace places the quintessential punk slogan—‘No future’—at the centre of the Red Riding Quartet confirms that punk deeply resonates with the bleak world he has created. Conjuring visions “that were postindustrial, post-democratic and post-apocalyptic” (Worley 2017: 221), punk as a cultural expression was infused with the same dystopian sensibility that we recognize in Peace’s quartet. This sensibility can be defined as the ability to identify and magnify societal dysfunctions— dysfunctions that in a classic dystopian narrative would be projected onto a non-existent society in an alternative time and space—in order to present the contemporary world as essentially negative. In the case of 1970s and 1980s Britain, this vision was triggered by “events and perceptions of the time: deindustrialisation, unemployment, the Falklands War, the Cold War, the neutering of trade unions, the closing down of the Greater London Council, the repositioning of Britain as an entrepreneurial economy driven by the needs of individual consumers” (Worley: 221). Nonetheless, it is precisely this dystopian quality that can be associated

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with the vitality and proactiveness of punk’s core practices, namely its do-­ it-­yourself ethos and its rejection of mainstream social order. Punk’s dystopian sensibility provided a generation with effective ideas of political resistance which continue to be advocated by new punk generations. As Kevin Dunn observes, “Over the last several decades, despite repeated claims that ‘punk is dead’, punk has become a global force that constructs oppositional identities, empowers local communities, and challenges corporate-­led processes of globalization” (2016: 9). As I will discuss in the conclusion of this chapter, the notion of punk’s political resistance can be used to expand the scope of Peace’s writing as a social commentary, but to do this I first address the quartet’s hauntological implications.

Future Is Written When asked about her greatest political achievement during a dinner party in 2002, Margaret Thatcher allegedly answered: “Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds”.9 Thatcher’s quote points at the crisis of the Left and the progressive erosion of its discourse with the naturalization of the ideologies that permeated the conservative governments of the ‘Iron Lady’.10 Thatcherism, according to cultural theorist Stuart Hall, proved to be successful as a hegemonic project, which aimed, among other things, at producing a foundational cultural change in society based on the belief in free market and individualism: “Thatcherism is about the remaking of common sense: its aim is to become the ‘common sense of the age’” (Hall 1988: 8). Dismantling the idea that, after World War II, “the welfare state had come to stay”, and that there was no going “back to using the criterion of the market as a measure of people’s needs” (Ibid.), Thatcher started “the long march of Neoliberal Revolution” (Hall 2011: 705). A significative development of this interpretation can be associated with the more recent notion of capitalist realism, proposed by Mark Fisher, who argues that capitalism itself has become the common sense of the age. According to this perspective, the neoliberal narrative introduced during the 1980s by US President Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, with its myths about privatization, deregulation and the downsizing of the welfare state, has become the hegemonic narrative in the West to an extent that the mere possibility of a world not governed by these principles or logic has become unthinkable. This perceived lack of alternatives seems to retrospectively corroborate the nihilistic and ‘apocalyptic’ attitude towards society promoted by punk, epitomised by

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the ‘No future’ slogan, which Italian political theorist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi interpreted as “a self-fulfilling prophecy that has slowly enveloped the world” (12).11 There was no future because—to paraphrase another alleged quote, this time by Joe Strummer, punk icon and leader of the band The Clash—the future was actually written and there was no alternative.12 The dystopian sensibility which informs the fictional world of the Red Riding Quartet is naturally linked to this scenario. Far from being impartial, Peace’s perspective on the past is full of resentment, because of his own personal experience, spending his formative years when “West Yorkshire suffered a great deal under the Thatcher government” (Verguson 2008), but also because of his pessimistic view of the present and his disappointment with the New Labour governments. As pointed out by Jarred Keyes, in Peace—despite his reluctance to write about contemporary Britain—the “intention to engage the political consolidation of neoliberalism” goes together with the implicit judgement of the present (Keyes 20). This political tension seems to find expression at two different levels. On the one hand, it informs the exposing of police corruption carried out in the tetralogy. As pointed out by Katy Shaw, in Peace’s novels the West Yorkshire Police force is “not committed to fighting crime but are instead engaged in a pattern of discipline and regulation directed at those targeted by neoliberal policies” (Shaw 2016: 72). On the other, Peace’s retrospective narrative depicts an overwhelmingly bleak and apocalyptic world, where the general feeling—perceived from the first pages of 1974 and explicitly stated at the end of 1983—is that there is “No hope for Britain” (Peace 2002: 404). Peace’s dystopian sensibility inevitably creates an invisible bridge between his time and that of the tetralogy. We may interpret this in Bakhtinian terms, as a sort of spectral interaction between the chronotope of the text and that of the author/reader: capitalism realism, with its consolidated lack of alternatives, is haunting the world of the Red Riding Quartet from the future. Spectrality has in fact been used to underline how the tetralogy dialogues with the past and “the ghostliness of history” (Shaw 2018: 60), but also to illuminate how the tetralogy is characterized by a tension about the future. Mark Simpson, whose reading is particularly relevant for the purpose of this chapter, has underlined how the hauntological quality of the narrative can be considered in terms of spectral futurity, as “the time of the series […] presses onward, intrusively, into the contemporaneity of narrative writing and reading”, and into “the wound-world we have come to inherit

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from the Thatcherite moment” (Simpson: 260). According to this perspective, while unfolding a “horrific vision of history and the present” (260–261), the Red Riding Quartet subverts the crime genre from within, “by refusing its normative pleasures and normative closures, […] those narrative mechanisms of mystery, of suspense, of ratiocination that inform and, arguably, enable the genre’s commodification” (261). Taking the clue from a similar premise, we consider the spectral interaction between the chronotope of the text and that of the author/reader as the core element of Peace’s noir tetralogy. This dynamic informs the sense of inescapability that sooner rather than later possesses many of the characters of the quartet, as they struggle with situations that become increasingly untenable. Their arc follows the typical trajectory of noir characters: not only are they not able to right the general wrong of the unjust world in which they live (cfr. Manchette 2009), but they also end up being trapped in events over which they have no control.13 Mark Fisher has linked this specific aspect to the progressive haunting of the characters that end up seeing themselves only through a glass darkly: In the end, everything—narrative, intelligibility—succumbs to total murk; as the characters begin to disassociate, it becomes difficult to know what is happening, or what has happened; at a certain point, it is unclear as to whether we have crossed over into the land of the dead. (Fisher 2014: 81)

Even though the actions of almost all the main characters of the tetralogy are motivated by the search for answers to solve cases or clear mysteries, they progressively fall into obsession and isolation, losing their hold on reality, enticed into a web of evil that leads them to death—Edward Dunford in 1974, Bob Fraser in 1977 and Peter Hunter in 1980—or to madness—Jack Whitehead in 1977. What they discover about the crimes they are investigating, as suggested by Nicoletta Vallorani, seems to infect them like a virus which gradually destroys their life (Vallorani 2015). This recurrent pattern seems to affect a central aspect of noir, namely that of individual action as a replacement for class struggle, in a context in which “the exploited have been defeated and are forced to suffer under the reign of evil” (Manchette 2009). In line with this view, the actions of noir antiheroes, with their aura of existentialism and fatalism, are grounded in the acknowledgement of an unjust, corrupted world and are based on a negative understanding of the capacities of political action. In the tetralogy Peace pushes this dynamic to its extreme, as the actions of his characters

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can be interpreted as a negation of the world they live in. Mark Fisher has brilliantly stressed this aspect, comparing James Ellroy and Peace, in order to highlight the different political implications conveyed in their work and to underline how the tetralogy cannot be read “as justifying, normalizing or in any way desensitizing the ‘harsh realities’ of neoliberalism” (Fisher 2009b): Ellroy’s message: this is the world, live with it, adjust your expectations to fit it, accept your corrupt protectors, mythologise them, because they are all that separates you from something even worse. Peace’s message: if this is the world, then it must be rejected, abominated, destroyed, even if it is the best world we can realistically expect. (Fisher 2009b)

This desperate form of resistance which can be identified in Peace’s characters establishes further affinity between the Red Riding Quartet and punk. As such, Peace’s writing embodies both the negative praxis of punk—its combined emphasis on nihilism and negationism (see Sabin 1999: 3) as a response to an unacceptable world—and punk’s hauntological claim that the future is no longer possible. Reading the Red Riding Quartet through the lens of punk allows us to consider Peace’s choices as a crime writer under a different light: besides the author’s disinterestedness in certain structural conventions of the crime genre—closure and plot-driven dynamics most of all—Peace’s take on noir seems characterized by a tendency towards aesthetic radicalism. This finds expression in the author’s peculiar style; in the ‘obscure’ progression of the plot with its piling up of unresolved mysteries; and in the depiction of a bleak, apocalyptic world which is at the same time imploding into ‘local’ darkness and transitioning into the new order of neoliberal economics.14 This latter aspect in particular allows us to expand the scope of this Yorkshire noir and its political implications and, at the same time, to corroborate my punk reading. Beyond the UK boundaries, punk subculture revealed itself as a transnational phenomenon which, between the 1970s and the 1980s, spread both in Western and Eastern Europe, promoting its own form of political resistance against the present status quo, but also the future neoliberal one.15 Punks, to use Bifo’s words, “detected the smell of a new totalitarianism in the making” (Berardi: 157), or—we may add—perceived the presence of capitalism realism’s ghost. The same dynamics found in Peace’s tetralogy, where crime fiction is used to explore the structural transformation of British society and the

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economy between the 1970s and the 1980s, also speak to or about what many commentators saw as a key turning point in European history, namely the shift away “from the Keynesian consensus on state intervention, which simply could not be financed any more, to a new consensus based on neo-liberal austerity policies” (Wirsching: 8). According to this view, Peace’s Yorkshire noir is able to transcend the here and now of its setting and establish a dialogue with European history, participating in the larger narrative that chronicled the moment when “Militant right-wing liberalism emerged as the dominant political ideology in Europe” (Therborn: 12). The punk aesthetics at work in Peace’s quartet allows us to contemplate a European dimension in hauntological terms, stressing the articulation of a sense of ‘no future’ or no alternatives which resonates through the narrative. We may push this interpretation further, stating that the whole Red Riding Quartet revolves around the ‘spectral crime’ of the killing of the future, denounced at the end of 1977 with the words of the quintessential punk slogan, used in the United Kingdom as in the rest of Europe by a young generation who did not want to conform to the social and political norms of the time. Pushing the boundaries of the genre but maintaining the idea that crime writers should have the moral and political obligation to document the time of their stories (Barretta: 100), Peace’s Yorkshire can be read as an exploration of a time haunted from the future, by the ghost of capitalism realism, that is, “the widespread belief that there is no alternative to capitalism” (Fisher 2009b: 19).16

Notes 1. In the Foreword that he wrote for a new edition of Manchette’s Fatale (2015), Peace has expressed his admiration for Manchette and the political nature of his crime writing, comparing him to Dashiell Hammett. “Not only were Hammett and Manchette great writers—with their characters and their stories, in their language and their styles—they were Great RED Writers; men of the Left. And it was rare enough at the time Hammett was writing, rarer still when Manchette was writing, but now almost extinct. And it is then this very rarity—of being a Great Red Writer—that made first reading Manchette such a revelation for me; that here was someone who had seen the political potential of the ‘crime story’ and had then actually fulfilled that potential, while never once compromising his stories or his style for manifestos and theories” (Peace 2015). 2. Despite the fact that none of the characters in the Red Riding Quartet bear the names of real people, the tetralogy is partially based on real events.

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1977 and 1980 are based on the murders committed by Peter Sutcliffe, the serial killer known as the Yorkshire Ripper, who was convicted of killing 13 women between 1975 and 1980. The wrongful prosecution of Michael Myshkin’s character, in 1974 and 1983, clearly refers to the real life story of Stefan Kiszko, wrongly accused and convicted of killing 11-year-old Lesley Molseed in 1975. The character of Peter Hunter in 1980 appears to be based on John Stalker, a deputy chief constable of the Greater Manchester Police who headed an investigation into the shooting of suspected members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army in 1982. 3. David Peace has acknowledged the importance of punk or, more precisely, of post-punk in his formative years. “I grew up in a small place in West Yorkshire called Wakefield and […] because of punk everybody want to form a band, everybody want to write a fanzine, and everybody put on gigs and concerts and festivals […]. I was interested in writing so I joined a band because I wanted to write the lyrics and I was the singer in the band […]. You could be creative and every town had this kind of scene where people formed bands and wrote and did things. I think it was quite a revolutionary time for many young people because you suddenly had this explosion of expression. It made you question everything […]”. “David PEACE—05 Influence du punk”. YouTube. Uploaded by Editions Payot & Rivages on 9 March 2016. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=gFgGyLgowms. 4. On the role played by ‘occult histories’ in Peace’s writing, with particular reference to GB84 and its political vision, see Matthew Hart, “The Third English Civil War: David Peace’s ‘Occult History’ of Thatcherism”. 5. “At the time of writing, I felt GB84 was very much a continuation of the Red Riding Quartet in terms of documenting the time and place I had grown up in but also, in many ways, a conclusion as-again, at the time of writing-I did see the strike as very much the last battle” (Shaw 2012: 134). 6. Peace’s interest in British history of the 1970s will be also at the centre of UK/DK, the next book he plans to publish after the recent Tokyo Redux (2021). UK/DK will focus on the history of the United Kingdom from 1968 to 1979, a timeframe that the British author describes as that of “the death of the left and the rise of the right” (Wild 2006). 7. Interestingly, Peace has acknowledged Ellroy’s influence using an analogy related to punk, defining the experience of reding Ellory’s White Jazz as his “Sex Pistols moment”, meaning the moment in which he decided to become a writer (Fisher 2014: 80). 8. At the same time, “When the two sevens clash” also became a sort of slogan or catchphrase in punk circles because of a certain affinity between reggae and punk subcultures (Hedbege 2002: 67).

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9. Thatcher’s quote is reported by Conservative MP Conor Burns (2008) who was attending the same event. 10. As Tony Blair himself acknowledged: “[Thatcher] was immensely kind and generous to me when I was Prime Minister … Politicly, certain reforms she made, for example in Trade Union Law …, we kept the basic legal framework … We didn’t renationalise many of state industries that she privatised … I always thought my job was to build on some of the things she had done rather than reverse them … Many of the things she said … had a certain creditability … Whenever I wanted to ask her for advice, she would always give it … in a genuine, spirited way … She was very kind” (BBC News, April 8, 2013). 11. Nonetheless, punk was also able to articulate proposals of resistance. It is in fact this specific attitude that has made it possible for the punk subculture to acquire a transnational dimension and to survive beyond “the cycle of resistance and de-fusion” which characterizes subcultures, and their progressive absorption into mainstream culture, as described by Dick Hebdige (130). 12. The phrase “future is written”, as underlined by Nick Montfort, “appeared on the record sleeve of the Clash’s 1982 album Combat Rock. It became strongly associated with Strummer and with the Clash’s particular take on punk, which acknowledged grim realities but also rejected hopelessness, seeing the possibility for political improvement” (Montfort 2017: 157). 13. See Amici (2012: 9–19). 14. “Primitive Yorkshire, Medieval Yorkshire, Industrial Yorkshire/ Three ages, three dark ages/ Local decay, industrial decay/local murder, industrial murder/ local hell, industrial hell” (Peace 305–306). 15. It is not by chance, in fact, that punk it is still today an active and effective form of political resistance. 16. This seems to correspond to the second direction in hauntology identified by Fisher in Ghosts of My Life, and described, referring to Hägglund (2008), as a virtuality already happening. “The second sense of hauntology refers to that which (in actuality) has not yet happened, but which is already effective in the virtual (an attractor, an anticipation shaping current behaviour)” (Fisher 2014: 19).

Works Cited Amici, Marco. 2012. ‘Massimo Carlotto e il linguaggio del noir’. In The Black Album. Il noir tra cronaca e romanzo. By Marco Amici and Massimo Carlotto. Rome: Carocci. 9–19. Berardi, Franco. 2011. After the Future. Edinburgh: AK Press. Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’. 2015. Heroes. Mass Murder and Suicide. New York: Verso.

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Barretta, Manuela. 2009. ‘The “Noir” in David Peace’s Shadow.’ Altre Modernità, 1. 95–102. Brown, Richard. ‘Armageddon Was Yesterday—Today We Have a Serious Problem’: Pre- and Postmillennial Tropes for Crime and Criminality in Fiction by David Peace and Stieg Larsson.’ In Constructing Crime. Discourse and Cultural Representations of Crime and ‘Deviance’. Editor, C.  Gregoriou. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 81–96. Burns, Conor. 2008. ‘Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievement: New Labour’. In ConservativeHome. https://conservativehome.blogs.com/centreright/2008/ 04/making-­history.html. Accessed 17 December 2021. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning & the New International. New York: Routledge. Dunne, Kevin. 2016. Global Punk. Resistance and Rebellion in Everyday life. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Fisher, Mark. 2009a. Capitalist Realism: Is There no Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books. Fisher, Mark. 2009b. ‘David Peace and Capitalist Realism’. In K-PUNK. https:// k-­punk.org/david-­peace-­and-­capitalist-­realism/. Accessed 8 July 2021. Fisher, Mark. 2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester: Zero Books. Hägglund, Martin. 2008. Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hall, Stuart. 1988. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London and New York: Verso. Hall, Stuart. 2011. ‘The Neo-Liberal Revolution’. Cultural Studies, 25:6. 705–728. Hart, Matthew. 2008. ‘The Third English Civil War: David Peace’s “Occult History” of Thatcherism.’ Contemporary Literature, 49:4. 573–596. Hebdige, Dick. 2002. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London and New York: Routledge. Lockwood, Dean. 2013. ‘When the Two Sevens Clash: David Peace’s Nineteen Seventy-Seven as ‘Occult History’. In Twenty-First Century Fiction: What Happens Now. Editor, Siân Adiseshiah and Rupert Hildyard. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 49–65. Manchette, Jean-Patrick. 2009. ‘Five Remarks on How I Earn My Living’. In Marxists.org. http://www.marxists.info/archive/manchette/1976/earn-­ living.htm. Accessed 20 August 2021. Originally in Les Nouvelles Littéraires, no. 2565, December 30, 1976. McIntyre, Dan. 2013. ‘Language and Style in David Peace’s 1974: a Corpus Informed Analysis.’ Études de stylistique anglaise, 4. 133–146. Montfort, Nick. 2017. The Future. Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press. Peace, David. 1999. 1974. London: Serpent’s Tail. Peace, David. 2000. 1977. London: Serpent’s Tail.

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Peace, David. 2001a. 1980. London: Serpent’s Tail. Peace, David. 2001b. ‘The Red Riding Quartet’. In Crime Time. https://www. crimetime.co.uk/the-­red-­riding-­quartet/. Accessed 5 August 2021. Peace, David. 2002. 1983. London: Serpent’s Tail. Peace, David. 2004. GB84. Faber and Faber. Peace, David. 2015. ‘Foreword by David Peace’. In Fatale. Jean-Patrick Manchette. London: Serpent’s Tail. Recalcati, Massimo. 2019. The Telemachus Complex: Parents and Children After the Decline of the Father. Newark: Polity Press. Sabin, Roger, editor. 1999. Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk. London: Routledge. Shaw, Katy. 2012. ‘“Unfinished Business”: David Peace and the 1984–5 Miners’ Strike.’ In Digging the Seam: Popular Cultures of the 1984/5 Miners’ Strike. Editors, S.  Popple and I.  MacDonald. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 132–141. Shaw, Katy. 2016. ‘“Local Hells” and State Crimes: Place, Politics, and Deviance in David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet.’ In Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction. Editors, A. Pepper and D. Schmid. Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillian. Shaw, Katy. 2018. David Peace: Texts & Contexts. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. Simpson, Mark. 2017. ‘At Home in the World of the Wound: Feral Cosmopolitism in the Red Riding Quartet.’ In Negative Cosmopolitism. Cultures and Politics of World Citizenship after Globalization. Editors, E.  Kent and T.  Tomsky. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 243–262. Stone, Alison. 2018. The Value of Popular Music: An Approach From Post-Kantian Aesthetics. Cham (Switzerland): Palgrave McMillian. Sweedler, Milo. 2020. Allegories of the End of Capitalism: Six Films on the Revolutions of Our Times. Winchester: Zero Books. eBook. Vallorani, Nicoletta. 2015. ‘Serializing Evil: David Peace and the Formulae of Crime Fiction’. In Serial Crime Fiction. Dying for More. Editors, J. Anderson, C. Miranda and B. Pezzotti. Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillian. 133–143. Vardy, Cristopher. 2018. ‘Historicising Neoliberal Freedom: GB84 and the Politics of Historical Fiction’. Open Library of Humanities, 4:2, 1–32. Wild, Peter. 2006. ‘Back to Basics. Peter Wild interviews David Peace’. In Dogmatika. https://dogmatika.wordpress.com/2006/08/20/back-­to-­basics/. Wirsching, Andreas, Göran Therborn, Geoff Eley, Hartmut Kaelble and Philippe Chassaigne. 2011. ‘The 1970s and 1980s as a Turning Point in European History?’ Journal of Modern European History, 9:1. 8–26. Worley, Matthew. 2017. No Future. Punk, Politics and British youth Culture, 1976–1984. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 8

The Trails of a Counter-Narrative: The Representation of the Years of Lead in Loriano Macchiavelli’s Sarti Antonio Series Silvia Baroni

That very morning, just before noon, the judges decided that Santini Raffaella should be kept in prison in spite of the evidences provided by Santovito and in spite of colonel Friggerio’s efforts. They said it plain and simple. Those were dark years, years of lead. Loriano Macchiavelli, Francesco Guccini, Questo sangue che impasta la terra1

The expression anni di piombo2 (Years of Lead) refers to a dark page in Italian history that covers the period from the end of the 1960s to the early 1980s, and was characterized by students’ and workers’ protests, terrorist attacks and political violence. Scholarship about the Years of Lead has either focused on authors who were writing in the 1970s and 1980s,

S. Baroni (*) Dipartimento di Filologia classica e italianistica, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Dall’Asta et al. (eds.), Contemporary European Crime Fiction, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21979-5_8

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and thus lived through and represented those years from an ‘internal’ perspective, or it has looked at the ways that contemporary writers have reconstructed this period and their various motivations for doing so. In this context, however, critics have rarely addressed the case of Loriano Macchiavelli, whose work might be regarded as epitomizing both an internal perspective and a kind of overview of this key period in recent Italian history. Although he did not obtain the same international recognition as other well-known Italian crime novelists such as Andrea Camilleri or Umberto Eco, Loriano Macchiavelli has played a major role in establishing Italian noir fiction. He began his career as a writer almost by chance, as the first book detailing the investigations of Sergeant Sarti Antonio, Le Piste dell’attentato [The Trails of the Attack], was written in 1973 during a holiday in Spain and for the sole purpose of amusing his wife.3 Since his first appearance, however, the character of Sarti—ironically nicknamed questurino4 for his ‘bureaucratic’ attitude—has become the protagonist of the longest series of noir novels and short stories in contemporary Italian crime fiction: the latest installment, La stagione del pipistrello [The Season of the Bat], was published in 2022. The Sarti Antonio saga consists of twenty-one novels, three graphic novels and around fifty short stories. The series has experienced ups and downs: in 1987, discouraged by the criticism received, Macchiavelli decided to ‘kill’ his character in Stop per Sarti Antonio [A Stop for Sarti Antonio], before choosing to bring him back in the novel Coscienza sporca [A Guilty Conscience, 1995] in the wake of the success of two TV series inspired by Sarti’s enquiries, released in 1991 and 1994. In addition, Macchiavelli is also the author of the Jules Quicher series, composed of two novels, and collaborates with the singer-songwriter Francesco Guccini, with whom he has created two other literary crime series, the first devoted to inspector Benedetto Santovito and the second to the ranger Marco ‘Poiana’ Gherardini.5 Starting from Le Piste dell’attentato (1974)—one of the first Italian novels depicting the Years of Lead along with Il contesto (1971) by Leonardo Sciascia, Vogliamo tutto (1971) by Nanni Balestrini and Caro Michele (1973) by Natalia Ginzburg6—Macchiavelli has selected this specific period as a recurring theme of his fiction. Throughout Sarti’s series, as well as Santovito’s and Jules Quicher’s sagas, Macchiavelli describes the Italian society of the 1970s and 1980s, setting his stories in Bologna, a city that works as a lens through which the author observes and depicts the whole country.

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As stated by Barbara Pezzotti (2014), Macchiavelli’s representation of Italian history stands out from that of other crime writers because of the critical gaze and political impegno (commitment) that the writer adopts while dealing with some dark episodes of World War II and the Years of Lead. Thus, according to Pezzotti, his crime stories might be considered “a counter-history of major Italian events, mirroring the counter-­ information activity performed by extra-parliamentary groups in the 1970s” (2014: 94). Although this is certainly true for some of his novels, we shall take into account that in the course of his career Macchiavelli has adopted different strategies to approach historical events. Whereas the idea of a ‘counter-history’ works perfectly in the case of Jules Quicher’s series—that mainly deals with ‘true crime’7—I will argue that the Sarti Antonio series might be better considered a counter-narrative of the Years of Lead. After contextualizing the place of Macchiavelli within the broader framework of the national literary production devoted to that particular period, I will focus my analysis on the Sarti Antonio series, arguing that its counter-narrative displays three main features: a particular way of rewriting historical events within fiction; the use of irony to mark a distance from mainstream accounts of major events in contemporary Italian history; and the characterization of the detective as inept, rather than as the successful tough guy hard-boiled hero. I will than pinpoint how these three elements interact in Macchiavelli’s representation of the Years of Lead, especially by focusing my analysis on the works written between 1970 and 1989. In addition, I will touch upon the main differences occurring in the representation of the anni di piombo from the first to the second period of Sarti’s series, stressing that these changes are strictly related to a question of genre, that is, the passage from giallo (classic detective fiction)8 to noir.

Historical Perspectives: Anni di Piombo, Italian Narrative and Loriano Macchiavelli The period known as the Years of Lead has been strongly marked by terrorist attacks and a general climate of political violence. On the one hand, the protests led by workers and students, which reached their peak in the so called Autunno Caldo (the Hot Autumn) of 1969, demanded an improvement in working conditions and a renewal of the educational system, introducing into public debate important issues that helped the

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country to overcome the restrictive policies that characterized Italian society during the 1960s. At the same time, however, such a turbulent climate marked the beginning of a season of violent clashes between demonstrators and the police, with numerous victims on both sides. The workers’ protests were supported by radical left-wing extra-parliamentary groups such as Potere Operaio, Lotta Continua and Avanguardia Operaia, as well as by even more extreme organizations such as the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades). This latter group, in particular, was held responsible for the murder of several industrialists, judges, and members of the police and of the Christian Democratic Party: the most extreme action perpetrated by the Red Brigades was the kidnapping and execution of the Italian politician Aldo Moro, at the time leader of the Christian Democratic Party. Suddenly, the ‘Caso Moro’ (Moro case) became one of the most debated mysteries of the era; several journalists, activists, as well as the terrorists themselves hypothesized about the possible involvement of the Italian State and American Secret Service in the planning of Moro’s kidnapping and execution, thus giving rise to a series of conspiracy theories which have inspired several writers and film makers. On the other hand, the Years of Lead were also marked by bombing attacks and murders perpetrated by right-wing terrorist groups, which played a central role in the so called strategia della tensione (strategy of tension), consisting of a series of terrorist attacks against the civilian population. The beginning of this dramatic period is commonly identified with what came to be known as the ‘Strage di Piazza Fontana’ (the massacre of Piazza Fontana), a bombing attack that occurred on 12 December 1969 on the premises of the National Bank of Agriculture in the centre of Milan. Seventeen people died in the attack, which is considered the first act in a series of outrages including the Gioia Tauro massacre (22 July 1970), the Questura di Milano bombing (17 May 1973), the Piazza Loggia bombing in the centre of Brescia (28 May 1974), the bombing attack on the Italicus Rome-Brenner Express (4 August 1974) and the Bologna railway station bombing (2 August 1980), undoubtedly the most tragic event of the Years of Lead, in which eighty-five people were killed and 200 were wounded. In many cases, the perpetrators and the instigators of these terrorist acts are still unknown, and a growing number of victims’ associations as well as investigative journalists are still looking into the role played by secret services and criminal organizations in these events. Given the social and political turmoil they caused, and, most importantly, given the suspicion that national political and military institutions

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might have been involved in the organization of these atrocities, it is no surprise that the Years of Lead have become a source of inspiration for fiction, and in particular for crime narratives. Yet, many scholars—Pezzotti (2016), Paolin and Donnarumma,9 among others—have noted that the majority of crime novels and short stories dealing with the Years of Lead’s events and protagonists are chiefly historical crime narratives. In this regard, the reflection proposed by Donnarumma in an article on the fictionalization of terrorism in Italian literature is of particular interest. Building on the assumption that this attempt to offer a collective re-­ elaboration of traumatic events led to an overproduction of public and mediatic discourses about these themes,10 Donnarumma highlights the— apparently—marginal role played by literature in this context, identifying three main phases according to a threefold periodization. First, he argues that starting from the 1970s, fictional works dealing with the Years of Lead were usually ‘contaminated’ with a certain degree of non-fiction, as in the case of capital texts such as Nanni Balestrini’s Vogliamo tutto (1971) and Leonardo Sciascia’s Il contesto (1971). Then, in the period between 1982 and 2002 this primacy of non-fiction over fiction became explicitly evident and we can see an unprecedented proliferation of journalistic investigations and (auto)biographies of former left-wing terrorists. According to scholars, this phenomenon led to a general marginalization of fictional reconstructions: “the public is looking not for the narrative invention but rather for a historical reconstruction, or better, a fictional historical reconstruction, in a display of non-fiction coated with a fictional patina” (Donnarumma 329). In fact, the crisis of Italian high-brow literature has coincided with a gradual ascent (cf. Mondello 51–76) of crime fiction in the Italian literary context: the 1990s indeed marked the appearance of influential groups of writers—such as the Scuola dei Duri in Milan, the Gruppo 13 in Bologna and the Neonoir group in Rome—whose authors have contributed in a decisive way to the success of the genre (Mondello). Finally, the third period identified by Donnarumma started around 2003, when Italian crime literature established a tight relationship with the historical novel, generating a new trend of fictional works inspired by major historical events which try to fill in the gaps left by official investigations and judicial reconstruction. Romanzo criminale (2002) by Giancarlo de Cataldo, a novel aimed at reconstructing the links between national political institutions, the mafia and the criminal organization known as Banda della Magliana, is the most famous example of this trend.

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In this context, the experience of Loriano Macchiavelli stands out as unique. First, he is the only author whose books were written throughout all the three phases described by Donnarumma. Secondly, he has succeeded where the high-brow literature of the first and second phases failed, namely in the attempt to fictionalize the anni di piombo. Thirdly, such representation of the national history was made through what was considered at that time a low or popular genre, as critics typically used to consider the so-called giallo. Finally, the narrative strategies that Macchiavelli adopted in representing the Years of Lead were highly original and quite distant from those exploited by other—more famous—writers such as Sciascia.

Living in an Age of Terrorism: The Fictionalization of Facts in the Sarti Series In the Sarti Antonio series, Loriano Macchiavelli exploits two different systems to represent the Years of Lead. The first strategy is certainly the predominant one: a fictional traumatic event, strictly connected to the real atmosphere of terrorism and movements of protest, is located at the core of the story. In this case, the writer succeeds in pinpointing the context and the atmosphere of tension of those years, while avoiding any explicit mention of real historical events. The first novel, Le piste dell’attentato, epitomizes this mechanism. As Luca Somigli (139) has remarked, the novel’s title immediately evokes the context of the series of bombing attacks that hit Italy at the beginning of the 1970s: the trails of the attack—as the title might be translated—already make clear the intention of establishing a tight connection with the historical events of those years rather than treating generic urban crimes related to prostitution or the drug trade as other Italian crime fiction writers did at that time: Macchiavelli is one of the first writers “to have perceived and exploited the narrative potentials of Italian political and criminal history” (Milanesi 196).11 Set in Bologna, at the end of July during the first half of the 1970s, the impetus of the novel is marked by the sound of an explosion coming from the hills around the city that pierces the air: a bombing attack has just destroyed a radio station of the Italian Army located on the top of the di Paderno hill, killing four soldiers. All the police cars are called to the southern part of the town to set up checkpoints. Among them there is the car carrying our protagonist, Sergeant Sarti Antonio.

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The bombing attack at the army radio station on the hill constitutes an interplay between mimesis and reality that is undoubtedly central to the way the strategia della tensione is depicted in the Sarti Antonio series: realistic events such as bombing attacks, political murders and scenes of protest are daily occurrences in Sarti’s investigations, but they are usually invented facts without a specific historical correspondence. The questurino’s enquiries rarely focus on true crimes, which are the source of inspiration for Macchiavelli’s fiction, but undergo a transformation which makes it difficult to distinguish the real and fictional. In the 1976 novel Sui colli all’alba [Upon the Hills at Dawn], for example, a young rich farmer, Costantino de’ Chiari, is kidnapped—or so it seems—by an obscure group of left-wing terrorists carrying weapons and bombs, a plot that is meant to allude to events that were happening in this period, as new groups participating in the armed struggle started to proliferate. However, the kidnapping is revealed to have been organized by the lawyer (and friend) of de’ Chiari, who disseminated clues trying to frame the crime in a revolutionary and political angle and thus to divert the suspicions of the police. The same applies to the 1976 novel Ombre sotto i portici [Shadows under the Porticoes], whose plot revolves around the adventures of four students who participate in the meetings at Teatro Sanleonardo to talk about politics: because of their political affiliation, they are accused of having killed an old woman in her own ex-casino, located near the theatre. Such a practice is at the core of Macchiavelli’s ‘counter-narrative’ strategy: focusing on a fictional yet plausible event, the structure of the investigation replicates what really happened, as journalistic investigations exposed the responsibility of right-wing groups in criminal events, only after the government had initially blamed left-wing extra-parliamentary groups. In Sarti’s stories, Chief Inspector Raimondi Cesare is the symbol of official power, seeking to implicate any left-wing member he can find at the crime scene. But, by the close of the enquiry, two recurring endings are usually proposed: either the crime is committed for private reasons (Ombre sotto i portici; Sui colli all’alba), or Sarti discovers a political conspiracy enacted by ambiguous mercenaries (Le piste dell’attentato) or members of the secret services (Stop per Sarti Antonio). Such a narrative strategy is very common in the Sarti Antonio series, and it undoubtedly constitutes a fictional equivalence to the conspiracy theories that were formulated in that period about important events such as the Piazza Fontana massacre.

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In addition to his preference for fictionalizing actual events, Macchiavelli also uses facts and real life people and incidents to allude to these larger historical events, in order to draw out their wider implications. This approach was rarely adopted in the series before the return of the character in the mid-1990s, except in Ombre sotto i portici, where the reader finds an allusion to the bombing at Piazza Loggia, in Brescia. Sarti is called to face a protest that has broken out in the streets of Bologna: “they put the bomb thrower in his hand, they lower the helmet with the plastic visor on his head, they hang a backpack full of tear gas from his neck and they put him in a bus” (Macchiavelli 2003: 118–119). The following day, news of the bombing attack in Piazza Loggia (a real bombing attack occurred in Brescia in 1974) somehow overshadows another related event which has occurred in Bologna; after a few days, the status quo is soon restored, and the first-person narrator, as a sort of alter-ego of the author himself, comments: How could anyone think that everything would go back to the way it was? And in fact, for a while, it doesn’t go back to the way it was: in the bars there is talk of an attack, of fascism. Someone is even outraged. For a while … Then back to watching the smiling dummies of Carosello [a very popular show on Italian television], to talk about the World Cup in Monaco. Sarti Antonio, sergeant, has his bomb thrower removed from his hand, his helmet with its plastic visor removed, his backpack full of tear gas removed from his neck and thrown back into car 28 to deal with the murder of Mrs Imelde Scampini, in her eighties, as if nothing had happened. And Sarti Antonio, sergeant, has no choice but to dry his eyes, damp from the gas, and pick up where he left off a few days earlier. To be at peace with his conscience as a policeman. (2003: 120)

The passivity of Sarti, who apparently has no choice, conceived as an inanimate object in the middle of the protest after receiving his anti-riot equipment and then being undressed and having his clothes thrown back on in the police car, the auto 28, poses serious questions about the individual responsibility of the sergeant. Sarti “as if nothing had happened […] pick[s] up where he left off”: the policeman shows an inability to understand—and, consequently, to deal with—a major event that hit an entire nation. He does not question the orders he receives, he just acts, like a robot, avoiding any kind of questions or reflections on what he is doing. On the contrary, when he is called to face a particular case, he is perseverant, and does not give up until the case is solved: Imelde Scampini’s

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murder will not be forgotten, and Sarti continues to investigate. In this sense, the case of Ombre sotto i portici highlights this particular feature of Sarti Antonio, a characteristic that Carlo Lucarelli’s Commissario De Luca—acting during the Fascist period—will replicate: Sarti refuses to deal with History, but, at the same time, he seems to be a ‘good’ policeman, empathetic and honest. Macchiavelli’s questurino succeeds in giving visibility and dignity to micro-stories, which become as important as History. The fact that Sarti dies in the very moment History penetrates in fiction is relevant: he is killed while investigating a series of murders related to the Bologna railway station massacre (1980), the most devastating terrorist action of the anni di piombo. According to Luigi Bernardi, the Bologna massacre and the brutal murder of art critic and academic Francesca Alinovi in 1983 (as well as the other so-called murders of the DAMS12), which received wide media attention on a national level, were two of the events that caused a sort of crisis in Macchiavelli’s writing. As Bernardi explained in his Macchie di rosso. Bologna avanti e oltre il delitto Alinovi [Bologna before and after the Alinovi Murder], these two crimes marked a point of no return in Bologna’s contemporary history: In the history of Bologna, there is a before and an after the Alinovi murder; that homicide is the radiography of a fracture. Just less than three years before that murder, Bologna had been shaken by quite another deflagration, the bombing at the railway station. The city was stunned, her reflexes slackened, her impulses dampened, perhaps even her desires. In that foggy, albeit tense, atmosphere, someone had shifted into an extra gear, had begun to advance at a pace that Bologna had not yet mastered. […] Francesca Alinovi was looking for different perspectives. […] In this sense, the new Bologna, the one which born as a result of the rail station bombing and other massacres, has in the Alinovi crime its official date of birth. (2002: 10–11)

The third event that caused the disaffection of the author for his character was Aldo Moro’s kidnapping and execution at the hands of the Red Brigades in 1978, which threatened the writer’s overall approach to the representation of political events and by implication the political limits of the traditional crime or giallo form: […] Macchiavelli’s intent is, consistently, to deny the anarchist or red matrix of attacks and murders, indicating neo-fascists or organized crime as the actual culprit. The assault on the heart of the state evidently no longer

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allowed for an argument such as this; at the same time, the classical structures of the giallo (which Sciascia, in fact, approached through parody) became inadequate: [Sarti’s] trust in the efficacy of reason and justice now prove insufficient. This is also why from giallo crime writers move to noir: noir’s unstable structure and dark atmosphere appear to be the forms of a crisis of reason. (Donnarumma 338)

Simultaneously, true crime suddenly became the primary subject of Macchiavelli’s fiction, starting in 1987 with the novel Stop per Sarti Antonio [A Stop for Sarti Antonio]. Here, for the first time, the questurino has to deal with real events, which he does not survive: he is killed by a fake American CIA agent because he discovers a connection between the bombing at the railway station and the Alinovi murder. As such, Sarti’s death has an important symbolic meaning: his character, a simple sergeant, was no longer deemed to be sufficiently insightful to give a full account of Bologna and of the social and political changes that were upsetting the city. At the same time, Macchiavelli’s decision to kill off his character reflects the almost insurmountable challenges of using the style and format of the Sarti series to properly interrogate the new Italian society that was emerging from the ashes of the Years of Lead. This is why Macchiavelli created characters such as Jules Quicher and Benedetto Santovito, who come across almost as superheroes (at least in relation to Sarti): characters who can see and do more to combat a further deteriorating situation. Perhaps uncoincidentally, Sarti’s first resurrection in the 1995 novel Coscienza sporca is marked by a heavy atmosphere of distrust and suspicion introduced by the crimes perpetrated by the ‘gang of the white Uno’, a group of criminals using a particular car—a Fiat Uno—to commit a series of bloody robberies in Bologna and in the entire region of Emilia-Romagna between 1987 and 1994, and which comprised five policemen. Starting with this novel, Sarti seems even more disappointed and embittered about what is happening in Bologna. Nevertheless, he is still determined to solve mysteries: he seems even smarter, depending less on others’ advice. If Sarti died for his passivity and indifference to political power and the social situation, Macchiavelli’s questurino is brought back to life for his most positive qualities: his honesty and good heart. Raimondi’s orders are called into question; Sarti keeps on investigating even without his permission. From this perspective, Sarti becomes the symbol of an opposition, of that counter that is at the core of Macchiavelli’s writing: he remains as a positive example against the general trend of corruption.

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On the one hand, the events of the anni di piombo are rarely mentioned in this second phase in Sarti’s series (1995–2022): in these novels, the dulling sensation caused by those years is symbolized by the constant presence of fog that lingers in the city streets, while the plots mainly focus on the return of the repressed, as represented by the dark pages of the fascist epoch. The very last references to the events of the anni di piombo are made in the 2019 novel Delitti senza castigo [Crimes without Punishment] through the form of a catalogue, at a rapid and vertiginous pace that reads like an epitaph: The bell of the tower does not play anymore to call the people to the square on the occasion of tragic events and, perhaps, to discuss how to overcome them. It hasn’t played for few centuries. ‘It should play every day,’ mumbles the questurino. Is he thinking of the Italicus? Of Ustica? Of August 2 [the bombing at the railway station]? Of Francesco Lorusso [a Bologna student killed by the police during violent clashes in 1977]? Of the gang of the white Uno? (91)

On the other hand, Sarti is called to deal with the real events of the present, such as the Uno Bianca gang and the consequences of the L’Aquila earthquake in 2009  in the novel L’ironia della scimmia [The Monkey’s Irony, 2012]: from now on, he faces the major events of History with a certain savoir faire.

Unconventional Characters: The Importance of Irony Irony plays a key role in Macchiavelli’s counter-narrative of the Years of Lead. It is also worth noting that this strategy is targeted at high-up characters such as the Chief Inspector, Raimondi Cesare, a symbol of the master narrative of police/state authority that Macchiavelli is constantly (and ironically) seeking to undermine, as well as Sarti Antonio himself. The protagonist of the series, in fact, could be defined as an inept character and, therefore, as a parody of the traditional detective figure. I have already shown Sarti’s passivity in Ombre sotto i portici, where he is treated like an inanimate object. But Sarti’s most peculiar trait is that he suffers from colitis, and this leads to several ridiculous situations. For example, in Le Piste dell’attentato, he almost fails to get to the checkpoint on time because of an attack of colitis that strikes him just before his call.

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Macchiavelli’s parodic style indeed characterizes his whole first novel. The writer creates implausible and stereotyped characters, makes sarcastic use of military language—that is, the police rank always reported after the character’s name and surname, as in Sarti Antonio—and employs a first-­ person narrator to underline the comic aspects of the situations with ironic comments (cf. Wilson 2007). An example of this ironic tone is found in the very first pages of Le Piste dell’attentato. While Sarti Antonio and his colleague Felice Cantoni are stationed at a checkpoint, a car breaks through the roadblock, and Sarti calls for reinforcements and starts the pursuit. The car they are chasing runs off the road, and three presumed terrorists are taken to a hospital under close police surveillance. Chief Inspector Raimondi has no doubts about their guilt because of their affiliation to an extra-parliamentary left-wing group (Macchiavelli 2004: 13). But the policemen soon find out that the three suspects declare they were running away from the checkpoint because they thought a prostitute had sued them for not paying her. Another parodic situation occurs in the short story Girando attorno alla P38. Dissertazioni inconcludenti fra il sottoscritto e Sarti Antonio [Turning around the P38. Inconclusive Dissertations between myself and Sarti Antonio] (1985).13 Macchiavelli imagines Sarti Antonio being stalked on the phone by a man who threatens to wait outside of his house in order to kneecap him. Yet, Sarti’s situation is transformed in a surreal gag, where the questurino continues to talk with the man on the phone, wondering why he has been chosen as a victim—after all, he is nothing but a questurino di merda [fucking cop]: “they have always shot people that matter: journalists, judges, shop stewards, generals...If they have come to Sarti Antonio, sergeant, that means that they are in sharp decline” (Macchiavelli 2020: 118). Finally, he appeals to his colitis to try to get out of the situation: ‘The colitis: that’s all I needed! And I can’t call the doctor. Yes, I can. Even in war time the doctors, the nurses, the [Italian] Red Cross, the Geneva Convention…’. He is more than determined to resolve the situation, but the answer he receives at the phone melts his decision like snow in the sun. ‘I am ill…the colitis. I do know my rights, you can’t let me suffer like this. The Geneva Convention…’. He is freaking out. ‘There is a pharmacy at the corner of your street’. ‘And you won’t shoot me? Do I have your word?’. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Sooner or later we will shoot you anyway’. (120)

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Sarti’s medical condition makes him a disempowered detective, quite different from the models of strong, assertive characters that dominate the crime genre. Furthermore, Sarti is not just inept, he is also incapable of logical deduction: without the help of his surprising collaborator, the anarchist Rosas, he would never be able to deconstruct the crimes he is assigned to solve. In this sense, he is best understood as an anti-hero, as Loriano Macchiavelli himself has stated (24 May 2021): a colitic, ridiculous and almost dull detective. Nevertheless, this does not mean that Sarti is a negative character; rather, he usually ignores the orders of his chief Raimondi, and instead he pursues his investigations until he succeeds. Knowing his limits, he prefers to pay Rosas to help him rather than giving up on the investigations. Rosas is known to the police for his activities as a member of an extra-parliamentary left-wing group, and insofar as he plays a full part in Sarti’s investigations, Macchiavelli self-consciously draws our attention to political biases and the inherent untruthfulness of the official police line. Yet, Rosas’ version of the facts is not completely reliable and disinterested either, as he gives information only in return for something—money, food or even a place to stay. He rarely helps Sarti without any inducement. From this perspective, Rosas might be considered an unreliable character: a Sherlock Holmes figure because of his intuition and logical intelligence but also a mercenary one interested first and foremost in what he can earn for himself. This portrait is softened in the second phase of the Sarti novels when he works as a researcher in Ancient History at the University of Bologna, serving as a kind of guardian and a voice of subaltern history (i.e. Uno sterminio di stelle, 2017; L’ironia della scimmia, 2012), but in the first period he is a rather more ambiguous character. Sometimes he also disappears instead of giving help to Sarti: in Stop per Sarti Antonio, for example, he might know that Sarti is going to get in serious trouble but does not stop or prevent him; in Sarti Antonio: un diavolo per capello [Sarti Antonio: a bee in the bonnet, 1980] and in Cos’è accaduto alla signora per bene? [What happened to the Respectable Woman?, 1979], Rosas avoids helping Sarti because he does not want the policemen to discover the real offender. In fact, it seems that Macchiavelli is not as interested in resolving the mystery of his stories as in making the reader hesitant and uncomfortable: to raise questions and not to provide clear-cut answers; to give us main characters who are either inept or self-interested; to show that justice is rarely if ever delivered by the police; or to offer different culprits without identifying which one has committed the crime. As

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Macchiavelli puts it, it is impossible to restore harmony after murder: “a murder will always remain a murder, a disturbed balance that cannot be re-established even when the culprit is arrested and punished” (24 May 2021).

Towards the Years of Noir All the examples presented in this chapter have emphasized the originality of Loriano Macchiavelli’s crime fiction in representing the Years of Lead. On the one hand, the strategies adopted in Le Piste dell’attentato, Ombre sotto i portici and Sui colli all’alba epitomize the verisimilitude pursued in and by the first novels in the Sarti Antonio series: these plots, based on thinly fictionalized accounts of terror bombings and political murders, reflect the febrile atmosphere of the Years of Lead, marked most predominantly by state paranoia about left-wing radicalism. In these novels, Macchiavelli’s purpose is not so much to present a counter-history of real events as to question the general attitude of that time and try to build alternative narratives so as to counter institutional truths. Sarti and Rosas show a different, critical attitude that refuses the official version of the facts, which is often influenced by political reasons rather than real events. This is the core of Macchiavelli’s noir poetics: to be counter, or against, the status quo, whatever it is: I think that noir genre noir has to be disturbing, it has to disturb official literature, readers, and most importantly, it has to disturb the cranks. In short, the noir genre is against. I understand it that way. […] it is an attitude towards the culture of our society, towards the official culture, completely of opposition. (Interview with the author, 24 May 2021)

The second part of Sarti’s series, from the early 1990s, marks a further transformation or development in Macchiavelli’s style and politics: as a consequence of dramatic events such as the bomb attack in Bologna, Macchiavelli made a more conscious effort to bring ‘real’ events into his fiction (rather than attempt to thinly fictionalize them, as in his earlier novels). In Stop per Sarti Antonio, the questurino dies while investigating the Bologna massacre and, after his resurrection in 1995, continues to investigate ‘real’ crimes, though always with the intent of drawing attention to the presence of counter-histories and counter-narratives that reveal the falsities and limits of the official version of events. This is the reason for

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the increasing impegno in Macchiavelli’s work: parody, dark humour and mystery can only take us so far, and to supplement or augment these elements, he gives us the details of history. Just as Sarti becomes more independent in his enquiries, his collaborator Rosas assumes the role of archivist of a collective—but lost—past. These features of Macchiavelli’s crime fiction have been a source of inspiration for several authors of the following generation: at the beginning of the 1990s, Macchiavelli founded the Gruppo 13, composed, among others, of Pino Cacucci, Marcello Fois and Carlo Lucarelli. The group was deeply inspired by the kind of political impegno that Macchiavelli had pursued throughout his career. Indeed, many of Macchiavelli’s narrative strategies, such as the use of parody and inept characters, were adopted by Carlo Lucarelli, helping him to become one of the most successful contemporary Italian crime writers. His novels about Commissioner De Luca, set in the Fascist period, are strongly influenced by Macchiavelli’s poetics, while his literary and TV series devoted to Inspector Coliandro, an anti-hero policeman working at the questura of Bologna, are an obvious homage to Sarti Antonio. In fact, it is possible to say that the kinds of counter-narratives first explored by Macchiavelli have now become a crucial device of Italian contemporary noir. Acknowledgement  The research presented here has been financed by the research project DETECt: Detecting Transcultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives (Horizon 2020, 2018–2021) (Grant agreement number 770151).

Notes 1. All translations by the author, unless otherwise stated. 2. This short introduction to the Years of Lead is inevitably an excessively simplified but also necessary summary of some key aspects that characterized this complex historical period. For a deeper examination of this era, cf. in particular: Silj (1994), Oliva (2019) and Deaglio (2009). 3. https://www.loriano-­macchiavelli.it/biografia/quarta-­di-­copertina/. 4. Questura is the central police station, so questurino indicates the policemen based on these premises and most often assigned to bureaucratic work. 5. Even if these two series will not be commented on here, it is quite important to mention them: the Years of Lead are also represented in the second novel of the Jules Quicher saga, Strage [Massacre, 1990] and in the third volume of the Benedetto Santovito series, Questo sangue che impasta la terra [This Blood Kneading the Earth, 2001]. In these works, Macchiavelli

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employs different strategies than in the Sarti series to evoke the Years of Lead, which is the reason why I will not analyse them here, as much more space would be required to examine them properly. 6. Cf. the catalogue of novels concerning the theme of Italian terrorism during the Years of Lead made by Raffaele Donnarumma annexed to his article (2010). 7. Jules Quicher investigates crimes such as the bombing attack that occurred at the Bologna railway station on 2 August 1980 and the Ustica massacre (the crash of a civil aircraft between the islands of Ponza and Ustica, probably as a result of a bomb attack on 27 June 1980). 8. In Italy, there has been a disagreement about the use of the terms giallo (yellow) and noir to distinguish the different sub-genres of crime fiction. If noir derives from the American hard-boiled school, giallo (after the yellow covers employed by the publisher Mondadori for his crime collection in the 1920s) is used as a synonym for both crime fiction and detective fiction. In the case of Macchiavelli, the situation is complicated: the stories focused on Sarti Antonio have often been described as gialli, but on many occasions the writer has affirmed that he prefers the term noir, including in a recent interview with the author (24 May 2021). 9. See also: Conti (2013), Vitello (2013) and Simonetti (2011). 10. Television and cinema have been particularly sensitive to the topic. Cf.: Antonello and O’Leary (2009); O’Leary (2007); Uva (2007). 11. See also Carloni and Pirani (2020: 5): “Macchiavelli’s crime fiction proves to be provocative from the very beginning and, compared to each known model, absolutely anomalous. It is, as they say, a ‘committed’ detective story, because the investigation of crime is always an investigation into the social and political matrixes from which it originates”. 12. ‘I delitti del DAMS’ (the murders of DAMS) is an expression indicating a series of three unsolved murders that occurred between 1982 and 1983. The victims, Angelo Fabbri, Francesca Alinovi and Leonarda Polvani, were two researchers and one student of a well-known arts programme (called DAMS), offered by the University of Bologna. Because of this, one of the hypotheses circulating at the time was that of a serial killer hunting the members of the faculty. 13. The Walther P38 pistol became one of the most iconic symbols of the Years of Lead as it was used by left-wing militants in armed actions as well as during street demonstrations.

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Works Cited Antonello, Pierpaolo and Alan O’Leary, editors. 2009. Imaging Terrorism: The Rhetoric and Representation of Political Violence in Italy 1969–2009. Legenda: MHRA and Routledge. Alberti, Paola. 2019. Uno studio in giallo. Indagine sul poliziesco. Pisa: ETS. Bernardi, Luigi. 2002. Macchie di rosso. Bologna avanti e oltre il delitto Alinovi. Arezzo: Editrice Zona. Beverly Allen. 1997. ‘They’re not children anymore: The novelization of ‘Italians’ and ‘Terrorism”. In Revisioning Italy: National Identity and Global Culture. Editors, B.  Allen and M.  Russo. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Carloni, Massimo. 1994. L’Italia in giallo. Geografia e storia del giallo italiano contemporaneo. Reggio Emilia: Edizioni Diabasis. Carloni, Massimo and Cesare Pirani. 2020. ‘Introduzione’. In 33 indagini per Sarti Antonio. Loriano Macchiavelli Milano: SEM. 5–10. Conti, Ermanno. 2013. Gli anni di piombo nella letteratura italiana. Ravenna: Longo editore. Crovi, Luca. 2020. Storia del giallo italiano. Venezia: Marsilio. Deaglio, Enrico. 2009. Patria 1978–2008. Milano: il Saggiatore. Donnarumma, Raffaele. 2010. ‘Storia, immaginario, letteratura: il terrorismo nella narrativa italiana (1969–2010)’. In Per Romano Luperini. Editor, P.  Cataldi. Palermo: Palumbo. 439–465. Eco, Umberto. 2009. La vertigine della lista. Milano: Bompiani. Guagnini, Elvio. 2010. Dal giallo al noir e oltre. Declinazioni del giallo italiano. Latina: Ghenomena. Macchiavelli, Loriano. 2004. Le Piste dell’attentato [1974]. Torino: Einaudi. ———. 2003. Ombre sotto i portici [1976]. Torino: Einaudi. ———. 2020. ‘Girando attorno alla P38. Dissertazioni inconcludenti fra il sottoscritto e Sarti Antonio’ [1985]. In 33 indagini per Sarti Antonio. Milano: SEM, 2020. 114–123. ———. 2010. Strage [1990]. Torino: Einaudi. ———. 2012. L’ironia della scimmia. Milano: Mondadori. ———. 2019. Delitti senza castigo. Torino: Einaudi. ———. 1995. Coscienza sporca. Milano: Mondadori. ———. 2022. La stagione del pipistrello. Milano: Mondadori. ———. 2001. Questo sangue che impasta la terra. Milano: Mondadori. Macchiavelli, Loriano and Magnus. 2006. Sarti Antonio e il malato immaginario. Palermo: Dario Flaccovio. Manai, Franco. 2004. ‘Loriano Macchiavelli and the Italian Detective Fiction Novel of the 1970s’. In The Value of Literature in and after the Seventies: The

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Case of Italy and Portugal. Editors, M. Jansen and P. Jordao. Utrecht: Igitur Utrecht Publishing & Archiving. 660–674. Milanesi, Claudio. 2010. ‘Il Giallo italiano contemporaneo’. In Splendori e misteri del romanzo poliziesco. Editors, A. Castoldi, F. Fiorentino and G. Santangelo. Milano: Bruno Mondadori. 193–201. Mondello, Elisabetta. 2010. Crimini e misfatti. La narrativa noir italiana degli anni Duemila. Roma: Giulio Perrone editore. O’Leary, Alan. 2007. Tragedia all’italiana. Cinema e terrorismo tra Moro e memoria. Tissi: Angelica. Oliva, Carlo. 2003. Storia sociale del giallo. Lugano: Todaro. Oliva, Gianni. 2019. Anni di piombo e di tritolo 1969–1980. Il terrorismo nero e il terrorismo rosso da piazza Fontana alla strage di Bologna. Milano: Mondadori. Paolin, Demetrio. 2008. Una tragedia negata. Il racconto degli anni di piombo nella narrativa italiana. Nuoro: Il Maestrale. Pezzotti, Barbara. 2014. ‘Loriano Macchiavelli’. In Politics and Society in Italian Crime Fiction. An Historical Overview. Jefferson: McFarland & Company. 94–112. ———. 2016. ‘The Giallo and Terrorism: the Years of Lead and the Conspiracy Theory’. In Investigating Italy’s Past through Historical Crime Fiction, Films and Tv Series. Murder in the Age of Chaos. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. 169–235. Silj, Alessandro. 1994. Malpaese. Criminalità, corruzione e politica nell’Italia della prima Repubblica 1943–1994. Roma: Donzelli editore. Simonetti, Gianluigi. 2011. ‘Nostalgia dell’azione. La fortuna della lotta armata nella narrativa italiana degli anni Zero’. Allegoria. 64:2. 97–124. Somigli, Luca. 2010. ‘Storia e cronaca nella narrativa di Loriano Macchiavelli’. In Memoria in noir: un’indagine pluridisciplinare. Editors, M.  Jansen and Y. Khamal. Brussels: Peter Lang. 137–146. Uva, Christian. 2007. Schermi di piombo. Il terrorismo nel cinema italiano. Soveria Mannelli: Rubettino. Vitello, Gabriele. 2013. L’album di famiglia. Gli anni di piombo nella narrativa italiana. Massa: Transeuropa. Wilson, Robert. 2007. ‘Narrative Innovation in Loriano Macchiavelli’s Sarti Antonio Stories’. Romance Studies, 25:4. 309–321.

CHAPTER 9

Didier Daeninckx, Le roman noir de l’Histoire (2019): Dismantling the Tale of French History through Disseminated Micro-Histories Alice Jacquelin

After the failure of the demonstrations and the aborted cultural revolution of May 1968 in France, many left-wing activists turned to writing political crime novels (Collovald and Neveu 77). Daeninckx’s detective novels are part of this tradition of left-wing neo-polar initiated in the 1970s: “After 1968, Jean-Patrick Manchette had inaugurated the neo-polar or polar d’intervention sociale, and this tradition was continued by, among others, Didier Daeninckx, Frédéric Fajardie, Jean-Claude Izzo, Sébastien Japrisot, Thierry Jonquet, Jean-Bernard Pouy, and Jean-François Vilar” (Forsdick 337). Didier Daeninckx is the author of a series of noir novels—the series of Inspector Cadin—whose most famous investigation, Meurtres pour mémoire (“Murder in Memoriam”), was published in the Série Noire in

A. Jacquelin (*) Université Paris Nanterre, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Dall’Asta et al. (eds.), Contemporary European Crime Fiction, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21979-5_9

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1984. In this novel, Daeninckx denounces, through a double police and historical investigation, both the bloody repression of the FLN demonstration of 17 October 19611 and the French collaboration of 1940: “Didier Daeninckx occupies an important place in the heart of the French noir genre, consolidated by a good number of novels and short stories. Most of his works are situated at the intersection of History and politics, taking as subjects the sensitive moments of French History: the Second World War, colonization, etc” (Belhadjin 64). In the detective novels of the Inspector Cadin series, but also in the stand-alone novels such as La mort n’oublie personne (1989), Cannibale (1998) and Le Retour d’Ataï (2002), Didier Daeninckx endeavours to reveal state exactions, to reactivate memorial traumas and to restore the shortcomings of the roman national (“national tale”). Unveiling the secrets of the past is at the heart of Daeninckx’s literary approach, whether it is thanks to the police, or a journalistic or historical investigation. In addition to his detective novels, Daeninckx wrote numerous historical novels and short stories. This novelistic production moves between the historical archive, the particular story and the dismantling of the official narrative: this literary practice allows Dominique Viart to classify Daeninckx’s work in the category of the “archaeological novel2” (12). From 1989 to 2019, Daeninckx has written no fewer than 18 collections of short stories, nine of which have been published by Verdier, a publishing house known for its experimental and avant-garde texts. His latest work Le roman noir de l’Histoire, published in 2019, is the last and undoubtedly the most imposing of these books, since it is a collection of 77 short stories written over the years, collected and republished according to a new structure. In this short story collection, Daeninckx seems to find an ideal literary form: the very form of History itself, broken up and fragmented into a multitude of micro-narratives. From one macro-­ narrative to multiple micro-narratives, Daeninckx has shifted from being a “raconteur of History” (Reid 2010) to a storyteller. Between a short story collection and a novel, how can we understand the formal contradiction contained in the very title of the book? In what way does this assembly and chronological montage of short stories constitute a noir novel? This chapter shows how the journalistic counter-investigation carried out in the course of the short stories allows Didier Daeninckx to denounce the abuses committed by the French state, bringing this collection closer to a historical crime novel. In doing so, the author reconstructs a new fragmented History, moving away from the narrative form of the great

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national tale. For the first time, he proceeds to a remontage of short stories and facts that navigates between factual and fictional. Undermining the French national narrative, Daeninckx thus relies on a “political memory” to rewrite a History which is more broadly part of a History of European internationalist lefts in resistance against state oppression.

Noir Novel, Crime Fiction and Journalistic Counter-Inquiry The programmatic title of the book, Le roman noir de l’Histoire (“The Noir Novel of History”), contains several ambiguities. First, the announced novelistic dimension is contradicted by the multitude of stories and profusion of characters within the book. The double reference to the novel and to History in the same expression also evokes, in the case of Daeninckx, the concept of roman national (“national tale”). Even more than medieval hagiography, the French national tale assumed a linear, patriotic, teleological reading of History with the aim of justifying the nation-state as it was constructed in France under the Third Republic (in particular through the textbooks of the historian Ernest Lavisse). As for the term roman noir (“noir novel”), it obviously contains a reference to the detective story that emerged from the American noir novel: the hardboiled stories.3 Therefore, how can we understand this reference to the noir novel in the context of a collection of short stories that do not necessarily describe a criminal action or a real police investigation? What crime(s) do these short stories investigate? If the crime novel is meant to restore the social order that has been damaged by the occurrence of crime, what “order” does Didier Daeninckx seek to reinstate in his book Le roman noir de l’Histoire? Some of the events recounted seem to involve trivial news items (fait divers) more than proper historical facts. Daeninckx’s short stories often begin with an apparently minor, negligible or anecdotal fact. For example, the short story Yvonne, la Madone de la Plaine (“Yvonne, Madonna of the Plaine”) begins with the death of a woman named Yvonne in a road accident at the Plaine Saint-Denis, a popular suburb to the north of Paris. The intradiegetic narrator is a local journalist who is sent to the Plaine Saint-­ Denis to do a micro-trottoir (“street interview”) on the rigours of winter. The narrator quickly shifts his focus from this assignment to investigate the life of Yvonne, nicknamed La Madone (“Madonna”). Although Yvonne has lived in Saint-Denis for more than ten years, no one seems to

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know her story. The journalist moves from testimony to testimony—from the local bistro owner to the parish abbot and to a homeless man famous in the neighborhood—but without learning more about Yvonne. No one knows about Yvonne’s origins and “the mystery is all the thicker” (Daeninckx 2019: 491). The mystery at the origin of the traditional detective novel is here diverted to the benefit of the biographical investigation which also works backward, in search of the traces of the past: It is perhaps the archetypal narrative structures of detective fiction—and the explicitly teleological unfolding of events on which these depend—that lend themselves to such historical explorations. Such a narrative paradigm reflects, as the initial mystery is solved and the criminal brought to justice, a shift from ignorance to knowledge, opacity to transparency, darkness to light. And associated to these is another structural device and recurrent figure: that of uncovering the past. (Fordsick 337–338)

In the course of the story Yvonne, La Madone de la Plaine, the narrator draws a portrait of this poor and anonymous woman who died suddenly, as well as a portrait of the Parisian department of Seine-Saint-Denis during the 1980s. The journalist’s journey takes him from the subway station Porte de la Chapelle in Paris to the Basilica of Saint-Denis and to the gasometers of Aubervilliers, another city in the North Parisian suburbs. This short story is representative of Daeninckx’s approach and of the posture of local journalist that he adopts in many of the short stories of the collection, as he explained in an interview: My experience as a local journalist was quite useful, even essential. From 1977 to 1982, I had made investigations, I had written hundreds of articles on the most diverse and prosaic subjects. So, I accumulated. Being in the streets, following the fait divers, fascinated me. On the most everyday facts that seem unimportant, one must always find an angle that allows one to say that this story is worth telling.4 (Collovald 11–12)

The short stories that make up the collection are thus similar to journalistic briefs enriched with fictional details and put back into their historical context to reveal their deep meaning. Véronique Desnain, who has been interested in the relationship between neo-polar authors and the fait divers—and in particular through the analysis of texts by Dominique Manotti and Didier Daeninckx—writes:

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Our authors, using this journalistic ‘brief’ as a starting point, emphasize the place of the anonymous individual in a story more traditionally considered from its event-based angle, while making the case that the news story is ultimately a truncated, manipulated, and misleading narrative, which actually conceals the real issues raised by the facts evoked.5 (Desnain 11)

In Manotti’s and Daeninckx’s literary works, the starting point of the fait divers is used as a pretext to explore a broader historical context and a corrupt political system: “In this text, the crime against the individual (the fait divers therefore) is only a pretext for the unveiling of crimes against humanity. Similarly, the crime perpetrated by the individual is only a symptom of the failure of a whole society […]6” (Desnain 4). The case of Yvonne is not isolated: in another short story, Fatima pour mémoire (“Fatima for the Record”), Daeninckx demonstrates that the pseudo-­ suicide of a young Algerian woman in 1961 actually masks the bloody police repression of an FLN demonstration during which Fatima was killed. Daeninckx’s narrative technique, which works by linking historical events separated in History and time, through crime fiction, is doubled in this book: if the temporal strata can be confronted at the level of the short story, the jolts of a criminal History are replayed between the short stories at the level of the overall organization of the book. The short stories respond to each other as if by echoes; memories overlap, narrative and historical threads are connected, “for in Daeninckx’s fictional universe, memories […] are generated and circulate in symbiosis with crimes from other distinct historical periods” (Gorrara 76). Some of the stories in the collection Le roman noir de l’Histoire aim to obtain justice and reparation for the crimes perpetrated in the name of the French state—the deportation of the Communards after 1871, the summary trials of Tonkinese immigrants in New Caledonia during the colonization, the forced conscription of Kanaks to the front line during the First World War, the bloody repression of Algerians in 1961, the deportation of Tunisian and Algerian immigrants who fought for France, and so on. In this sense, Le roman noir de l’Histoire follows the path of previous novels such as La Mort n’oublie personne (1989) which rehabilitated the figure of a resistance fighter tried for murder after the Second World War, or the Kanak novels Cannibale (1998) and Le Retour d’Ataï which denounced the ill treatment of the Kanak people by the French state. The short stories in this collection thus make explicit, through the recurrence of processes, the guilt of the French state in the application of these authoritarian and

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imperialist policies: “[…] fiction thus makes it possible to relate events separated in time and space in order to reveal their true scope, the way in which they are linked in a system which, although invisible, is no less allpowerful” (Desnain 6). The final aim of this Daeninckxian literary enterprise is to offer multiple counter-narratives in order to reorganize collective memory. By filing the gaps of collective memory, Daeninckx is actually repairing the crimes committed by the historically dominant states of the economic, imperialist and colonial North. However, other short stories do not immediately correspond to this definition of the crime short story insofar as they do not reveal hidden aspects of History and do not denounce crimes against humanity committed in the name of the French state. So what crimes do these other news stories report on? Since noir in French means both criminal—as in noir novel—and black, as in the colour, we can argue that Daeninckx is filing the blackouts of History. The biggest crime of all, according to Daeninckx, would be to forget the details and the failures of History. He is then rehabilitating anonymous figures who participated in History, but who are evacuated from the great national tale, such as the worker and prisoner Eliéser Eckert whose letters are found by a fictional narrator in Réservé à la correspondance and many others. The form of the multitude of micro-narratives, at the same time fragmented and integrated into historical time by the chronological periodization, seems to propose a new form of History that is no longer the great linear narrative of the lives of famous men and great events, but on the contrary a narrative of events that could appear infra-historical or that contradict the official version of History.

(Re)montage, millefeuille and Rejects: A New Form of Fragmented History The 77 short stories are arranged in chronological order, from a not so faraway past to a near future, from 1855 to 2030, and organized into 11 periodic chapters. Didier Daeninckx explains that his literary project consisted in “putting back in order” his previously published short stories: “I gathered a hundred of them, the result is incredible”, he says (in Boucheron 10). The device of chronological remontage clearly situates Daeninckx’s approach in a historical perspective. Each of the short stories is associated, in the table of contents, with a precise date, which allows its integration within one of the 11 periodized chapters that punctuate Le roman noir de

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l’Histoire. The titles of Le roman noir de l’Histoire’s chapters shed light on Didier Daeninckx’s intellectual and political framework: the title of the first chapter Commun. Commune. 1855–1912 echoes the communist Jean Ferrat’s song and the Paris Commune, the title of chapter 5, Morceaux d’empires. 1948–1961 (“Bits of Empires. 1948–1961”), denounces the colonialist policy of the imperialist states during the twentieth century, while chapter 8, entitled Changer de bases. 1986–1990 (“Changing Basis. 1986–1990”), refers directly to the Communist International song. The finished product thus proposes a historical fresco, from the end of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twenty-first century, through a multitude of individual stories and subjective points of view, that proposes a “multi-directional memory” (Gorrara 6) and builds an eminently committed form of History. This type of History is more interested in forgotten characters and in constructing a History of the (international) Lefts which would emancipate itself from the limits of the national History. The last short story, Les boueux de l’espace (“The Muddy Ones of Space”) is associated with the date 2030 and closes chapter 11, Troisième Millénaire. 1998–2030 (“Third Millennium. 1998–2030”) by a projection in a spatial near future. For Daeninckx, modern History begins with the premises of the Paris Commune of 1871 and ends in space. This projection makes Le roman noir de l’Histoire lean towards the site of speculative fiction. This last story describes a team of space garbage collectors in charge of cleaning space of intergalactic ships’ debris and scraps. The story allows the reader to trace the great moments of the twenty-first century. Each one of these space wrecks reveals the traces of this historical past. The team of cleaners, for example, makes a discovery that will call into question the events of September 11th 2001. Daeninckx’s storytelling observes the minute facts and the rubbish of space, shedding light on hidden sides of History. The briefness of the short story and the tragic irony of the ending allows Daeninckx to reveal the salient features of History and its feedback effects. Through this micro-narrative kaleidoscope, Daeninckx revives his training as a local journalist to tell the minuscule, the bizarre and the anecdotal while linking these to larger historical crimes. The preface by the famous French historian of the Middle Ages, Patrick Boucheron, also supports Daeninckx’s historical approach. This preface text by Boucheron, entitled L’art de la chute (“The Art of the Outcome”), illuminates the text with its famous author’s aura and with considerations on the functioning of memory and History. Boucheron here legitimizes the approach of the writer: “A short story comes to us, which informs on

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something distant, hidden, ignored, and this matt and dry crackling electrifies our present without illuminating it completely, tearing furtively the black night of History7” (Boucheron 9). The briefness of the short story form makes it possible to capture the precise moment in the form of an account, contrary to the novel, which registers a longer narrative frame. Like a photographic flash, the short story shines a spotlight on a precise moment and reveals, as if in negative, the very logic of History, which functions, for Daeninckx, by recurrences of violence and the return of collective traumas. Because of the syllepsis contained in the French word nouvelle meaning both “short story” and “news”, the short story (nouvelle) of the book can be oxymoronically qualified as anciennes nouvelles (“old news”). These short stories are indeed unactual on at least two levels: first, because they were written by Daeninckx during the last 40 years and second, because they do not constitute a chronicle of current events; they are not news items. On the contrary, they are immersed in different historical periods, which they recontextualize and relate to the present. We are far from the Mallarmean éternel reportage (“eternal news report”): “News events are like this, which attract and fix our attention on events that we believe to be ephemeral or born of circumstances, whereas they come from the depths of our society8” (Daeninckx 2019: 568). Instead, Daeninckx’s ambition is to show the persistence of historical phenomena and eventually their cyclical return. The short story Fatima pour mémoire (“Fatima for the record”), set in 1961 and echoing Daeninckx’s novel Meurtres pour mémoire, is symptomatic of this layering of historical time. In the story, Daeninckx portrays himself as a journalist-investigator revealing the tragic end of the young Fatima Bedar and other Algerian demonstrators by undergoing historical research: “These names I had found by consulting the archives of the newspapers, at the National Library or at Beaubourg9” (Daeninckx 2019: 404). The writer also collaborates with a historian, Jean-Luc Einaudi, whose investigation makes it possible to identify and name the anonymous corpse of Fatima Bedar. Whereas Fatima Bedar’s family always believed her to have committed suicide, Daeninckx reveals that she was actually killed during the FLN demonstration of 17 October 1961. The short story accumulates temporal layers: the time period of the 1960s (childhood memories of the narrator and narration of the FLN demonstration of 17 October 1961 and the assassination of Fatima Bedar), the time period of the 1980s (publication of Meurtres pour mémoire, writing an article in the Algerian press and L’Humanité and testimony of Louisa Bedar, Fatima’s

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sister) and finally the time period of the 2000s (return of Fatima’s body to Algeria following the publication of the novel, writing of a short story in Médiapart about these events and republication of the short story in the collection Le roman noir de l’Histoire). The story also accumulates textual layers: the short story we are reading (originally written for Médiapart) also includes entire passages from a previous article written by Daeninckx for L’Humanité and written extracts from Louisa Bedar’s testimony. The historical narrative is thus composed of several diverse journalistic, fictional and memorial materials assembled and cobbled together. The short story, by its briefness and its instantaneous frame, makes it possible to create a temporal millefeuille that is much closer to discontinuous historical time10 than linear narrative. Didier Daeninckx’s work has always been situated at the intersection of crime fiction, the writing of History and political literature. Many commentators have emphasized the slippage between historical fact and literary fiction that lies at the heart of Daeninckx’s literary work: Donald Reid—using a variation on the title of a collection of Daeninckx’s short stories published by Gallimard (Raconteur d’histoires)—calls this author a “Raconteur of History” in an eminently oxymoronic phrase (Reid 2010). About Meurtres pour mémoire, David Platten underlines that “this balancing-­cat between the duty of the historian to the truth and the recourse of the novelist to the imagination is palpable in the writing” (129). For Claire Gorrara, meanwhile, “[…] fictional forms can extend the scope and range of historical investigation providing source material (records of opinion, attitudes and values) that can supplement more quantitative methods” (6). I understand from these various comments that History informs Daeninckx’s literary production as much as Daeninck’s fictional work informs History, and can even compete with historical discourse. At the end of the Preface, historian Patrick Boucheron loops back to the subtle alliance between fact and fiction at the heart of Daeninckx’s writing: “[…] the fraternity he establishes between fictional imagination and historiographical operation is anything but anecdotal11” (19). As he aptly puts it: “As if History were nothing more than a set of well-­composed fictions. This hypothesis, as we understand it, is so breath-taking, that it deserves to be explored12” (10). Le roman noir de l’Histoire would thus propose a new reading of the History, fragmented and broken into a multitude of brief texts, of counter-narratives, of events a priori minor, of portraits of anonymous characters and of testimonies organized according to a committed reading of the History.

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A “political memory” to Undermine the National Tale Several critics, such as Charles Fordsick (337) and Véronique Desnain (8), have compared this Daeninckxian literary technique of attention to anonymous characters to the discipline of micro-history as practiced, for example, by Carlo Ginzburg, who focused on the life of a miller in Friuli in the sixteenth century in Le Fromage et les vers (1980), or the work of the social historian Alain Corbin in Le Monde retrouvé de Louis-François Pinagot, sur les traces d’un inconnu, 1798–1876 (1998). Desnain takes up Koenraad Geldof’s analysis of Didier Daeninckx’s use of micro-History: As Geldof points out: ‘Thus the detective story becomes a critical genealogy of modernity which, implicitly and explicitly, demystifies the myths and emblems of official History and whose main actors are those who usually do not appear in the great narratives.’ (Geldof 141)13 (Desnain 9)

The very imposing external aspect of this book, which counts more than 800 pages, suggests a linear and excessive narrative (Samoyault 1999) and not an assembly of a multitude of brief texts. Contrary to the traditional detective story or the classic historical account, the interpretation is not given here by the one who tells the story. The elucidation is not obvious, and it is up to the reader to interpret this assembly of petits faits vrais (“small true facts”) in order to understand the overall meaning of the work: the subtle and progressive dismantling of official History. The fragmented form of a multitude of micro-narratives thus proposes a new form of History which is no longer a great linear narrative (roman national) but rather a narrative of events which might appear sub-historical or in contradiction with official History. This way of debunking the national narrative by going through the small history allows Daeninckx to dwell on characters a priori perceived as minor or forgotten in History books. The characters the narrator investigates or gives a voice to are often communist or anarchist political activists, such as the communards Henry Bauër and Maxime Lisbonne, but also the journalist and communist activist John Reed, the Spanish internationalist Francisco Asensi, or Rino Della Negra of the Manouchian group and winger of the Red Star de Saint-Ouen football club, or the communist resistance fighter Émile Jansen, to name but a few. Through this gallery of

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characters, one can read Didier Daeninckx’s commitment to the Left. He paints a fresco of an anarchist and internationalist left, which extends far beyond national borders and which participates in building an alternative European History. Daeninckx brings to light events or struggles perceived as minor or forgotten in the collective memory, thus putting into practice what Anissa Belhadjin calls a form of “political memory” (Belhadjin 61). Daeninckx also celebrates the workers whose community organizations and trade union struggles helped to obtain rights for workers, such as Ginette Tiercelin, an activist in women’s sports associations during the Popular Front. Here again, the political commitment of Didier Daeninckx, who was a member of the PCF and now defines himself as a libertarian communist, to the side of an international organization of workers is perceptible. Finally, the author gives an account of anonymous people crushed by History: Thai Hoc and his compatriots from Tonkin who were executed in New Caledonia following a judicial error, and Jacques Benzara, a Jewish player of Tunisian origin of the Red Star of Saint-Ouen football club, who was deported during the Second World War. Without worrying about the nationality of his protagonists, Daeninckx denounces the injustices of history, insisting particularly on the crimes linked to the colonialism of the French state. This denunciation aims to question, more widely, the colonial History and the imperialist ambitions of European nations. It questions the very notion of “national narrative” to show its criminal sides. The literary practice of reconstructing minor trajectories allows Didier Daeninckx to propose a plurality of historical counter-narratives in order “to undermine national fictions” (Fordsick 349). My argument is that it is precisely to distance himself from a rigid and often criminal historical framework that Didier Daeninckx makes recourse to fiction. Moreover, the double-page spread at the end of the book entitled Sources clarifies this position. The “Sources” section enables the reader to determine the origin of the short stories and the format of their original publication, whether in short story collections (at diverse publishing houses such as Gallimard, Verdier, Le Cherche-Midi, Denoël, Hoëbeke, Ska éditions, Arcanes 17, Le Temps des noyaux and Parigramme), leftist newspapers and media (L’Humanité, L’Humanité Dimanche, Médiapart, Arte, and L’Équipe magazine) and even academic (Siècle 21) and institutional (Kunststiftung NRW) journals. Indeed, all the short stories have been carefully selected and gathered in the same collection and under the common theme of the writing of History. As such, this object resembles

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an anthology, bringing together pieces chosen by the author himself and his editor, with a view to collecting Daeninckx’s best short texts and reorganizing them according to a coherent reading grid. Le roman noir de l’Histoire is paradoxically made up of chronologically republished short stories, like ancient chronicles. The literary device of the “Sources” section resembles a historical approach, but the latter are solely self-referential, that is, they only refer to the author’s fictional works. In Daeninckx’s oeuvre, the collective memory and the memory of the personal work merge to become a single literary monument. There are also five unpublished short stories scattered throughout the collection: L’arbre de Dumas in chapter 1 (“Dumas’s Tree”), Le cowboy de Pétrograd in chapter 2 (“The Cowboy of Petrograd”), “No More” also in chapter 2, Les silences du patriarche in chapter 7 (“The Silences of the Patriarch”) and Le mausolée de Tsoï in chapter 8 (“The Mausoleum of Tsoi”). These five short stories, all written in the first person, are not all on the same level, since some of them feature an external narrator (in L’arbre de Dumas and Le cow-boy de Pétrograd), while others feature an autobiographical “I” referring to Didier Daeninckx as the narrator (in “No More”, Les silences du patriarche and Le mausolée de Tsoï). Les silences du patriarche, set in 1978, operates according to a regressive scheme that goes back to the childhood memories of Didier Daeninckx himself via the anaphoric device of an “I remember” repeated thirty-seven times. Also following an autobiographic structure, the short story Le mausolée de Tsoï takes place in 1990 when Didier Daeninckx was sent as a reporter to Moscow after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Four of the unpublished stories, L’arbre de Dumas (1889), Le cowboy de Pétrograd (1917), Les silences du patriarche (1978) and Le mausolée de Tsoï (1990), function as a chiasm: those of 1889 and 1978 evoking a genealogical regression and a return to the roots of various family “branches”, and the stories of 1917 and 1990 reporting on the beginning and fall of the USSR. The last unpublished short story, “No More” (1922), has a median chronological position. It shows an anonymous and almost omniscient narrator whose ethos suggests a historian’s posture by listing various “pacifist” war memorials that dot the French territory. The historical mausoleums and lieux de mémoire (“sites of memory”) (Nora 1984–1992) are scattered throughout the collection, but Daeninckx actually constructs, at the same time, a literary monument to the memory of his own work.

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Conclusion In addition to the double-page spread of Sources, the self-memorializing dimension of the book is further reinforced by an additional page at the end of the collection: a section entitled Romans de l’auteur faisant écho aux chapitres de l’ouvrage (“The author’s novels echoing the chapters of the book”). For each chronological chapter of Le roman noir de l’Histoire— grouping together several stories—the section cites a few of Daeninckx’s novels, published or not by Verdier, referring to the historical period addressed in the specific chapter. For example, the first chapter of short stories Commun, Commune. 1855–1912 echoes Daeninckx’s novel Le Banquet des Affamés, which takes place in the 1880s and 1890s, and the novel Le Retour d’Ataï, which focuses on the Kanak revolt of 1878. This bibliographic insert thus makes it possible to link the work of the short story writer to that of the novelist and thus to create a global and coherent Daeninckxian literary universe. It is astonishing to observe the constancy of the Daeninckxian literary project throughout the pages that comprise this anthology. His perspective on the writing of History seems to have almost never drifted or changed its course: the literary processes of the gallery of portraits of anonymous people who made History, the method of journalistic investigation and the re-transcription of testimonies are reiterated from one short story to the next. The autobiographical narrator sometimes becomes himself the witness of History and then becomes a reporter on a mission or a historian digging into the archives. The internal focus never imposes an omniscient vision and leaves room for interpretation by the readers. It gives an image of the author as a detective investigating his own history mingling with those of others. The blending of anonymous characters and historical figures also underlines Daeninck’s vision of History that mixes the factual and the fictional, undermining the French national tale by focusing on links between European figures and events linking the Internationalist left. Didier Daeninckx is a media and polemical figure, whose denunciatory verve and political choices have tarnished him in the eyes of many comrades in struggle. His literary activity is nonetheless as abundant as ever: from the denunciation of clientelism in the fictional town of Courvilliers—a symbol of the towns of the former communist suburbs of Paris—in his novel Artana! Artana! published by Gallimard in 2018, to this collection of historical short stories Le roman noir de l’Histoire, which proposes a

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new form of historical narrative, Didier Daeninckx’s literary practice is one that actually “does something”, as Patrick Boucheron writes. Literature, according to Daeninckx, is a combat sport that gives a right to follow up on unfinished business, that denounces collective memory and modifies the course of the present through an incisive and hard-hitting rereading of the past. For, as he had already written in the epigraph of Meurtres pour mémoire: “By forgetting the past, we condemn ourselves to relive it”. Daeninckx proposes a monument to the memory of his own work by composing an anthology of his own short texts. But the author himself has become a monument of European and detective literature of the end of the start of the twenty-first century, as proven by the place he occupies (alongside Dominique Manotti) in the “History and Politics” MOOC created by the DETECt research collective and entitled “Euro Noir: Cultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives”. Acknowledgement  The research presented here has been financed by the research project DETECt: Detecting Transcultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives (Horizon 2020, 2018–2021) (Grant agreement number 770151).

Notes 1. The FLN, Front de Libération Nationale, was an Algerian nationalist movement that was active from the 1950s to the 1990s and that campaigned, sometimes violently, for Algerian independence and an end to the colonial yoke. On 17 October 1961, the French federation of the FLN organized a peaceful demonstration in Paris against the curfew imposed only on “French Muslims”. It was put down in blood by the CRS police force led by the infamous Paris police prefect Maurice Papon. 2. “Roman archéologique”, Viart, 2009: 12, our translation. All translations are ours unless stated otherwise. 3. This crime fiction vein appeared in France after the Second World War, and particularly in France thanks to Gallimard’s Série Noire book collection founded by Marcel Duhamel. For a full definition of hardboiled, see Tadié (2006: 3 and 165). 4. « Mon expérience de journaliste localier m’a été tout à fait utile, voire essentielle. De 1977 à 1982, j’avais fait des enquêtes, j’avais écrit des centaines d’articles sur les sujets les plus divers et les plus prosaïques. J’ai ainsi accumulé. Être dans les rues, suivre les faits divers me passionnait. Sur les faits les plus quotidiens qui paraissent sans importance, il faut toujours

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trouver un angle qui permette de dire que cette histoire-là vaut la peine d’être racontée ». (Daeninckx, in Collovald and Neveu, 2001: 11-12) 5. « Nos auteurs, en utilisant cette ‘brève’ journalistique comme point de départ, insistent sur la place de l’individu anonyme dans une histoire plus traditionnellement considérée sous son angle événementiel, tout en faisant la démonstration que le fait divers est en fin de compte un récit tronqué, manipulé et trompeur, qui dissimule en réalité les véritables enjeux soulevés par les faits évoqués » (Desnain 2015: 11). 6. « Dans ce texte, le crime contre l’individu (le fait divers donc) n’est qu’un prétexte au dévoilement de crimes contre l’humanité. De même, le crime perpétré par l’individu n’est qu’un symptôme de la défaillance de toute une société […] » (Desnain 2015: 4). 7. « Une nouvelle nous vient, qui renseigne sur quelque chose de lointain, de caché, d’ignoré, et ce crépitement mat et sec électrise notre présent sans l’illuminer tout à fait, déchirant furtivement la nuit noire de l’histoire », (Boucheron, 2019: 9). 8. « L’actualité est ainsi faite, qui attire et fixe notre attention sur des événements que l’on croit éphémères ou nés de circonstances, alors qu’ils viennent du fond de notre société » (Daeninckx 2019: 568). 9. « Ces noms je les avais trouvés en consultant les archives des journaux, à la Bibliothèque nationale ou à Beaubourg », (Daeninckx, 2019: 404) . 10. Michel Foucault is probably the most virulent critic of an idea of historical time as continuous (see Revel 2004). For him, on the contrary, historical time is made of discontinuities and ruptures. Contemporary thoughts on History, including that of Daeninckx, are largely inspired by this Foucauldian reference. 11. « […] la fraternité qu’il installe entre imagination fictionnelle et opération historiographique est tout sauf anecdotique » (Boucheron 2019: 19). 12. « Comme si l’histoire n’était rien d’autre en somme qu’un ensemble de fictions bien composées. L’hypothèse, on le comprend, est si ébouriffante, qu’elle mérite d’être explorée » (Boucheron 2019: 10). 13. « Comme le souligne Geldof: « Ainsi le récit policier devient-il une généalogie critique de la modernité qui, implicitement et explicitement, démystifie les mythes et les emblèmes de l’Histoire officielle et dont les acteurs principaux sont ceux ou celles qui, d’habitude, ne figurent pas dans les grands récits » (Geldof 2000: 141) » (Desnain 2015: 9).

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Works Cited Belhadjin, Anissa. 2010. ‘From Politics to the Roman Noir’. South Central Review, 27: 1–2. 61–81. Boucheron, Patrick. 2019. ‘L’art de la chute’ (Préface). In Le roman noir de l’Histoire. By Didier Daeninckx. Lagrasse: Verdier. 9–20. Collovald, Annie. 2001. ‘Entretien avec Didier Daeninckx: une modernité contre la modernité de pacotille’. Mouvements [En ligne], 3/15–16. 9–15. https:// www.cairn.info/journal-­mouvements-­2001-­3-­page-­9.htm (accessed 13 Aug 2021). Collovald, Annie and Erik Neveu. 2011. ‘Le néo-polar. Du gauchisme politique au gauchisme littéraire’. Sociétés & Représentations, 1:11. 77–93. Corbin, Alain. 1998. Le Monde retrouvé de Louis-François Pinagot, sur les traces d’un inconnu, 1798–1876. Paris: Flammarion. Daeninckx, Didier. 2019. Le roman noir de l’Histoire. Lagrasse: Verdier. ———. 2018. Artana ! Artana ! Paris: Gallimard. ———. 2012. Le Banquet des affamés. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 2003. Raconteur d’histoires. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 2002. Le Retour d’Ataï. Lagrasse: Verdier. ———. 2000. Nazis dans le metro. Paris: Éditions La Baleine. ———. 1998. Cannibale. Lagrasse: Verdier. ———. 1989. La mort n’oublie personne. Paris: Denoël. ———. 1983. Meurtres pour mémoire. Paris: Gallimard. Desnain, Véronique 2015. ‘Le polar, du fait divers au fait d’histoire’. Itinéraires [En ligne], http://journals.openedition.org/itineraires/2557, (accessed 3 December 2020). DETECt. ‘Part 4: History and Politics’. ‘MOOC Euro Noir: Cultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives’. https://www.edx.org/course/euro-­ noir-­transcultural-­identities-­in-­european-­popular-­crime-­narratives (accessed 15 August 2021). Forsdick, Charles. 2001. ‘“Direction les oubliettes de l’histoire”: Witnessing the Past in the Contemporary French Polar. French Cultural Studies, 12:36. 333–350. Geldof, Koenraad. 2000. ‘Une écriture de la résistance. Histoire et fait divers dans l’œuvre de Didier Daeninckx’. In Écrire l’insignifiant. Dix études sur le fait divers dans le roman contemporain. Editors, P.  Pelckmans and B.  Tritsmans. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 135–153. Ginzburg, Carlo. 1980 [1976]. Le Fromage et les vers. L’univers d’un meunier au XVIe siècle. Paris: Aubier. Gorrara, Claire. 2012. French crime fiction and the Second World War: Past Crimes, Present Memories, Cultural history of Modern War. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Nora, Pierre, editor. 1984–1992. Les Lieux de mémoire. Paris: Gallimard, 3 tomes. Platten, David. 2011. The Pleasures of Crime: Reading Modern French Crime Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Reid, Donald, 2010. ‘Didier Daeninckx: Raconteur of History’. South Central Review, 27:1–2. 39–60. Revel, Julie. 2004. ‘Discontinuité de la pensée ou pensée du discontinu’. Le Portique [En ligne]. 13–14. http://journals.openedition.org/leportique/635 (accessed 25 Oct 2021). Samoyault, Thiphaine. 1999. Excès du roman. Paris: Éditions Maurice Nadeau. Tadié, Benoît. 2006. Le Polar américain, la modernité et le mal. Paris: PUF. Viart, Dominique, 2009. ‘Nouveaux modèles de représentation de l’Histoire en littérature contemporaine’. In Nouvelles écritures littéraires de l’Histoire. Editor, D. Viart. Caen: Minard. 11–39.

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CHAPTER 10

Revisioning the Past to Build the Democratic Future: The Cases of Italian and Spanish Crime Fiction Stewart King and Barbara Pezzotti

The treatment of historical themes has become a staple of European crime fiction.1 This is perhaps unsurprising given that the legacy of several bloody conflicts (World Wars I and II, the Irish War of Independence, the Spanish Civil War, the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, etc.) and various totalitarian regimes is still felt today. This focus on historical crime fiction has been acknowledged by scholars working on specific European national traditions with significant studies on French (Gorrara; Hutton), German (Hall), Italian (Pezzotti), and Spanish, including Catalan and Basque (Colmeiro; Godsland and King; King Murder), crime fictions. For these scholars, the past does not just provide the setting for the crime and investigation; how we understand the past is also shaped by the genre’s conventions. The dual narrative formula, for example, with an investigation in the present into a crime that has already been committed, allows the detective

S. King (*) • B. Pezzotti Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Dall’Asta et al. (eds.), Contemporary European Crime Fiction, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21979-5_10

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to interrogate the past and to reveal what has been hidden or silenced from the historical record. The fictional detective thus acts as a historian, investigating the past—the life of the victim—and trying to make sense of it (Ginzburg 57–106). This investigation, moreover, allows for the tackling of history from what Andrea Cortellessa has described as an ipocalittico perspective, that is, a micro-story—the investigation itself—that illustrates a larger story or history, thus functioning as a wider investigation into the society and period depicted (Cortellessa). In the case of historical crime fiction, Claire Gorrara has noted how representations of the past are situated with a legal and moral framework that makes explicit “connections between war and crime, guilt and responsibility, justice and resolution” (1). For Gorrara, this interpretative frame pushes readers to respond in an ethical manner in order “to confront the past and to take collective responsibility” (13). According to Claudio Milanesi, the detective’s inquiry into the past often allows crime writers to draw parallels between the past of the investigation and the present of the reader as a way of commenting upon issues of contemporary relevance (13). Finally, the scholarly collective known as Wu Ming argues that historical representations in crime fiction are in fact acts of resistance and attempts to change the present. In this chapter we take the discussion on the relevance of the past further: in the context of the two crime series analysed here, we argue that in investigating historical injustices Italian and Catalan/Spanish crime writers Carlo Lucarelli and Jordi Sierra i Fabra use the past not only to intervene in contemporary debates, but also to shape the political future via the construction of a more perfect democratic community whose foundations are built on (1) the rejection of authoritarianism, (2) the recognition of past injustices and (3) the symbolic provision of justice. While the historical engagement identified by these scholars applies to the crime genre more broadly, the study of historical crime fiction has, to date, largely been circumscribed by the specific national literary tradition in which the critic works. The scholarship thus tends to focus on understanding the contradictions and flaws of specific dictatorial regimes in terms of civil rights and personal freedoms in stories set during the fascist Ventennio in Italy, Nazi Germany, Vichy and Occupied France, Francoist Spain, and so on. While these studies have helped to understand each nation’s experience of war and dictatorship and their ongoing legacy as articulated in that country’s crime fiction, it must be noted that these experiences are not limited to individual countries. To account for the shared transnational experience of war and dictatorship within Europe

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during the bloody twentieth century, we propose a comparative reading practice that seeks to explore the similarities and differences in historical crime fiction across what are usually seen as distinct national traditions. Comparative reading approaches are rare in studies of historical crime fiction. In the first decade of this century, the Germanist Katharina Hall compiled a list of over 150 “Nazi-themed crime fiction” novels in different languages as part of her “‘Detecting the past’: crime writing project”, but this project was only partially realized.2 More recently, Jesper Gulddal and Stewart King define European crime fiction as “a comparative opportunity that enables us to examine crime fiction from various countries in terms of both their distinctiveness as well as their shared social concerns and historical experiences” (198). Our chapter in the present collection contributes to further developing comparative approaches to historical crime fiction through an analysis of two series of Italian and Catalan/ Spanish crime fiction set during moments of significant political collapse during World War II and the Spanish Civil War respectively: Lucarelli’s Inspector De Luca series and Sierra i Fabra’s Inspector Mascarell series. These case studies are significant because in both countries the new democracies have failed to address the crimes and responsibilities of previous dictatorial regimes in the name of national reconciliation—a failure that still haunts the present in Italy and Spain. In analysing the Italian and Catalan/Spanish cases together, our study highlights how these crime series advocate for the need to acknowledge these crimes, to provide symbolic justice for their victims, and also to act as a powerful warning against the resurgence of right-wing movements and for the future of democratic practices. Both the De Luca and the Mascarell series are set during significant moments of political and social upheaval that shape how we understand the past. Centring on Inspector Achille de Luca, Lucarelli’s series comprises Carta bianca (1990; Carte Blanche, 2006), L’estate torbida (1991; The Damned Season, 2007) and Via delle Oche (1996; Via delle Oche, 2008), which cover the period 1945–1948, and subsequent books which go back to 1943 and then cover post-war Italy up to 1955. The series, which has enjoyed great success in Europe, is particularly notable for the authenticity of its historical detail in its ability to re-create a 1940s atmosphere. Sierra i Fabra’s Mascarell series currently consists of twelve novels that cover the period from January 1939 to January 1952. The series recounts the experiences and investigations of Miquel Mascarell Folch, a Catalan police inspector who in the first novel, Cuatro días de enero (2008;

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Four Days in January), continues to uphold the law of the Second Republic (1931–1939) until the fall of Barcelona towards the end of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). The remaining novels take place during the early years of Franco’s right-wing dictatorship, when Mascarell, now considered an ex-criminal for his support for the democratically elected Republican government, finds himself investigating mysteries in order to avoid falling foul of the so-called new legality. Although set entirely in the past, the two series do not offer nostalgic representations as seen in TV series like Foyle’s War; rather they participate in contemporary debates about the past that emerged in their respective countries during the 1990s, and they highlight the ways in which popular fictions respond to and participate in these debates. For example, Lucarelli’s crime series was published in the 1990s during a period of right-wing revisionist debate about Fascism, World War II and the actions of the Italian Resistance. In this period revisionist historians re-interpreted the Ventennio as a period of modernization for Italy, and criticized anti-­fascism and the Resistance for their strong communist elements. While historians such as Giampaolo Pansa, Claudio Pavone and Nuto Ravelli debated the historical legacy of Fascism and resistance to it, right-wing parties such as Alleanza nazionale and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia used revisionist pronouncements to bolster their political position. In this period, as Jonathan Dunnage explains, the political success of the post-Fascist party Alleanza nazionale revealed that “a significant number of Italians did not identify with the anti-Fascist tradition on which the Republic had been founded” (224). While revisionism in Italy was able to flourish in a void generated by the failure of post-war governments to address personal and collective responsibilities, particularly the collusion with the Fascist regime, the return to power of the right after decades of political isolation also revolutionized Italy’s discourse on its past. In this period, the proliferation of studies, memoirs and newspaper articles about the young men who fought for Mussolini’s short-lived Republic of Salò (1943–1945) after the Allied forces invaded Italy decontextualized the stories of the combatants on both sides, showing what Raffaele Romanelli describes as a “discursive tendency to dissolve all distinctions, often through an appeal to individual experience and to the emotions” (343). Finally, “thanks to widespread support from the mass media (mainly television) those interpretations have been largely accepted by the public” (Corni, 429). Following the tradition of social and political commitment of the Italian genre, left-wing crime fiction writers, such as Lucarelli, Corrado Augias and Leonardo

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Gori individually and in co-authorship with Franco Cardini also intervened, challenging this “revisionist” discourse. For Luca Somigli, crime fiction intervened, both explicitly and implicitly, in the very public discussion on the meaning and the moral and political implications of a series of pivotal moments and events at the twilight of the Fascist regime and its artificial continuation with the Italian Social Republic. (18)

In setting their stories during Fascism and World War II, left-wing Italian crime writers covered a variety of perspectives that range from the problematic representation of the fascista buono (good fascist) to the endorsement of the ambivalent attitudes of many Italians who survived during Fascism without taking sides, to an open condemnation of a regime that murdered its political opponents and suppressed freedom of expression in Italy.3 The 1990s in Spain also saw the emergence of a widespread public debate about the past that centred on the failure to acknowledge what British historian Paul Preston controversially describes as the “Spanish Holocaust”. That is, the murder of approximately 180,000–200,000 Spaniards, who were killed extra-judicially or executed after flimsy legal process during and after the Spanish Civil War, as well as the suffering of the victims of Francoist violence during the almost forty years of the regime’s existence (Preston, xi). These debates about the past were a product of a lack of consensus on the transition to democracy following Franco’s death in 1975, with those on the right celebrating the peaceful transition of power while those on the left saw the refusal to acknowledge past traumas as a spectacular failure. In what has been described as a “pact of silence”, a form of disremembering, the founders of the post-Franco democracy avoided the divisive issue of transitional justice by promoting the idea that the Civil War was simply a collective tragedy for which all Spaniards, regardless of their political persuasion, were responsible (Aguilar Fernández 210, 358–59). Despite the lack of public acknowledgement of the impact of the war and the Franco regime, the experiences of the losers did not disappear, nor were they completely silenced, as historians, filmmakers and writers sought to overturn the “pact of silence”. This was particularly the case for crime writers, such as Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Jaume Fuster, Dulce Chacón and Andrés Trapiello, who drew on the genre’s social and political critique

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to criticize the state for abrogating its duty, its moral imperative and its legal obligations to establish the truth and prosecute criminal behaviour. These writers contributed to a memory boom in the late 1990s and early 2000s that was fuelled by numerous historical documentaries, feature films, works of fiction and non-fiction, survivors’ accounts, and the exhumation and identification of bodies in mass unmarked graves and that ultimately led to the passing in 2007 of what is popularly known as the “Law of Historical Memory”. Despite its flaws, namely the failure to identify or hold to account the perpetrators of violence, the law seeks to provide “moral reparation” via “commemoration and other symbolic non-legislative outcomes” (Tamarit Sumalla 741; Humphrey 36). While 18 years separate the publication of the first two books of Lucarelli’s and Sierra i Fabra’s series (1990 and 2008 respectively), both novels and the series that follow them seek to draw attention to the failure of post-dictatorial societies in Italy and Spain to investigate the gross violations of human rights and to prosecute perpetrators of right-wing violence in the name of national reconciliation. Whereas the respective legal systems have hindered the investigation and prosecution of crimes against humanity by the Fascist and Francoist regimes, many left-wing Italian and Spanish crime fiction writers seek to situate right-wing violence within a criminal framework that attributes guilt and acknowledges victimhood and, in so doing, to provide justice—if only symbolically—for the victims. In this regard, these writers use the genre to “give tangible shape to the state’s labyrinthine operations and multiple institutional forms [and also to] draw attention to the ethical dimension of the state” (Pepper, 1). Moreover, in criminalizing the right-wing regimes the narratives studied here undermine the basis for the historical revisionism used by right-wing political parties to legitimize their policies and ideology. As such, these historical crime narratives also act as a warning for the present and future, during a period in which in Spain and Italy (and, indeed, in the whole of Europe) far-right movements are gaining ground in politics and society. Set towards the end of major periods of conflict as their respective countries transition out of or into right-wing dictatorship, the two series’ approaches towards their respective dictatorships are very different. Lucarelli was the first Italian crime writer to specifically investigate the decoupling of individuals from the actions of the regime they served in the name of alleged apolitical professionalism or loyalty. In crime fiction, the detective is typically an upholder of justice, but he may also cut corners in order to deliver justice, especially when this does not coincide with

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fairness. A detective can also be a corrupt sleuth, and work for his own profit. In Lucarelli’s novels the protagonist Inspector De Luca is a former commander of the notorious Brigata Ettore Muti, one of several Fascist paramilitary and political police corps operating in northern Italy. Now an inspector of the Republic of Salò police, De Luca is an unusual fictional detective because he is not corrupt, and pursues the law even if this means going against the authorities when they break the law. However, this is more complicated than it first sounds, as the rules he obeys are those of the Fascist regime. In other words, De Luca neither questions the rules of the Fascist regime nor does he doubt the validity of its judicial foundation and claims. The series follows a familiar pattern for detective stories with a crime and an investigation, clues scattered throughout the story and a final resolution of the mystery thanks to the acumen and perseverance of the detective, even though the villain is not always brought to justice, not because the detective allows the criminal(s) to evade justice—as Poirot does in Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express—but because justice cannot be realized through the fascist legal framework that existed at the time. In the novels a dichotomy between truth and justice, fairness and legality, is expressed through the blurring of key roles in a crime story insofar as in De Luca’s adventures the detective becomes complicit in defending a criminal state, and the victims are in fact perpetrators. For example, in Carte Blanche, set in 1945 during the last days of the Fascist puppet regime in the north of Italy, De Luca has transferred back to the “normal” police from the political police and is tasked with finding the murderer of wealthy playboy and prominent member of the Fascist Republican Party Vittorio Rehinard. De Luca is promised carte blanche to investigate. However, his investigation is soon compromised by an internal struggle within the Fascist party in disarray. De Luca’s chief, who belongs to one Fascist faction, presses him to charge an important member of a rival faction with the murder. During the investigation De Luca also discovers that the victim and a network of corrupt Fascist officers are involved in drug trafficking. In addition, the inspector’s inquiries reveal that several influential Fascists are secretly negotiating their way out of Italy either through the Vatican or with the Allies. Finally, after escaping an assassination attempt, De Luca solves the crime, but he is forced to flee before the arrival of the partisans, and the culprit is not delivered to justice. The blurring between the roles of the victim and the perpetrator is an important feature of Carte Blanche: the victim, Vittorio Rehinard, is a drug trafficker

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and a misogynist. The perpetrator is Assuntina, Rehinard’s servant, a young and vulnerable girl seduced by the relentless womanizer, and a victim of the misogynistic nature of the Fascist regime.4 The figure of the detective is also problematic. As a policeman working for the Republic of Salò, De Luca is complicit in the Mussolini dictatorship. Significantly, at the end of the novel, De Luca refuses to free Assuntina, even though the Fascists have fled Bologna, and the Republic of Salò is collapsing before his eyes: ‘Che facciamo, commissa’, la portiamo dentro veramente?’ chiese Pugliese e De Luca si voltò, guardandolo da sopra una spalla. ‘Che domande fate, Maresciallo?’ disse calmo. ‘Certo che la portiamo dentro, è un’assassina. Non posso lasciarla andare, Pugliese, sono un poliziotto’ (Carta bianca, 105). ‘What are we going to do, Commissa, are we really going to take her in?’ asked Pugliese. De Luca turned and looked at him from over his shoulder. ‘What kind of question is that, Maresciallo?’ he said calmly. ‘Of course, we are going to take her in, she’s a murderer. I can’t let her go, Pugliese. I’m a policeman.’ (Carte Blanche, 107)5

Despite the collapse of the institutions he works for, De Luca is dedicated to upholding the law and, as such, he refuses to free Assuntina in order to provide real justice. Thus, he never scrutinizes the ethics of his decisions. While it is not unusual for fictional detectives to uphold laws they know to be unjust, by acritically pursuing justice for an unjust regime that protects criminals and crushes innocents, and by rejecting Pugliese’s recognition of Assuntina’s victimhood, De Luca chooses to align himself with the corrupt regime. In contrasting the attitudes of the two policemen, the novel here points to the fact that a choice can always be made, thus challenging the right-wing revisionist idea that performing one’s duty provides justification in and of itself. The inquiry, moreover, reveals the hypocrisy of a political class whose members only think about saving themselves before the inevitable fall of Mussolini’s regime. The investigation thus expands from focusing on a specific crime to become an interrogation of the criminality of the Fascist system at large. In so doing, De Luca undermines the moral authority of present-day revisionist politicians and historians. Lucarelli further intervenes directly in the historical debates about the role of individual Italians in supporting the Fascist State by raising the

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issue of De Luca’s complicity. In spite of being openly challenged throughout the series, Inspector De Luca refuses to admit to being compromised by association with the regime. In L’estate torbida, the inspector is hiding in the small village of Emilia-Romagna, posing as an engineer, Giovanni Morandi, to avoid reprisals for the role he played during the dictatorship. Exposed by Guido Leonardi, a member of the partisan police, De Luca is forced to investigate a series of brutal murders, becoming a reluctant player in Italy’s post-war power struggle. Confronted by the partisanpoliceman Leonardi, De Luca tries to defend himself: “Non sono stato nella Squadra Politica perché ero fascista, lo ero come lo erano tanti, non me ne fregava niente” (L’estate torbida 109) (I wasn’t in the Political Squad because I was a fascist, I was there for the same reason that a lot of other people were) (The Damned Season 106). In so doing, he attempts to diffuse the question of moral agency without entirely acknowledging the illegitimacy or, indeed, the criminal actions of the previous regime. In a situation of political turmoil, De Luca is characterized by a selective desire for justice that he only applies to his investigation, while ignoring the larger picture. He never expresses doubt or disgust, instead believing himself to always do the right thing. Only his chronic insomnia and nausea betray his underlying and unacknowledged uneasiness. In the exchange with Leonardi, De Luca’s moral vacuity and his inability to take responsibility are exposed: ‘Oh certo, lei faceva solo il suo dovere…’ ‘No, il mio mestiere! È diverso…’ ‘Sì, è diverso. Così, è anche peggio.’ (109) ‘Right, you were only doing your job-’ ‘No, not my job. Leonardi, my profession! It’s different-’ ‘Yeah, it’s different. It’s even worse.” (106)

In this passage, Leonardi implicitly points out that by hiding behind his profession, De Luca behaves like the majority of Italians who justified their passive adherence to Fascism by the desire to live a quiet life, and who thought they were good people because they were only performing their job to the best of their abilities in difficult circumstances. For Leonardi, De Luca’s excuse is even less convincing because as a policeman charged with providing justice, he should have fought the injustice perpetrated by

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the Fascist regime. Lucarelli highlights that in spite of distancing himself from any ideological affiliations, De Luca shares responsibility for being part of a police force that tortured partisans and civilians. In a highly volatile historical situation, when people are asked to make their choices— either supporting the Republic of Salò or joining the Resistance—De Luca’s answer sounds weak and fails to convince his interlocutor, and with him the reader. In crime fiction, the reader’s identification with the police detective as upholder of the law is often problematic, especially when the law does not provide real justice (Pepper). The problem of (dis)identification is more pronounced when the law is used instrumentally to uphold non-­democratic politics. According to Katharina Hall, novels featuring police protagonists in dictatorial states “risk generating a textual crisis” (“The Nazi Detective”, 292). While Lucarelli is careful to depict a flawed detective who is nonetheless honest, allowing the reader to identify with him at least partially, the textual crisis nevertheless is always present in the narrative. This series exposes the weakness of the new revisionist mythology of the innocent and honest Fascist and challenges a persistent idea of “Italiani, brava gente”, that is, the widespread assumption in Italian society that Italians are good people irrespective of their past actions (Del Boca). Thus, the series undermines one of the central tenets that provide legitimacy to far-­ right political parties in the present and, in so doing, seeks to articulate and reinforce democratic values. In Sierra i Fabra’s series a different sort of textual crisis emerges, one that is not associated with the figure of the detective, as in Lucarelli’s novels, but rather centres on the legitimacy of the State as the provider of justice. When the series opens with Cuatro días de enero Mascarell is in his mid-fifties and a dedicated, somewhat foolhardy, inspector in the Republican police force. His only son has died a few months earlier fighting the rebel army and his wife is bedridden with advanced cancer. The novel takes place during the four days immediately before the fall of Barcelona to Franco’s forces. Unlike his police colleagues and his brother, Mascarell does not flee the city, a decision that is not based on misplaced heroism, but rather on the refusal to abandon his dying wife. With all vestiges of Republican authority collapsing around him and with Franco’s underground supporters becoming increasingly emboldened, Mascarell decides to investigate the case of a missing, later murdered, young woman even though he knows it is doubtful that her killer will ever be brought to justice.

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In some ways, Mascarell is similar to De Luca in that they both share a strong desire to see the law served and justice done within that legal framework. Both operate in a collapsing legal and political context, and just as De Luca does, Mascarell seeks to bring the criminal to justice because “[u]n asesinato es un asesinato, con o sin la Generalitat, con o sin República” (a murder is a murder, with or without the Generalitat, with or without the Republic) (209). This is, however, where the similarities end, as Mascarell is more aware than De Luca that the law can be unjust and that the provision of justice cannot always be realized through the formal judicial system. Rather than defending the financial, political, social and legal status quo by just doing his job, in Cuatro días readers discover that Mascarell is unlike other police officers. A die-hard socialist reporter, for example, recognizes that although Mascarell is a cop, he has never been “un maldito burgués, porque tiene conciencia social” (a damned bourgeois, because you have a social conscience) (28). Even some criminals have positive things to say about him: “Usted siempre me trató bien […]. Ni una hostia ni nada. Yo siempre decía: ‘El inspector Mascarell es buena tela. Él, a lo suyo pero legal.’ Y eso se agradece, ¿sabe? Cuántos de mis amigos se quedaron sin dientes, porque usted tenía unos colegas que…” (You always treated me well […]. You never laid a hand on me. I always said ‘Inspector Mascarell is a good ’un. He does his own thing, but he’s legal’. And that’s appreciated, you know. How many of my friends lost their teeth because some of your colleagues…) (Dos días, 155). Even his direct adversary recognizes his professionalism and moral authority. Pascual Cortacans, the criminal face of the Franco regime, grudgingly acknowledges Mascarell’s commitment, even if he thinks he is somewhat quixotic in his endeavour: “Un viejo policía solitario, hasta el límite. Un fantasma en una ciudad fantasmal. No sé si es digno de admiración o patético” (An old, alone policeman, working to the end. A ghost in a ghostly city. I don’t know if you are worthy of admiration or pathetic) (Cuatro días, 272). In Cuatro días Mascarell’s dedication to providing justice is evident in his decision to investigate a murder despite the collapse of the Republican justice system and the fact that he is the only remaining policeman in a city suspended in a legal limbo. As Cortacans correctly states, “¿Y a quién reporta el resultado de sus investigaciones?” (And to whom are you going to report the findings of your investigation?) (118). There are, after all, no police stations, no courts and no jail in which to incarcerate criminals (275). By the end of the novel, Cortacans receives his answer when

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Mascarell goes beyond his professional jurisdiction to become judge, jury and executioner. He uses his remaining bullet to shoot Cortacans, justifying his actions on the grounds of his inability to prevent the Francoist sadist and murderer from continuing to organize with impunity violent orgies for his bourgeois friends in which they sexually assault young women, one of whom—a 15-year-old girl—Cortacans had brutally murdered. Ten years later in Dos días de mayo (2013; Two Days in May), Mascarell is adamant that the killing of Cortacans was not an act of vengeance, which would see him operating outside the law. Instead, the inspector sees it as an “ajusticiamiento” (justified execution) (227). The De Luca and Mascarell series continue after the end of their respective wars, but both protagonists now live and operate under very different circumstances. De Luca, for example, works for the new democracy, and the fact that he is able to continue unproblematically in the role despite his past points to the willingness of the new Italian state to bury the past in the name of national reconciliation. In Via delle Oche inspector De Luca is again in Bologna. It is April 1948, and although De Luca has survived Mussolini’s downfall, he has been demoted and assigned to the vice squad where he meets up with Pugliese, his subordinate in Carta bianca. Against the backdrop of the first post-war general election, De Luca begins to investigate the death of Ermes Ricciotti, an employee in a bordello on Via Delle Oche. Ricciotti’s death has been staged to look like a suicide and De Luca’s superiors insist that the case be closed. Once again, the volatile political situation intrudes into De Luca’s investigation. More corpses appear, all of whom were members of the Communist party, while a suspect, Antonio Abatino, is an influential member of the Christian Democrats. The fake suicide is finally revealed to be a murder committed to cover the embarrassing sudden death of a Christian Democrat politician in the bordello on the eve of the general elections. De Luca and Pugliese solve the mystery, but receive no praise. On the contrary, Pugliese is punished through the typical move of “promuovi e rimuovi” (Via delle Oche, 148, emphasis in the text) “promoted and made remote” (Via delle Oche, 154) while De Luca is again put on trial for his Fascist past. With this umpteenth tale of abuse of power over truth and justice, Lucarelli highlights how the flaws of Fascism continue to taint post-war Italy. As Straub puts it, communicative constructions of a shared past can be innovative insofar as they may generate “a new version of the past, a new outlook on the present” and especially “new group-shared expectations for the future” (Straub 120). In the case of Lucarelli’s series, De Luca’s relentless fight

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against abuses of power creates an expectation among readers that democratic culture should aim to create a fairer and more just society in Italy, and this is something that has not been achieved in a post-dictatorship Italy in which the law is still linked with the interests of the ruling classes. The first novel in the Sierra i Fabra’s series ends on the day that Franco’s forces occupy Barcelona, with the rest of the series charting the social, political and cultural changes that Spain, and specifically Catalonia, underwent during the Franco dictatorship. Mascarell’s decision not to flee the Catalan capital like his colleagues has serious ramifications. At the beginning of the second novel, Siete días de julio (2010; Seven Days in July), readers learn that his wife had died shortly after the city was occupied and that Mascarell had been arrested, tried and convicted for belonging to a now illegitimate police force and sent to a labour camp. Released after eight and a half years, Mascarell returns to Barcelona where in the following novels he solves a number of mysteries. The post-war novels reprise two main themes from Cuatro días, namely the ambiguous role of the detective as an arbiter and provider of justice and the criminalization and, thus, delegitimization of the Franco regime through its supporters. Unlike in the De Luca series, Mascarell’s “policing” in a dictatorial regime does not generate the sort of textual crisis that Hall attributes to members of Nazi—and we extend to Fascist and Francoist—police officers. In Siete días…, Mascarell encounters the “new”—in reality, old—Spain that Franco has imposed on the entire country: “la España de la represión, la imposición de formas, la misa diaria, la comunión, la exaltación de la familia y los valores tradicionales, pero también la España de la mentira, la crueldad, el hambre, la corrupción, el estraperlo y la falsedad” (the Spain of repression, forced habits, daily masses, communion, the exaltation of the family and traditional values, but also the Spain of lies, cruelty, hunger, corruption, black markets and hypocrisy) (70). It is therefore a corrupt state. Readers see this through the criminals, who, although individuals, personify the brutality, perversion, corruption and hypocrisy of the Franco regime. If the first novel explores the ethics of providing justice and enacting punishment when the state has broken down, in the remaining novels the state exists and is strong, but it does not provide justice. Purged from the police and punished for once having upheld the law, Mascarell now acts illegally. Nevertheless, the authority assigned him by the Second Republic continues extra-officially into the Franco regime. Even his nemesis in Cinco días de octubre (2011; Five Days in October) recognizes that while

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“circunstancias pueden cambiar, […] uno no deja de ser necesariamente lo que era a causa de ellas” (circumstances can change, […] you don’t necessarily stop being who you are because of them) (20), thus acknowledging his ongoing identity as a police officer. To the extent that Mascarell tries to remain on the right side of a now non-existent legal code that, in his view, he “seguía separando a los buenos de los malos” (continued to separate the good from the bad) (Dos días, 221), and to act as a moral arbiter and provider of justice. In highlighting the disjuncture between the state and justice, the Mascarell series not only undermines the legitimacy of the Francoist state, but also criminalizes it. Moreover, the series presents the Franco regime as a historical anomaly, wedged between two democratic moments—the Second Republic and the current constitutional monarchy—and, in so doing, it points to the real threat that democratic culture can face when its values are not defended. Memory studies and scholarship on the historical crime novel focus on the connection between the past and the present (Quinn). Both Lucarelli’s and Sierra i Fabra’s series are products of a reaction to current debates on dictatorship and its crimes in their respective countries. They powerfully participate in the debate by situating right-wing violence within a criminal framework that highlights real guilt and acknowledges real victimhood, beyond appearances. However, in these series, there is more. While the engagement of crime fiction with the past is, of course, conducted in the present, the insights provided by the past serve to “construct new visions of the […] future” (Ribeiro de Menezes and King 798). As we have shown in this chapter, the exercise in memory in both Lucarelli’s and Sierra i Fabra’s series is not fixed; it is rather a “project”, an ongoing and “unfinished task” (Song 22). It provides innovative constructions of a shared past which seek to generate collective expectations for the future (Straub 120). In investigating past injustices Lucarelli and Sierra i Fabra combine the past and the present with the aim of proposing an alternative political future via the construction of a democratic community whose foundations are built on the recognition of past injustices and the symbolic provision of justice, and a faith in a future democratic culture that fosters equality and fairness. As our comparative approach highlights, the use of historical crime fiction for shaping the future is not confined to individual national traditions, but is shared by nations, such as Italy and Spain, that experienced dictatorship with its corollary of violence, oppression and injustice. This comparative approach demonstrates the diverse ways in which crime

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writers use the genre’s conventions not only to investigate and interrogate the concealed histories and political underpinnings of national societies and institutions, but also to critique the limitations and failures of post-­ dictatorial democracies ultimately with the aim of reinforcing new democratic identities based on law, justice and freedom.

Notes 1. Unless otherwise specified, all translations from Italian and Spanish are by the authors of this chapter. 2. Hall references this transnational corpus in “The Crime Writer as Historian” (64, n.2). 3. See Pezzotti (63–168) for an in-depth exploration of historical crime fiction that engages with this period. 4. The connection between Fascism in its various totalitarian manifestations (Nazism, Francoism, etc.) and misogyny and violence against women is a recurring trope in historical crime fiction. See King, “La novela”. 5. Commissario, or the shortened version ‘Commissa’ as in the extract, means inspector.

Works Cited Aguilar Fernández, Paloma. 1996. Memoria y olvido de la Guerra Civil española. Madrid: Alianza. Colmeiro, José. 1999. ‘Introducción’. In Las hermanas coloradas, F. García Pavón. Barcelona: Destino. 5–100. Corni, Gustavo. 2007. ‘Fascism, Anti-fascism, and Resistance in the Politics of Memory and Historiography’. In Post-War Italy. In The Many Faces of Clio: Cross-cultural Approaches to Historiography. Editors, Q.  E. Wang and F. L. Fillafer. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. 420–436. Cortellessa, Andrea. 1999. ‘Ipocalittici o integrati: Romanzo a chiave di un falsario collettivo con ambizioni di conflitto sociale.’ Indice dei libri, 16:7/8. Web. https://www.wumingfoundation.com/italiano/rassegna/140799.html Del Boca, Angelo. 2005. Italiani brava gente? Vicenza: Neri Pozza editore. Dunnage, Jonathan. 2002. Twentieth Century Italy: A Social History. London and New York: Longman. Ginzburg, Carlo. 1979. ‘Spie. Radici di un paradigma indiziario’. In Crisi della ragione. Editor, Aldo Gargani. Turin: Einaudi. 57–106. Godsland, Shelley and Stewart King. 2006. ‘Crimes Present, Motives Past: A Function of National History in the Contemporary Spanish Detective Novel’. Clues, 24:3. 30–40.

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Gorrara, Claire. 2012. French Crime Fiction and the Second World War: Past Crimes, Present Memories. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gulddal, Jesper and Stewart King. 2022. ‘European Crime Fiction’. In The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction. Editors, Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King and Alistar Rolls. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 196–220. Hall, Katharina. 2011. ‘The Crime Writer as Historian: Representations of National Socialism and its Post-War Legacies in Joseph Kanon’s The Good German and Pierre Frei’s Berlin’. Journal of European Studies, 42:1. 50–67. ———. 2013. ‘The “Nazi Detective” as Provider of Justice in post-1990 British and German Crime Fiction: Philip Kerr’s The Pale Criminal, Robert Harris’s Fatherland, and Richard Birkefeld and Göran Hachmeister’s Wer übrig bleibt, hat recht’. Comparative Literature Studies, 50:2. 288–313. Humphrey, Michael. 2014. ‘Law, Memory and Amnesty in Spain’. Macquarie Law Journal, 13. 25–40. Hutton, Margaret-Ann. 2013. French Crime Fiction, 1945–2005: Investigating World War II. Farnham: Ashgate. King, Stewart. 2018. ‘La novela criminal de dictaduras y la justicia universal’. In Justicia y paz en la novela de crímenes. Editor, Gustavo Forero Quintero, 47–64. Bogotá: Siglo de hombre editores. ———. 2019. Murder in the Multinational State: Crime Fiction from Spain. London and New York: Routledge. Lucarelli, Carlo. 2006 (1991). Carta bianca. Palermo: Sellerio. Translated as Carte Blanche. Translator, Michael Reynolds. New York: Europa Editions. ———. 2007 (1991). L’estate torbida. Palermo: Sellerio. Translated as The Damned Season. Translator, Michael Reynolds. New York: Europa Editions. ———. 2008 (1996). Via delle oche. Palermo: Sellerio. Translated as Via delle Oche. Translator, Michael Reynolds. New York: Europa Editions. Milanesi, Claudio. 2006. ‘Le Roman criminel et l’histoire: Introduction’. Cahiers d’études romanes, 15:1. 9–19. Pepper, Andrew. 2016. Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pezzotti, Barbara. 2016. Investigating Italy’s Past through Historical Crime Fiction, Film and TV Series: Murder in the Age of Chaos. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Preston, Paul. 2012. The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain. New York: W. W. Norton. Quinn, Kate. 2020. ‘Crime Fiction and Memory’. In The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction. Editors, J, Allan, J. Gulddal, S. King and A. Pepper. London and New York: Routledge. 310–17. Ribeiro de Menezes, Alison and Stewart King. 2017. ‘Introduction: The Future of Memory in Spain’. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 94:8. 793–799.

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Romanelli, Raffaele. 2003. ‘Retoriche di fine millennio’. In Due nazioni: Legittimazione e delegittimazione nella storia dell’Italia contemporanea. Editors, L. Di Nucci and E. Galli Della Loggia. Bologna: Il Mulino. 335–365. Sierra i Fabra, Jordi. 2008. Cuatro días de enero. Barcelona: Plaza & Janés. ———. 2010. Siete días de julio. Barcelona: Plaza & Janés. ———. 2011. Cinco días de octubre. Barcelona: Plaza & Janés. ———. 2013. Dos días de mayo. Barcelona: Plaza & Janés. Somigli, Luca. 2010. ‘Fighting Crimes in Times of War: Detective Fiction’s Visions and Revision of Fascism’. In Uncertain Justice: Crimes and Retribution in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction. Editor, Nicoletta Di Ciolla. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 15–35. Song, H. Rosi. 2016. Lost in Transition: Constructing Memory in Contemporary Spain. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Straub, Jürgen. 1993. ‘Collective Memory and Collective Past as Constituents of Culture: An Action-Theoretical and Culture-Psychological Perspective’. Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 52. 114–121. Tamarit Sumalla, Josep María. 2011. ‘Transition, Historical Memory and Criminal Justice in Spain.’ Journal of International Criminal Justice, 9:3. 729–752. Wu Ming. 2003. ‘La presa di Macallé’. Nandropausa 5. Web. https://www.wumingfoundation.com/italiano/Giap/nandropausa5.html.

PART III

Contemporary European Crime Narratives about the Post-1989 Era

CHAPTER 11

How Does Crime Fiction ‘talk politics’? Figures of Political Action in Contemporary French Crime Writing Lucie Amir

Contemporary French crime fiction bears the legacy of ‘literary leftism’, epitomized by the néo-polar generation that thrived in the 1980s and 1990s until the turn of the twenty-first century (Collovald and Neveu 2001). Inaugurated by Jean-Patrick Manchette who maintained close connections with the Situationist movement, this generation included writers associated with the Communist Party (Jean Vautrin, Frédéric Fajardie, Didier Daeninckx), Trotskism (Thierry Jonquet), Maoism (Patrick Raynal) and anarchism (Jean-Bernard Pouy). In the 1980s, these authors converted their political activity to embrace the creation of politically engaged literature, inspired by the models of the ‘novel of intervention’ and ‘crisis literature’ coined by Manchette (1996: 12, 81). At the turn of the 2000s, when the Le Poulpe series featuring an anarchist detective as its protagonist still enjoyed broad success, French scholars started

L. Amir (*) University of Limoges, Limoges, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Dall’Asta et al. (eds.), Contemporary European Crime Fiction, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21979-5_11

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to investigate how literature approached the ambiguous task of “bringing enchantment into political disillusion”1 (Collovald 2001: 16–21; Collovald and Neveu). Today, the literary scope of crime fiction has widened. The writers who embody the genre are no longer those who constructed the polar’s political posture. The best-selling names are not the creators of the néo-polar: they now include Fred Vargas, Jean-Christophe Grangé and, more recently, Franck Thilliez and Michel Bussi. A new generation of writers, whose publications span for the most part the mid-2000s and today, coexist with the heirs of the néo-polar movement while distancing themselves from the politically engaged ideology that was associated with the polar at large until the early 2000s. Elsewhere in Europe, the market for crime fiction mostly reflects the globalization processes, drawing on the nomadic trajectories of famous writers such as Donna Leon, Georgio Scerbanenco and Henning Mankell, and opening up fictional universes to areas like China in Peter May’s or Robert Van Gulick’s works (Erdmann 15), but also to global crime and complex geopolitical interplays between state, extra-state and non-state actors (Pepper and Schmid 5). Although contemporary crime fiction from around Europe continues to be associated with a critical outlook—and in some cases with political dissent—at the turn of the twenty-first century, it also became a space for the expression of ‘political disenchantment’ (Collovald and Neveu), as noted in the work of Vásquez Montalbán (Walsh 59–60), Andrea G.  Pinketts (Pezzotti 151) and Ken Bruen (Kincaid 57). In France, it is even sometimes associated with a shift from the political Left (Ledien 2020). The case of Cesare Battisti, an Italian activist during the Years of Lead (and crime fiction novelist) who received the protection of the French state until 2002 and the support of many French crime fiction writers after the repeal of the Mitterrand doctrine, emblematized the French 1990s polar scene’s divisive relation to political affairs and once more highlighted the traditionally strong links between crime fiction and political activity. However, this political involvement no longer forms a strong consensus and is increasingly presented as a problematic legacy, as thematized and discussed by contemporary novels. In the context of the reconfigurations brought about by the post-1980s mutations of political culture and of the decline of traditional political participation models (Rosanvallon 426), this chapter will explore how crime writers narrativize the fields of political participation. What can

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these stories tell us about the contemporary imaginaries of political activism and action? In contrast with the joyous anarchist detective of 1990s series Le Poulpe, twenty-first-century thrillers seem populated by disillusioned and disoriented police officers, hazardous political trajectories, and hesitant yet deadly engagements. Rather than exploring the political issues conveyed by crime fiction (e.g. political or economic crises, environmental issues, social banditry), this chapter focuses on representations of political attitudes, examining fictional militants and depictions of political commitments and sensibilities to characterize contemporary figures of political action. How do crime novels also reflect on the contemporary evolutions of social movements, and their consequences for political subjectivities? This study investigates a wide selection of novels by French authors in which protagonists must face political choices, drawing from a representative repository of eighty French novels, to encompass a wide anthology of contemporary fictional activists and agents.

Politics in Crime Fiction: From Militants to Situations Can fiction ‘talk politics’? Does it address ‘the political sphere’ in the same way the media does, thus contributing to demarcating the scope of its activity? From the perspective of political science, the constructivist tradition, grounded in French sociology and cultural studies, understands political activity as a process and a cultural phenomenon, a symbolic operation that appropriates and ‘re-qualifies’ diverse practices through the political imaginary (Lagroye 360). This approach gave rise to seminal studies on the production of political meaning through social and media discourses (Gamson). From the perspective of literary theory, literary ‘themes’ can be approached from a dynamic, narratological point of view, analysing how the fictional narrative contributes to the construction of concepts and their uses. Narrative themes are plural and reciprocal: they are “elements of a lexicon from which the narrative draws its components, and to which the reader can refer in order to determine the narrative significance of the facts that form the plot”2 (Ryan 24). They are devices that contribute to the characterization process, combining narrative functions (i.e. the canonic actions in crime fiction, including the murder, the investigation, the revelation, etc.) with abstract categories of meaning to which these actions are associated to construct the reader’s understanding of the

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text (crime, justice, engagement, activism, etc.), therefore contributing to discursive qualification processes. Elements drawn from the political lexicon thus contribute in fiction as in other texts—and more specifically within a realistic tradition based on a closely referential relation to the real world—to the ‘politicization’ of the different forms of action depicted. By studying how crime fiction thematizes the political, and elaborates what is assessed as political, we can document the contemporary imaginaries of political participation. This study investigates fictional activism through the judgements introduced by the narrative into the diegesis through the articulation of narrative structures (situations, actions and protagonists) and semantic qualification. Using a corpus built from a pre-­ established selection of the most successful novels published on the French literary market between 2000 and 2019—that is, considering both the importance of symbolic rewards and the growing influence of commercial considerations in our late modern consumer culture, the novels that received the most awards and had the largest print runs—I have examined the political lexicon in these novelist universes. This has allowed me to identify novels where politics are significantly present, either through the recurrence of the concept itself or through occurrences of specific qualifiers referring to ideas and actions associated with social movements.3 For the purpose of the comparison, I have complemented this corpus with a concise selection of earlier award-winning novels that provide an overview of novelistic universes in the most popular crime novels of the 1970s to 1990s, to provide a point of comparison and in some cases a counterpoint to the contemporary novels under study. From the outset, this preliminary research suggests that the imaginary of political participation (as conveyed through the lexicon of activism) has not altogether disappeared from novelistic universes, in spite of what could be presumed from the disengagement of contemporary crime writers from institutional politics. The specific lexicon of the 1960s and 1970s has of course perceptibly receded. Jean-Patrick Manchette, for example, was fond of the term ‘leftist’, which he often slipped into descriptions of his characters (Nada 1972; Morgue Pleine 1973), as did some of his contemporaries (Pierre Magnan, Le Sang des Atrides, 1977; Jean-François Vilar, C’est toujours les autres qui meurent, 1982). During the Le Poulpe years, fictional activists were still recognizably portrayed as militants, according to the traditional distribution of social movements between trade unions and parties: anarchists, communists, libertarians and so on. However, this concern with politics has not vanished from contemporary novels. The

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corpus even suggests a recent resurgence of interest in figures of activists (Greens, Basque independence fighters, jihadis and pro-migrant activists), although political activism has become more diverse, disparate and detached from the Marxist tradition, in line with the underlying mutations of what the European social sciences once referred to as the “new social movements” (Neveu). A diverse range of radical actions, from people smuggling to murder, robbery or hacking, remain invested with political meaning. But where institutional activism is still present, it is depicted retrospectively in historical noir novels that immerse themselves in the history of the twentieth century—and more specifically, the origins of the French Fifth Republic, including the Algerian War of Independence, the conflict between the OAS (anti-independence organization) and the FLN (Algerian liberation movement), and the turmoil caused by the Algerian question amongst the French institutional Left and in particular in the Communist Party (in Varenne and Cantaloube’s works). However, when figures from this period are present in post-2010 novels—such as Après la Guerre, Le Mur, le Kabyle et le Marin or Un Avion sans elle—they mostly form part of the background and appear as secondary characters. This major difference is not reflected in Table 11.1: on the contrary, the activists who featured in néo-polar narratives were often their main protagonists.

Political Militancy as a Background Element This move of institutional militancy to the background hides a more fundamental shift affecting the construction of novelistic universes. In late twentieth-century novels, diegetic characteristics indicate that politics are thematized according to a system of references associated with the French social movements of the time: the protests of 1961, the autonomous movements of the 1970s, the strikes of 1981. The novels’ main characters often belong to militant groups involved in these events—for instance, Victor Blainville (Vilar 1982), a ‘former activist’ who is surrounded by Surrealists and Trotskyist militants; Manchette characters Buenaventura Diaz in Nada (1972) and ex-Socialist Party member Georges Gerfaut in Le Petit Bleu de la côte Ouest (1976); socialist bar owner Fonfon in Chourmo (Izzo 1996); the protagonist in La Belle de Fontenay, a retired rail worker and anarchist (Pouy 1992); and the entire gallery of characters in Le Poulpe novels, a mix of anarchists and neo-Nazis (Nazis dans le metro, 1996). The political lexicon works as a characterization principle for

L’Unijambiste de la côte 284

C’est toujours les autres qui meurent Meurtres pour Murder in mémoire memoriam Belle de Fontenay

Pierre Siniac

Jean-François Vilar

Didier Daeninckx

Nazis dans le metro

Didier Daeninckx Jean-Bernard Pouy Hervé Prudon Ouarzazate et mourir

Les Sirènes de minuit

J.F. Coatmeur

1996

1992

1983

1982

1980

1976

1972

Year of publication

Nazis in the metro 1996

Nada

Nada

Jean-Patrick Manchette

English title (if any translation)

Title of novel

Author

Table 11.1  Corpus of crime novels

Bretagne liberation front

Anarchists

Activists (if any)

Algerian War of Independence A high school in the suburbs of Paris Anarchist circles, Boulogne-­ Billancourt Neo-Nazi circles in Paris

Antifascists, ‘Left-Wing Nazis’

Workers on strike, unionists Anarchists

Deserters, collaborationists, communists, members of the French Resistance Radical Left in Paris Trotskyists, communists in 1981

1970s terrorism in France (‘Years of Lead’) 1970s terrorism in France (‘Years of Lead’) France from 1917 to 1970

Setting

Clandestine investigation

Kidnapping

Decisive commitment (if any)

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Inhuman resources 2010

Zulu

Fakirs

Cadres noirs

Caryl Férey

Antonin Varenne Pierre Lemaître Marin Ledun

Les Visages écrasés

Beds of nails

Citoyens clandestins

DOA

Zulu

Utu

2011

2009

2008

2007

2004

The 2008 financial crisis France Télécom scandal

Terrorists (Left Wing extremists, Muslim fundamentalists) Communards

The Maori question Maori activists in the post-colonial context 2001, emergence of Jihadis the jihadi terror threat in France Post-apartheid conflict in South Africa The Gulf War

L’Homme aux lèvres de saphir Utu

Hervé Le Corre Caryl Férey

2000

2006

Cartago

Communists, socialists

Activists (if any)

The Left in Marseille in the 1990s End of Mitterrand’s presidency, the Bastille Day parade 1870 War

Setting

1996

Jean-Hugues Oppel

Chourmo

Chourmo

Year of publication

Jean-Claude Izzo

English title (if any translation)

Title of novel

Author

(continued)

Murder

Clandestine investigation Hostage-taking

Investigation the DGSE (French secret services) Clandestine investigation

Murder

Assassination attempt on the President

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Emmanuel Grand

Terminus Belz

Monsieur le Commandant

Pur

Antoine Chainas Romain Slocombe

2012

2012

Monsieur le 2013 Commandant: a wartime confession 2013

Forty days without shadows

2012

Le Dernier Lapon

Mapuche

Olivier Truc

Caryl Férey

2012

After the Crash

Un Avion sans elle Mapuche

Michel Bussi

The migrant crisis and Romanian mafia in France

World War II

French Far Right circles Dieppe, Communist city Scandal of the stolen babies, Argentinian dictature Geopolitical tensions in Swedish Lapland Far Right in France

2011

Militiamen

Far Right groups

Argentinian grandmothers

Neo-fascists and antifascists Communists

Communists

Algerian War of Independence

2011

Activists (if any)

French anti-terrorist Green activists units

Setting

2011

Year of publication

Loser’s corner

L’Honorable Société

Dominique Manotti, DOA Antonin Varenne

English title (if any translation)

Le Mur, le Kabyle et le marin Jérôme Leroy Le Bloc

Title of novel

Author

Table 11.1 (continued)

People smuggling

Denunciation

Assaults

Murder(s)

Assaults, kidnapping

Fascist activism

Murder

Cyber-espionage

Decisive commitment (if any)

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Après la Guerre

L’Homme qui a vu l’homme Yeruldelgger

Aux Animaux la guerre

Obia

Hervé le Corre

Marin Ledun

Nicolas Mathieu

Colin Niel

Hervé Le Corre Caryl Férey Thomas Cantaloube

Dans l’Ombre du brasier Plus jamais seul Requiem pour une République

Olivier Norek Entre deux Mondes Frédéric La Guerre est Paulin une ruse

Ian Manook

Title of novel

Author

In the shadow of the fire

After the war

English title (if any translation)

Activists (if any)

2018 2019

2018

Communards

Terrorism in the 1990s Algeria (the ‘dark decade’) The Paris Commune The migrant crisis Algerian War

2018

2017

2015

2014

Geopolitical tensions in today’s Mongolia Union struggles in Unionists the industrial region of Lorraine Geopolitical tensions around the Ndjuka people in French Guyana The migrant crisis

The Basque conflict

Bordeaux in the Communists 1950s, Algerian War

Setting

2014

2014

2014

Year of publication

Armed conflict Terrorist attack

Armed conflict

People smuggling

People smuggling

Clandestine investigations

People smuggling

Refusal of military enrolment Clandestine investigation Clandestine investigation

Decisive commitment (if any)

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characters, who are identified through their affiliation. For example, in Ouarzazate et mourir (Prudon: 14), Tchang is characterized as an “anarchist by training” and is recruited to assassinate a man described as “a fascist and a pimp”. The novels’ backgrounds are also determined by this political characterization, with stories mostly set in activist or former activist circles. Political engagement is thus defined via the degree of an individual’s involvement with a militant organization. Over the following decades, it became more and more difficult to identify characters who could be referred to as militants. Political characterization is mostly present in the novels’ spatial and temporal backdrops, which are often captured by a single denominator (current affairs and politics, security and politics, finance and politics, etc.). The term militant alludes to the exercise of power, describing the socio-political configurations that form the characters’ backdrops. The plots navigate the political spectrum through historical and social situations, but militancy is no longer through the character’s initial or key characterization. For example, when the protagonist of Entre deux Mondes (Norek 2017), a police officer, helps unaccompanied minor Kilani make the crossing to England, it is not out of pro-migrant political beliefs but because he was unwillingly assigned to the Calais migrant camp and becomes attached to the young boy. In Cadres Noirs (Lemaître 2010), the recruitment of executives turns into a kidnapping and, in the context of the 2008 financial crisis, blows up into a media scandal, fast-tracking the protagonist into an unplanned political career: he becomes “the most famous jobseeker in the world”, whose story is expected to provide “food for thought for politicians” (Lemaître: 429). In novels like L’Homme qui a vu l’homme (Ledun 2014), Zulu and Mapuche (Férey 2008, 2012), Après la guerre and Dans l’Ombre du brasier (Le Corre 2014, 2018), but also L’Honorable Société (Manotti and DOA 2011) and Fakirs (Varenne 2009), the plot is not only associated with a conflict, but more broadly with a national or international historical and political context: the 2008 financial crisis, the French presidential elections, South Africa’s political wars, the Afghan conflict and the Commune in Paris. There is a shift in scale and point of view: the characters move away from institutional activism but, although they are not labelled as political actors in the diegesis, their actions can take on a political value. This does not mean, of course, that in novels from the 1970s to 1990s, characters like Victor Blainville and Buenaventura Diaz (in Vilar’s C’est toujours les autres qui meurent and in Manchette’s Nada) are described as having a stable and unwavering political activity, or that activism is

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ubiquitous in all novels from this period. Conversely, a number of contemporary crime novels do feature characters who are involved in organized political activities: the grandmothers or abuelas in Mapuche (Férey 2008), who are figureheads of civil resistance against the Argentinian dictature; the Green activists in L’Honorable Société (Manotti and DOA 2012, 2011), during the French presidential election campaign; or the contemporary Far Right extremists in Bloc national (Leroy 2011). However, the main protagonists are rarely political activists and never Marxists: the multifold and diffuse nature of their activities often only eludes the notion of ‘militancy’. In contrast, in néo-polar novels, when activism forms part of a character’s past (e.g. in Vilar’s novels) or when it is jeopardized by the diegesis (in Manchette’s novels), institutional activism still provides the starting point for a meditation on political engagement, grounded in postMay 1968 nostalgia and generating ambiguous figures of ‘enchanted disenchantment’, as analysed by Collovald and Neveu (2001). As explicit mentions of activism become increasingly sparse, and the political circumstances take on a growing importance, the focus shifts to the conditions of political engagement, thus enlightened as a process: How do specific situations generate engagement? When does a person translate this engagement into action? At what point does an action become political? These changes reveal a more fluid understanding of political action, echoing the social sciences’ recent interest in a wider, ‘process-centred’ approach to political engagement (Fillieule 2001)—an approach that considers the participation of ‘ordinary people’ in critical moments of History and the intrinsic dynamics of events (Deluermoz and Gobille 2015). This evolution goes along with a global de-nationalization of critical theory: political action is now considered through the exploration of diverse situations of crisis, which novelists often find beyond their respective national history.

Internationalizing Political Action In Mapuche by Caryl Férey (2008), the condition of the Mapuche people collides with the abuelas movement in a plot that begins with the abduction of babies during the Argentinian dictatorship. Jana, a young Mapuche sculptor and sex worker, investigates alongside private detective Ruben (the son of an Argentinian opponent and a supporter of the abuelas) to find the biological brother of a stolen baby who has been adopted by an influential wealthy family. Jana breaks into the Navy archives, steals a suspect’s military file, kidnaps the perpetrators, and manages to keep them

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captive until they are arrested and the two brothers are reunited. While the “1810 Constitution has […] purely and simply denied the Mapuche who “only account for three percent of the Argentinian population today” (98), Jana, who “carves her dreams” into wood, brings the desaparecidos back to life thanks to her investigation and, more importantly, thanks to the fearlessness she inherited from her status as a survivor. The Zulu, Mapuche, Ndjuka, Mongol, Sami and Maori communities are at the heart of six of the most awarded French novels between 2005 and 2020: Zulu, Utu, Le Dernier Lapon, Obia, Mapuche and Yeruldegger. This interest in native populations who live as minorities on their own land can be associated with the many French novels that revisit the history of relations between France and Algeria (Le Mur, le Kabyle et le marin; Requiem pour une république; La Guerre est une ruse), and others that question France’s colonial past and its consequences for these territories and their populations, including Colin Niel’s trilogy set in Guyane, as well as Michel Bussi’s bestsellers set in La Réunion (Ne lâche pas ma Main) and in the Marquise islands (Au Soleil redouté), and other novels exploring highly divisive regional independence movements in Corsica (Michel Bussi) or in the Basque Country (Marin Ledun). The popularity of such geopolitical settings marks an ‘ethnographic’ turn in French crime fiction over the last few years (Erdmann 22–24), also observed in other crime writing traditions, expanding on the space of geopolitical struggles and conflictual national identities, like the Spanish or the Irish (McGuire; Walsh 59). In these stories, according to Erdmann, the investigation becomes a pretext for an ethnographic survey which unfolds according to the genre’s specific structure, where a series is built on chrono-spatial variations (affecting the locus criminalis) rather than on the elements of the plot (Erdmann). The tension between stereotype and singularity that sits at the core of popular literature is thus revisited as a tension between the lure of folklorism and the critical assessment of cultural particularities. For instance, Walsh analyses the recent rise of Catalan noir fiction, whose singular posture and critical approach to national politics can be explained by recent Catalan history in post-Franco Spain (59). In another study on the representation of the foreign in crime fiction, Pezzotti shows how Andrea Camilleri’s work articulates Sicilian folklore and a critical outlook on a fictitious national Italian identity (185) Our French novels are all based on a similar narrative structure: in each of them, the investigator is faced with a criminal event (theft or murder),

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and from this particular crime develops a personal interest in the case’s cultural dimension, often because of this character’s native origins (Ndjuka in Obia, Mapuche in Mapuche, Lappalainen in Le Dernier Lapon, Basque in L’Homme qui a vu l’homme). Most novels introduce a relation of causality between these two narrative features (Le Dernier Lapon, Yeruldegger). Rather than explaining this shift by the genre’s intrinsically ‘ethnological structure’ (Reuter 2015), I interpret it as a symptom of the de-­ nationalization of novelistic universes in recent years, to respond to the decline of the traditional categorization of the political as constructed and unified by the nation (Keucheyan 2017). In the past, the serialization of narrative patterns was based on variations on political action; the shift towards location-based series responds to a contemporary interest in locating political struggles and examining their stakes and proceedings. The ethnographic dimension in these narratives confirms the focus on the conjuncture and on the ‘diversity’ of situations (Knight 2003).

Political Subjectivities and Engagements In the boundless universe of these de-nationalized, plural and diverse struggles, the novels in my corpus also appear to deploy diverse modalities of participation in collective action. What drives Mapuche-born Jana to risk her life to find the people who murdered her colleagues, other than “a tingle […] in her Indian veins” (Férey 2008: 223)? What causes Zulu police officer Ali Neuman to chase two murderous generals into the desert despite his hierarchy’s instructions, in the hope of putting an end to abject pharmaceutical tests conducted by Western corporations, thus sacrificing his life? Why does Iban Urtiz, a humble French freelance journalist, decide to chase the army men who brutalized ETA activists, in the name of a regional cultural minority to which he does not really belong (Ledun 2014)? The popularity of this genre with cultural studies suggests that crime writing lends itself to a reflection on cultural identities, and that its success has paralleled the rise of identity-centred approaches to social issues (Krajenbrink and Quinn 2009; Anderson et  al. 2012; Mills and Julien 2005). It is difficult to conduct a diachronic study of the role played by motive in the narrativization of political actions. However, a fair number of novels in my corpus clearly articulate politics with a constellation of themes pertaining to the characters’ identities. In DOA’s spy epic Citoyens clandestins (2007), journalist Amel agrees to take on an investigation into

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the ‘jihadi phenomenon’ passed on to her by eminent reporter Bastien Rougeard. A “French citizen of Moroccan origin”, as she insists during her job interview when people keep referring to her as ‘Moroccan’, she willingly takes risks in order to meet her own standard of what it means to be ‘a good journalist’—that is, a journalist who “fights” (DOA 88–89). In the dialogue quoted above, Amel has to turn down the job offer or cancel her wedding trip. But behind the journalist’s invocation of professional standards, which borrows from the vocabulary of political struggle, what is actually at stake for this woman—the child of immigrants from a country associated with religious fundamentalism—is recognition. Like other authors, DOA builds a universe where choosing political engagements is also a way of finding one’s place in a world of stigmatization, where action is a way of countering discrimination, of finding one’s place professionally or culturally. In Colin Niel’s Obia, the police investigation led by Anato, a Ndjuka who grew up in the Paris suburbs, collides with the character’s quest for his true identity as he returns to his home village and reconnects with his Noir-Marron origins. At the other end of the genre’s spectrum, Un Avion sans elle, Michel Bussi’s bestseller (2012), narrates an investigation about a young woman, Lylie, whose biological identity has become uncertain after she survived a plane crash as a baby, and who is claimed by two families from two very different backgrounds, including a Communist family living in the industrial city of Dieppe. In this social parable, the character’s social identity remains forever undetermined: in spite of the social sacrifices it would involve, its elucidation is an irresistible quest for the various characters (the private investigator, the two putative families and Lylie herself). By making the understanding of a character’s identity a key aspect of the plot, these novels are recoding the imaginary of political engagement from the perspective of self-construction, de-centring the narrative of choice onto the characters’ intimate motivations, and thus echoing the rise of autobiographic and polyphonic writing (Gefen 2017). The characters’ actions are rooted in today’s ‘third culture of emancipation’ (Rosanvallon 2018), split between the appeal of collective action inherited from the recent tradition of social movements and, on the other hand, the desire for individual autonomy. In the diegesis, ‘political engagement’—that is, actions that are likely to be labelled as political in the narrative—is fugitive and contingent, both necessary and accidental, imperious and uncertain.

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Involuntary and Tragic Commitments As shown by the story of the Mapuche woman who declares “I’m coming with you” to the detective because something is stirring in her “Indian veins”, or that of Ali Neuman in Zulu who carries on with what he knows to be “a suicidal plan”, the intimate reading of the political act involves an emotional and sensorial characterization, in contrast with an existentialist understanding of subjectivity and action. In Plus jamais seul, another novel by Caryl Férey (2017), the explanation of the commitment made by Zoe, Angélique and Marco, and ultimately by the protagonist McCash, in favour of clandestine immigration obliterates the possibility of a deliberate choice: Setting up a clandestine immigration operation is punishable by years in jail, McCash reminded her: Marco is a tax lawyer and visibly leads a settled life, you have a child, why did you follow Angélique in this adventure? — I’ve already answered your question: out of human dignity. I was reticent at first, only because of our daughter. But eventually, I changed my mind without anybody forcing me. I don’t mind the risk. He nodded gently. — What about Marco? — Marco is a pirate, Zoé replied. Just like you (195, EPub).

McCash is not a sailor but a travelling detective who lost an eye in a riot during the Irish conflict. For him, piracy is a “temperament”, which could also be described as “nostalgia for the possible”, felt by a man who “never had anything to lose” since he beat up his father, lost an eye and broke up with Angélique. “Self-destructive instincts”, “rage by the cubic meter” (Férey 2017: 17, 220): the characters are constantly questioning their motives, and reasserting the role of instinctive, meaningless and sometimes desperate choices. Impulsive reactions are imbued with the same moral urgency in Marin Ledun’s Les Visages écrasés (2011) where the main character, Carole Matthieu, an occupational health doctor, is struck by the necessity to murder one of her patients. Because her job is about “listening, auscultating, vaccinating […], but also relieving, reassuring. And curing. Using the right treatment”, she grabs her Beretta handgun, which she had been keeping “for emergency use only” (22). She wants Vincent, a patient who has been bullied by his management in his everyday work and is suffering from severe depression, to “go away with dignity” (33–34). This novel also shows political action not as the product of a free and informed decision, but as

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the outcome of a slow and painful series of causes and effects, a knobbly tangle of ins and outs, where [Camille Matthieu is only] one link in the chain. (33–34)

The same sense of inevitability is present in Le Bloc (2011) by Jérôme Leroy, a novel that retraces the story of a writer named Antoine Maynard, who “became a fascist because of a girl’s sex” (1) according to the first words of the novel. In Thomas Cantaloube’s Requiem pour une république (2018), Sirius Volkstrom, who in a short diegetic interval is involved in the OAS-led terrorist attack on a Paris-Strasbourg train in 1961 before dying by mistake when trying to save an Algerian during the police killings of 17 October 1961, seems mainly driven by the death of his lover, who is killed by the secret services, and his desire to avenge him: “I don’t give a fuck about the OAS. I just want to make the bastards suffer! This new Republic is rotten!” (543). Sirius Volkstrom is not the only character who commits a fatal political gesture: in Le Corre’s Dans l’Ombre du brasier (2018), during the ‘Bloody Week’, police officer Antoine Roques decides to stay in Paris to support the Communards, in spite of his wife’s plea to leave while he still can, on 21 May 1871: —Why aren’t you coming with me? We could be with them, and protect them. What do you think? —I can’t. I must…   He stopped, out of breath. He could no longer tell where his duty lied. —You must what? For whom? For what? —I have made some commitments. You encouraged me to do it, remember. You were proud of me for doing it. Now I must go all the way, do you understand? (427, EPub)

And because Antoine’s choice forces him to remain locked inside the walls of Paris on 21 May, during the first days of the Bloody Week, this choice is irreversible and tragic: Antoine is shot by the Versailles army at the end of the novel, as he (finally) attempts to run away. Whether they lead to a murder, to a situation of danger or to civil disobedience, critical actions in these novels are deliberately approached in reverse of the positive Sartrian definition of political engagement, considered as a deliberate and carefully thought-through choice leading to the protagonist’s institutional affiliation. On the contrary, these actions are

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brief tipping points, taking place during moments of acceleration in the narrative, and associated with the build-up of suspense. They are not described as rational decisions (in the Sartrian sense of the term) but as imperatives, shaped by circumstances, fuelled by the characters’ determinisms and negative affects, and endured in the course of the thriller.

A Place of Disarray Described as impulsive, instant, personal and emotional, these gestures ultimately challenge the representation of political rationality. Echoing recent understandings of ‘noir’ as an aesthetic of affective negativity (Breu and Hatmaker), contemporary French novels highlight a form of affective fatality, invoking affects like doubt, fatigue or despair, when justifying the narrative action. Many of them stage hesitant subjectivities at the moment of action, the character’s hesitant political goals, the uncertainty of their political values and motives regarding actions that could otherwise take on a political meaning. In the extract quoted above, Antoine Roques expresses the sense of duty that derives from his choices, but he is no longer able to articulate the political purpose of this decision. Similarly, Sirius Volkstrom has no particular convictions regarding the OAS or the Algerian War in general: it is only in retrospect that his terrorist attack, despite its historic impact, is associated with a ‘political struggle’ (Cantaloube 2018: 539, EPub). La Guerre est une ruse, the first volume of Frédéric Paulin’s successful trilogy retracing the emergence of jihad in Algeria (Paulin 2018: 253, EPub), stages two characters who are like mirror images of each other: Tedj Benlazar, a French-Algerian man who works for the secret services in Algeria and shares his disillusioned perspective on both countries, and Raouf, a key member of the Front islamique du salut, a fundamentalist group, who can’t really explain his conviction: [Raouf] ‘can’t quite remember how he found himself socializing with some friends who were close to the FIS, how he became a member of the party, and how he found himself in the street in 1991, fighting the police, the army and the authorities.’

Finally, Jérôme Leroy’s Le Bloc (2011), Antoine Chainas’ Pur (2012) and Romain Slocombe’s Monsieur le Commandant (2011) all stage characters who are hesitating when faced with the discourses and actions of the Far Right. Stanko in Le Bloc finds himself caught in the movement without

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any real conviction; Alice considers that the fascist group ‘Force et Honneur’ could be instrumentalized for the benefit of the police; the writer-protagonist in Monsieur le Commandant is split between his loathing of the Gestapo’s wrongdoings and his antisemitism, while the fictional afterword of the novel stresses that this character did play a part in collaboration (Slocombe 2011: 264, EPub). Whether staging identity, morals or psychology, or volatile value systems, these narratives appear to undermine the representation of political agency. While they continue to stage political engagements, the characters’ subjectivities are often a bit ‘off-centre’, circumspect and indecisive. When these characters do on occasion connect with a militant organization through their actions, it is the product of fortuitous circumstances, of a personal quest or of poorly controlled emotions (the ‘rage’ mentioned in Plus jamais seul). The protagonists are not initially referred to as ‘militants’ (they ‘do not do politics anymore’, to quote a character from Zulu), but they do happen to change the course of spatial and temporal frameworks characterized as political. By emphasizing the role of indetermination and determinism, of chance and affects, these novels question the rational foundations of institutional political action, and defeat the “very model of organized action” (Rancière 2007). To an existentialist understanding of political engagement (pictured as rational, or at least deliberate, lasting and nominable), they oppose the contingency and fragility of political determinations. They document diverse forms of political engagement that do not follow the legacy of institutional culture, but instead take on multifold and uncertain directions, thus widening the scope of political action and the spectrum of historical ‘protagonism’ (Burstin 2010; Deluermoz and Gobille 2015). Last but not least, by resonating with contemporary attempts at delineating new social movements, they contribute to the expression of a common concern as to the very conditions of possibility of political engagement in contemporary times.

Conclusion: Towards a Typology of Contemporary Political Figures and Actions A typology of the figures engaged in political action in contemporary crime writing could be broken down into three categories. The first comprises the neo-militants, who appear to continue the tradition of the néo-­ polar’s representation of activism but are transfigured into new identities such as the hacker or the activist-migrant smuggler to reflect recent

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reconfigurations in the social movements landscape: their diversification, their detachment from organized activism, their de-centralization and their (trans)culturalization. Another category comprises ‘followers’ who are dragged into political action through no will of their own: they include self-searching individuals such as detectives, journalists, police officers or doctors, who perpetrate political actions, sometimes beyond the point of no return, without really grasping their full implications. Finally, a third category that would be worth exploring in more depth is made up of members of the police: as representatives of power bound by the duty of confidentiality, they embody the conflict between professional responsibility and political belief. However, all three categories share a common feature in the novels where they are sometimes mixed together: they reveal the often hazardous dimension of political action, and disrupt the narrative based on the theory of political engagement according to which the course of events is the product of conscious, rational and reliable choices. Through this preference for the active/passive agents of social movements rather than for militants, contemporary crime writers explore and symbolize their ideological and aesthetic reluctance for the militant model that prevailed until recently in representations of crime writing. In doing so, these authors also represent their own hesitations and political shifts. By opening up the spectrum of political meaning, they elaborate a raison d’être for writing that eludes the militant metaphor, and invest hesitation, sensitivity and even unintentionality (a notion that evokes the artistic value of intransitivity) with a political weight. While polar as a social group remains marked by the political engagement of some of its actors, contemporary crime writing is confronting the last remains of a political consciousness that has long drifted away from its militant roots. Acknowledgement  The research presented here has been financed by the research project DETECt: Detecting Transcultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives (Horizon 2020, 2018–2021) (Grant agreement number 770151).

Notes 1. All translations mine, unless otherwise stated. 2. Translation of a French original: « les éléments d’un lexique où le récit va chercher ses ingrédients et que le lecteur consulte pour déterminer la signification narrative des faits dont se compose l’intrigue ».

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3. I searched the corpus for occurrences of the following terms: politique (politics/political), activisme (activism), militer (to campaign), militantisme (campaigning/activism), engagé (politically engaged), communiste (communist), anarchiste (anarchist), libertaire (libertarian), maoïste (Maoist), fasciste (fascist), syndicaliste (unionist) and grève (strike).

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Pepper, Andrew and David Schmid, editors. 2016. Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction: A World of Crime. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pezzotti, Barbara. 2010. ‘Between commitment and disenchantment: an interview with Andrea G. Pinketts’. The Italianist, 30:1. 151–162, 2010. Pouy, Jean-Bernard. 1992. Belle de Fontenay. Paris: Gallimard. Prudon, Hervé. 1996. Ouarzazate et mourir. Paris: Baleine. Rancière, Jacques. 2007. Politique de la littérature. Paris: Galilée. 23–39. Reuter, Yves. 2015. ‘L’étrange disponibilité du roman policier’. Revue critique de fixxion contemporaine. 18. Available online at: http://www.revue-­critique-­de-­ fixxion-­francaise-­contemporaine.org/rcffc/article/view/fx10.02/979. Rosanvallon, Pierre. 2018. Notre histoire intellectuelle et politique, 1968–2018. Paris: Seuil. Ryan, Marie Laure. 1998. ‘À la recherche du thème narratif’. Communications, 47. Variations sur le thème. Pour une thématique. Editors, C.  Bremond and T.G. Pavel. Slocombe, Romain. 2011. Monsieur Le Commandant. Paris: NiLs. EPub. ———. 2013. Monsieur le Commandant. Paris: Pocket. Varenne, Antonin. 2009. Fakirs. Paris: Viviane Hamy. ———. 2011. Le Mur, le Kabyle et le marin. Paris: Viviane Hamy. Vilar, Jean-François. 1982. C’est toujours les autres qui meurent. Paris: Fayard. Walsh, Anne L. 2017. Fictional Portrayals of Spain’s Transition to Democracy: Transitional Fantasies. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press.

Open Access  This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

CHAPTER 12

Shadow Economies: The Financial Crisis and European TV Crime Series Thomas Morsch

The Financial Crisis and the Crisis of Representation One of the most significant events in the more recent history of Europe, equal in its importance to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020, has been the financial crisis that started in 2008. What began as a crisis of the US financial industry, ascribable to the immense and incalculable risk of certain mortgage-backed securities and similar derivatives traded among banks, soon expanded to a worldwide financial crisis—bringing many reputable banks to the brink of bankruptcy—and further to what has been named the European debt crisis that affected several member states of the European Union, most severely Greece, Spain, Ireland, and Portugal. As the immediate crash of the US financial sector was avoided through the intervention (often referred to as a ‘bailout’) of the US treasury department, so was the financial collapse of European states by the intervention of the EU and of international

T. Morsch (*) Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Dall’Asta et al. (eds.), Contemporary European Crime Fiction, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21979-5_12

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organizations like the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).1 The avoidance of an immediate crash of the financial sector by the intervention of the state did not prevent the crisis from perpetuating through different strata and sectors of the economy as well as into the international and, ultimately, world economy. The ramifications of the crisis were far and deep, its origins a mystery to many. Even experts had a hard time explaining the chain of events that led to the disastrous consequences the world was facing. It was also unclear if the cause of the so-called credit crunch was the result of wrong decision-making on the part of bankers, the inevitable consequence of increasingly complex and untransparent financial products—derivatives of the second-, third-, or more order-like credit default swaps, collaterized debt obligations, and mortgage-backed securities—or an inevitable crisis of neoliberalist capitalism and the dynamics of financialization (Martin 2002; Krippner 2005; Haiven 2014; Kotz 2017; Thomson and Dutta 2018; Mader et al. 2020). The opaqueness of events that affected so many states and individual lives left ample room for the cultural sphere to intervene and translate the events into stories that somehow make the historic events more tangible, more concrete, more seizable. And indeed, internationally there are many examples of documentary films and features as well as fictional treatments dealing with the financial crisis,2 although the highly abstract nature of financial transactions and economic processes does not easily translate into concrete images and narratives. If Kinkle and Toscano (2011: 39) somewhat optimistically state in their early survey of films about the credit crunch that the representation of crisis need not be a crisis of representation, there are nonetheless limits to the ability of media and fictional narratives to adequately translate complex and abstract financial matters into entertainment. The fundamental evasiveness of economic matters has already been stated in a seminal article by Susan Buck-Morss on ‘envisioning capital’ (1995),3 and this diagnosis remains valid today, as many economic processes, like high-frequency trading, even transcend the threshold of human perception (Hayles 165).4 Therefore, against Kinkle and Toscano, I would claim that a crisis of representation is indeed in order, considering the characteristics of finance economy. There is a degree to which the inner workings of financialization refuse to be put on screen. Many aspects and dimensions of contemporary finance economy cannot be adequately represented, but only allegorically or affectively expressed, as I argue elsewhere (Morsch 2018). Still, given the significance of the

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financial crisis and the severity of its ramifications, it is somewhat disappointing to see how rarely popular culture tackles this subject, and this is true for crime fiction as well. Very few European films and television series deal with this historical event, depict the crisis itself, reflect on it, confront its consequences, or translate the financial crisis in a way that fosters some kind of ‘popular knowledge’ (cf. Birchall 2006) about it. Following remarks by Carla Freccero, I refer to the ‘popular’, the eminent research area of Cultural Studies, in order “to talk about the everyday terrain of people without being sure who the people are, that is, without deciding ahead of time and once and for all who is being referred to by the term ‘people’” (Freccero 3).5 As John Storey (2018: 9) points out, the popular (a term that casts an even wider net than ‘popular culture’) serves as a site where the collective dreams and wishes of a given society are articulated in a sometimes disguised and sometimes all too consumable, but nonetheless relevant, manner. Following this line of argument into the realm of knowledge, we can say that the popular is also a realm within society where a particular kind of non-expert knowledge resides. Popular culture is often accused of simplifying political or social matters when dealing with them. But there is another side to this: while popular culture might fail in some sense to adequately represent more complicated matters, it is, at the same time, an important agent in service of the societal dissemination of accessible knowledge that is accepted by the people as the reality of their lives. Popular knowledge is what circulates as public discourse among the people, derived from expert, political, journalistic, scientific discourse, but more communicable, more manageable, more barrier-free. It is the knowledge accepted by people in their everyday life as the shared knowledge of a society. It forms the background we can refer to in our communication and rely upon in our decisions in the absence of a more profound or specialized knowledge. As it ranges from the simplest issues to the most complex ones (including the financial markets, politics, science, etc.), it constitutes the very fabric of society, what we accept as a society’s construction of reality and which is mainly produced through mass media in all its guises: as fictional entertainment, as news, features and documentary reports, as advertising (cf. Luhmann 2000). While the more complex aspects of the financial crisis (that which even experts at times fail to fully grasp) are too complicated to find their way into popular culture unfiltered, we should still expect popular culture to

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reflect on this important event and contribute to our knowledge about it, even in the pointed form of crime fiction. But alas, the bread and butter of popular television crime drama is murder out of greed, murder out of jealousy, murder out of hate, not white-collar crime. Only few examples of serialized crime fiction, the most popular and most widespread television genre in Europe,6 have taken up the task of translating the events of the financial crisis and its economic ramifications into crime stories. When the financial crisis is referenced in crime fiction, it is commonly relegated to the background narrative, explaining the actions of characters. We can observe this more often in social dramas like Sorry We Missed You (2019) about a family that is struggling with an overwhelming debt since the financial crisis, but there are examples from crime fiction as well. The European country hit hardest by the debt crisis is Greece, so it is no wonder that a crime movie from Greece aptly illustrates our point, the thriller Tetarti 04:45 (Wednesday 04:45, 2015), a Greek-German-Israeli co-production directed by Alexis Alexiou, set in 2010. The narrative conflict, that is to say the problems of the protagonist, the owner of a Jazz club in Athens, arises from his inability to pay back his debts. He is given only a few hours to perform a multitude of competing tasks that are almost impossible to handle within the given time. His looming bankruptcy, of course, is due to the country’s overall recession, which, in turn, is due to the austerity policies implemented by the EU, the IMF, and the ECB as the price to pay for the prevention of the state’s bankruptcy.7 Therefore, the events of the film derive directly from Greece’s real economic anguish. We can read the protagonist’s situation—characterized by multiple binds, competing directives, and conflicting obligations that threaten to lead to a violent resolution at any time within the few hours of the narrative—as a crime fiction allegory of the trials of Greek society and politics under the imposed rules of austerity, over which the Greek government and the Greek people had little to no control. The fact that crime in Tetarti 04:45 becomes an allegory of the political situation of Greece prevents the debt crisis from serving just as an arbitrary backdrop to a story that could easily be motivated by different causes, as is the case in many other crime fiction series since the late 2000s. But very few of them really delve into the financial world itself or really broach the issue of the financial crisis.8 Even a series like the Swiss-Belgian production Quartier des Banques (Banking District, RTS, 2017–2020), squarely placed, as the title suggests, in the banking milieu, achieves little in this regard. The setting of the series is a renowned (fictional) private bank

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located in Geneva. When the director of the bank falls into a coma (not by chance as the viewer is to suspect, but by sinister design), his sister must take over the business. It is through her eyes that the viewer experiences the world of banking, as she uncovers some of the hidden secrets of the bank’s business. The real-life backdrop of the story is, to a minor degree, the financial crisis, but more prominently, the international hunt for tax evaders by the US Department of the Treasury. It is the confidentiality and secrecy of Swiss banks that is the main narrative interest of the series and the object of some criticism within the narrative. But the secrets uncovered over the course of the two seasons have more to do with the family dynamics than with the world of high finance. The crimes happening in the series motivate an investigation that reveals some of the sinister workings behind the bank’s façade, but the series hardly seizes the opportunity to dig into the actual financial mechanisms. Even this series located in the banking district only touches upon the underlying topic of finance, without developing a deeper understanding of it.

Follow the Money Films and series like the ones mentioned above follow the consequences of the lack of money—crime out of desperation and poverty—or follow the money into the banking milieu as a setting of intrigue, but they hardly follow the trail of money into the inner workings of the banking business and the finance economy. A television crime series that delves with more ambition into the sphere of banking and high finance is the Danish show Bedrag (Follow the Money, DR1, 2016–2019), especially in its first season. A team of detectives coming from homicide and a financial crime unit investigate an investment company that illegally gained insight into contracts and upcoming sales of a Danish green energy company, Evergreen, and that used this insider knowledge to manipulate the stock market. The first season is about this kind of insider trading with so-called energy futures—that is, certificates on energy that has not yet been produced, as it is explained in the series, which designates this type of insider trading as ‘frontrunning’ (cf. Season 1, Episode 2). Bedrag is a rare example of a series that tackles finance economy in a more direct manner. Besides telling a suspenseful crime story, it is clearly the intention to tell something about the financial mechanisms that allow for these white-collar crimes in the first place. This is achieved through the

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narrative pairing of two very different detectives: Alf Rybjerg, a younger detective of the financial crimes unit with a thorough understanding of economic matters and banking procedures, and Mads Justesen, an older homicide detective who is the direct descendant of other detectives of Nordic noir: afflicted, solitary, distrustful, and impatient. While Mads is a character bordering on a cliché, because this type of stubborn detective is a staple of contemporary European crime television, he is also an important stand-in for the viewer. Largely ignorant of the workings of finance and with little patience to acquire an understanding of it, Mads is the addressee of all kinds of explanations about the nature of the crimes perpetrated and the financial instruments used to illegally profit from the green energy market—information that has to be conveyed to the viewer in order for him or her to understand the narrative. Besides the narrative depending on a character largely ignorant of financial matters, there are other indicators that the creators do not fully trust the allure of—and the suspense produced by—a purely white-collar, financial, and almost abstract crime: not only are other types of crime involved, like the murder of a journalist and drug trafficking, there are also a number of secondary motifs besides the central topic of the narrative accumulated in the course of the series, like the stifling police bureaucracy, the difficulty of legal process, the investigators choosing illegal methods to obtain evidence and cutting corners in other ways to circumvent red tape, corporate intrigue, entanglements between politics and energy companies, and the exploitation of foreign workers in the EU. Certain aspects of the series’ narrative construction (the pairing of two detectives with different levels of understanding of finance) and some of its narrative devices (like the accumulation of many secondary motifs, each of them with the potential to elicit additional interest from viewers) were obviously put into place by the creators in order to make the topic of financial crime more palatable to the average viewer. Despite this caution, Bedrag is one of the few attempts in European television crime fiction to embrace the financial sphere as a setting. It also gives us a glimpse of what a more detailed analysis of such crime series might unearth as the implicit popular knowledge about the world of finance. Three examples may help illustrate this point. First, within the series it is important how in the production of green energy scientific knowledge and corporate interests collide. The company Evergreen, which is at the centre of the narrative, bets on the development of a revolutionary in-house technology based on super-conductors to store and

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transport energy without loss, a technology called ‘quantum levitation’. Talking with his chief legal advisor and reacting to the cautionary worries of the scientist who initiated the project and now sees it on the verge of failure, the CEO of Evergreen takes a decisively opposite stance to the logic of science. While scientific progress is based on critique, scepticism, and revision, as Karl Popper’s (1962) critical rationalism suggests, this logic is turned on its head as soon as the scientific project enters the realm of corporate logic, as concerns and doubt are no longer permitted: ‘We do not allow for any doubt’ is what the CEO tells his company’s legal advisors and scientists (cf. Season 1, Episode 3). What viewers can take away from this scene is the insight that while technological advancements depend on scientific progress, the commercial implementation of technologies through corporations comes with a price. The academic insight into the fundamental differences between, and the autonomy of, different social areas—as proposed, for example, by sociological systems theory (cf. Luhmann 1995, 2012–2013)—is expressed here in a more concrete and tangible fashion, contributing to the popular knowledge about the structure of society. Furthermore, the series contrasts two different types of entrepreneurship. The chief legal advisor of Green Energy is forced to take on the invidious task of enforcing lay-offs in a subsidiary company. She is ordered to trim down the company so that it attains a higher price at the planned sale. She encounters the director of the subsidiary company who has inherited it from his father and embodies a completely different type of entrepreneur than the boss of the parent company that is about to go public: he appears as the thoughtful and caring leader of a medium-sized business that is rooted in the local community and who bears great responsibility towards his employees. In the end, his company is not only sold, but liquidated: without his knowledge (and without the knowledge of the legal advisor who is to execute a plan she does not fully understand), the CEO of the parent company had already sold and leased back all the company’s assets, buildings, and machines. The parent company is still producing something—green energy—but in the series it appears as ‘tainted’ through its affiliation with the finance sector, so that the ruthless action by its CEO further confirms a view articulated throughout the series. Finance is portrayed as a cancer that corrupts the healthy ‘normal’ economic endeavours (i.e. the production of goods) that the series favours. In this way, the division articulated in relation to scientific and corporate logic and in relation to entrepreneurs serves within the series as a

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stepping stone to articulate a third difference more pertinent to our topic, a division within the system of economics, as the series’ narrative sharply distinguishes between the sphere of production—of the development, manufacturing, and sale of palpable products—and the financial market as a secondary, almost vampiric sphere within the economy that leeches the productivity of the former. Economy in this perspective is divided between a more traditional kind of production, and the obscure, almost impenetrable workings of modern finance capitalism represented by investment banks and hedge funds. This view certainly neglects the degree to which the financial industry not only feeds off but contributes to material production by providing necessary investments and loans, but while this strong dichotomy might picture the workings of the economy in an overly simplistic manner, it nevertheless reflects a widespread prejudice and in turn further shapes the public knowledge about the financial sector—a knowledge that is marked by a deep scepticism about the inner mechanisms of contemporary finance capitalism. However, Bedrag fuels this sceptical attitude towards the financial industry without allowing its viewers a deeper look at these mechanisms. In the end, the mechanisms of the financial sector remain opaque, and the series focuses on the wrongdoing of individual actors within finance, elite criminals who soon resort to more violence. The initial interest of the series, the economic dimension of crime, loses some importance during its course compared to the easier depiction of more conventional crime. Even though the resolution of the crime plot owes much to simple accounting and mathematical procedures, which is certainly unusual for crime series,9 it is almost as if the violent ending of the first season is there to allow the series to avoid a more realistic resolution of the plot, a lengthy and tedious court procedure that would have to unravel the complex financial interrelations between various players that facilitated the fraud. While tackling the intriguing topic of economic and financial crime, the series’ writers seem to distrust the impact of white-collar crime on audiences and resort to violent action to keep up the interest in a story whose foundation might be seen as too complex for casual audiences. The following two seasons continue to balance white-collar crime taking place in financial institutions with more immediate action and suspense. The second season presents the banking milieu as even more sinister than the first season. The CEO of Denmark’s biggest bank is behind a scheme perpetrated for years, in which businesses in financial troubles are forced into bankruptcy, so that their real estate assets can be sold below

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market price to shell companies belonging to the CEO himself. This, however, is only the season’s ‘entry level crime’: a more severe agenda is the attempt to manipulate the stock market and the banking sector so as to destabilize the Danish economy and to short the Danish krone. This narrative is certainly the result of the way the public perception of banking institutions changed after the financial crisis. Whereas before the crisis banks were predominantly perceived as reputable, reliable, and trustworthy institutions, the glimpse into their inner workings granted by news coverage of the ‘credit crunch’ has modified this view considerably for the worse. The crimes of Follow the Money paint a sinister picture of a corrupt banking sector. But in the end, the truly sinister power behind this is a single CEO and a group of conspiracists, not the fiscal institutions in general. This softens the judgement on them considerably. Finally, in the third and last season several competing crime plots are unfolded, including drug dealing and human trafficking, but also including one storyline that leads back to finance: because she is denied a well-deserved and overdue promotion, a small-time bank employee starts laundering money for the local drug kingpin. In this way, the series follows the money through three seasons from high finance to your local bank branch, but without reaching beyond crime fiction’s typical focus on the wrongdoing of immoral or misguided individuals.

Bad Banks The most notable attempt of a television series to explore the realm of finance and white-collar crime without leaving it behind for more familiar forms of violent crime is Bad Banks, a German-Luxemburgish co-­ production (ZDF/ARTE 2018–2020, created by Oliver Kienle) that comprises two seasons and twelve episodes. The series is set in Frankfurt and Luxemburg, two of Europe’s major financial hubs. It takes its name from a phenomenon that became prominent during the financial crisis: a ‘bad bank’ is a separate company founded by a bank or another financial institution used to discard its toxic and high-risk assets.10 However, the setting of Bad Banks is not a bad bank in the literal sense; rather, the title plays with the moral semantics of ‘bad’ within the context of a regular investment bank that secretly and behind the backs of its shareholders sells its toxic assets in the amount of 300 million euro to an Arabian hedge fund that turns out to be a sham company, belonging to the bank itself.

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Therefore, the falsification of the bank’s balance, alongside bribery and insider trading, is the major crime perpetrated in Bad Banks. While the second of the two existing seasons keeps up with the most recent developments in finance by tackling ‘green’ and ethical investments, ‘fintech’ innovation, and so-called robo-advisors, it is the first season that is of interest as a reflection of and a comment on the cultural image of banking after the crisis. The protagonist of the series is Jana Liekam, a young and highly ambitious investment banker who is the victim of a corporate plot and the mastermind behind a devious intrigue of her own that in the end brings about the collapse of the bank she works for. What makes her superior to many of her colleagues are her skills as developer of financial products, and her perceptiveness in all financial matters, giving her insight into the potential of financial products as well as into the needs of clients. Already the opening of the series sets up a stark divide between the people ‘in the know’, who have insight into the financial world, and regular people. The first episode starts with a sequence in which people are desperately trying to get money out of an already emptied ATM and in which riots are starting on the street. These images reflect some of the anxieties of the public during the debt crisis, when governments had to appease the concerned public with the promise that their savings and bank deposits are safe and guaranteed by a state-supported insurance. While the desperation and fear of the bank customers quickly turn into turmoil and violent protest on the street, the people ‘in the know’, the bankers, are already in negotiation with the German finance minister about conditions of a possible takeover of the struggling banking institution—conditions which inevitably involve the assumption of debt by the government that once more uses public money to ensure private profits. The series begins with the pre-credit sequence of the enraged crowd, while the rest of the series’ narrative tells the events that lead to this crucial moment as a continuous flashback that sets in eight weeks before the turmoil of the initial minutes. The plot moves back to the day that Jana Liekam is fired from her job at the Crédit International (CI) in Luxembourg only to infiltrate the new investment team at the rival Deutsche Global Invest (DGI) in Frankfurt, where she, at the behest of her former boss at the CI, Christelle Leblanc, is supposed to collect information about the investment products and about her new boss, the freshly appointed head of investment banking at DGI, Gabriel Fenger. Leblanc tries to gather information in anticipation of a possible merger between the two

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competing banks that she fears would leave her on the sidelines. Meanwhile, Fenger is kept in the dark, even lied to by his superiors about the possible merger. Even the highest managing positions do not shield people like Leblanc and Fenger from manipulation, worries, or anxiety. Fenger is introduced at the moment of his enthusiastic inaugural address to his staff where he initially paints a grim picture of banking after the crisis. Fenger voices the necessity to shed the self-imposed modesty and restraint that he observes in young bankers who are still suffering from the reverberations of the crisis of 2008: “The frustration and the paralysis since 2008, the feeling that the party is over, that we work our asses off for lousy returns and unsatisfied customers, and that we, ten years after the crisis, still not dare to say where we work on a first date”11—this is the heritage handed to a new generation of bankers who have not experienced the crisis of 2008, but whose reputation is still tarnished by the public memory of it. During its course, though, the series does little to restore the reputation of bankers. Rather, its narrative highlights the comparative powerlessness even of high-ranking bankers, who turn out to be just a small cog in the money-making machine of investment banking: Christelle Leblanc has to weave a far-reaching intrigue in order to have a chance to keep her job, while Fenger, as it soon transpires, is himself not secure from corporate intrigue, despite his prominent position within the bank. Fenger is set up by a member of the board of directors to take the fall for the illegal sale of some of the bank’s debt-ridden assets to a hedge fund that turns out to be a subsidiary of the bank. The only purpose of the transaction is to whitewash the bank’s balance sheet, as the bank’s books are cleaned from a failed financial product and the related debts. This is one of the narrative elements through which Bad Banks incriminates banks as economic players that are able to structure their own business relations in ways that obscure existing dependencies and the flow of money. The series also attacks the ‘creative’ possibilities investment banks have under current regulatory policies not only to structure financial products in a way to conceal the risks involved, but also to profit from tax avoidance. After all, under her former as well as under her new employer, it is an essential part of Jana’s job to entice new investors through aggressive tax reduction schemes. Investment banking, according to the initial image Bad Banks presents, is lucrative not because of profits made through clever investments, but because of the tax shelter that financial instruments specifically structured

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in view of this purpose can provide. Simply put: the instruments Jana develops do not so much profit from investments in companies, products, or ideas, but they are profitable because they help customers to avoid paying taxes, therefore helping high-net-worth individuals (HNWI, as people with liquid assets in excess of $1 million are known in the financial industry) and companies to extricate themselves from their duties towards the very society that made their accumulation of wealth possible in the first place.12 Against this background it is all the more interesting that one of the major plot lines revolves around an investment within the public sector. The mayor of the city of Leipzig is desperately trying to fund an ambitious urban development plan called ‘Leipzig 2025’ with a financial volume of six billion euro. Being terminally ill, mayor Peter Schultheiß sees this project as his legacy. While it is out of the question that he will be able to ever see the project finished, he is at least eager to secure stable and viable funding for it. Only two billion euros are raised by local banks; another four billion are supposed to be raised by the DGI, where Jana is head of the team that intends to raise the amount through the sale of securitized loans to a large number of customers. It is part of the series’ irony that Jana works on the financing of a public project that lacks funds because of the state’s insufficient tax revenues, which in turn are at least partly the result of the tax evasion models Jana sold regularly to the bank’s wealthy customers. By connecting public funds and the tax evasion of private wealth, Bad Banks points to the vicious circle perpetuated by ‘bad banks’. Furthermore, the position of the bank in this context supports an established analysis of the general dynamic of financialization: the bank no longer acts as the main financial backer of such a project; instead of investing its own capital or money raised through the respective country’s federal central bank, it rather acts as an intermediary who raises money by selling public debts within the privatized financial market (Vogl 2021: 30–33; Vogl Forthcoming). Financialization is characterized by the transition from a publicly and state-controlled system to a market-driven financial system, which is reflected in Bad Banks, while also making visible the dangers involved. It soon becomes clear to what degree the financial instruments used in the financing of ‘Leipzig 2025’ are susceptible to manipulation. Jana exploits this as part of her own intrigue to bring down the DGI that is determined to fire her and her team after the deal goes through and the risky debt obligations are sold to private investors. In the end, a well concealed insider trading orchestrated by Jana leaves her bank

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with a crushing debt, as all investors suddenly pull out their money, and leave her and her co-conspirators with a considerable profit, securely stashed in a foreign bank account. As Jana leaks proof of fraudulent manipulations that took place at the DGI, it leads not only to the demise of the bank she works for, but also to the uproar on the street by anxious savers and bank customers. Beyond this, the mayor of Leipzig and his ambitious project also become collateral damage of her devious scheme to bring down her employer. At the end of Bad Bank’s first season, the public project that many citizens of Leipzig might have profited from is jeopardized, as its funding is crumbling and its future uncertain at the very moment its most dedicated advocate, mayor Peter Schultheiß, dies. Bad Banks is a multifaceted and timely portrayal of post-crisis banking, complex enough not to betray the reality of financial institutions. On a more affective level, the series emphasizes the personal and moral corruption that comes with high-level financial deals. It also incriminates the increasing importance and influence of private money, and its role in funding public projects. What also transpires is the ease at which modern financial products are manipulated, as they reach a level of complexity that even internal compliance and risk assessment departments are increasingly unable to fully penetrate. Despite this, within the series one of the protagonists during a shareholder meeting boldly claims that it is not concealed or unproportionate risk that bring the bank in turmoil, but the fact that banks, even ten years after the crisis, are under an unprecedented public and governmental scrutiny, depriving them of the leeway necessary to persist against the international competition. However, the insight into the banking business that the series’ narrative allows, counters this claim. Without making moral judgements explicit, the series’ narrative implicitly advocates for an even tighter control of the financial industry.

Conclusion In conclusion, all crime series discussed here are post-financial-crisis narratives, in that they are marked by a deep distrust in the financial sector, in that untransparent financial instruments become an important narrative device, and in that they stress the broader societal dangers that result from a sector that is as inscrutable as it is foundational for society. The attempt to tell stories about the financial sector lead to banking as the chosen setting of these crime stories. Banking is perceived as a part of the economy that is particularly prone to breed surprising forms of white-collar crime

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because of the opaque financial means used to perpetrate crime, that remain nebulous to most laypersons and ordinary people that are watching these series. Despite being located in the banking sector, there is little direct engagement with financial transactions as the actual site of the crime. Therefore, there is little that these crime narratives achieve in terms of elucidating the very mechanisms that are the origin of the deep financial crisis of 2008 and more recent financial scandals, like the ones documented in the CumEx-Files (Collier 2020; Schröm 2021; Storn 2021; Bognanni 2022) or revealed in the ‘Panama papers’ (Obermayer and Obermaier 2017; Bernstein 2017). There are at least two reasons for this. On the one hand, financial transactions do not easily lend themselves to (visual) narratives in general and crime fiction that strives for eliciting suspense in particular. As Oliver Stone famously noted regarding his film Wall Street—Money Never Sleeps (USA 2010): “It’s very hard to do a financial movie, to make stocks and bonds sexy and interesting”.13 And further: “I don’t know how you show a credit default swap on the screen”.14 This dilemma of audio-visual aesthetics concerning financial instruments even escalates in crime fiction. Suspense within the realm of high finance, it seems, is best induced by leaving the mechanisms and instruments used to perpetrate the crime vague and opaque. The few examples of crime fictions we were able to investigate (because very few examples of crime fiction even deal with this kind of content) focus mostly on immoral actors within the financial sector or the violent consequences that white-collar crime provokes. Most films and series that echo the financial crisis and its consequences lack the innovative aesthetic means and strategies necessary to adequately represent the finance economy and to overcome the fundamental invisibility of capitalism and the operations of financial markets (Buck-Morss 1995; Stäheli and Verdicchio 2006). While there are many attempts in contemporary film to address the aesthetic antinomies of the visibility of finance (Morsch 2018; Gregor 2021), European crime series, as the day-­ to-­day ‘bread and butter’ of televisual entertainment reaching for an average audience and high ratings, are, for the most part, rather conventional in their approach. They are rarely the site of aesthetic innovation, and they rarely explore new ways of expression for the invisible, of making visible the “spectre of capital” (Vogl 2014). The money in digital late capitalism—not the play money we use to go shopping or to pay our bills, but money in the sense of the capital of large-scale financial operations—is a spectre: neither dead nor alive, neither real nor fiction, neither present nor

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absent, it is just a force circulating in the immaterial, but with the potential to yield very material effects at any time. Bad Banks comes closest in portraying money in this way. Furthermore, crime stories usually focus on exceptions to the normal workings of society and its rules. While the financial scandals mentioned in this chapter are certainly exceptional, there is something we miss by focusing on the exceptional. First, crises are not the exception to the rules of finance under capitalism. They are not a disturbance in the capitalist system, but they are, as Naomi Klein has pointed out, what capitalism feeds on. Within the capitalist logic every crisis is turned into an opportunity to change the laws to the advantage of capital and to expand the reach of ‘free’ markets and deregulated finance (Klein). Second, the focus on the exceptional misses the mundane everydayness of capitalist rule, its inescapability, the almost ‘atmospheric’ quality it has taken on in the contemporary Western world, according to Mark Fisher: “[Capitalist realism] is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action” (Fisher 16). We can point to the German film Zeit der Kannibalen (dir. Johannes Naber, 2014) or Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience (2009) as two very different attempts to capture capitalism as a pervasive atmosphere in contemporary society. In both films we encounter individuals whose morality, love life, sexuality, social behaviour, and attitude towards life has been severely deformed by the forces of capitalism to which no outside or alternative exists within these films. The affective costs of capitalism highlighted in these films are also echoed in the many instances of the betrayal or corruption of friendship in Bad Banks, and also in the disintegration of Jana Liekam’s family life due to the demands of her job: as Jana becomes more and more absorbed by her work, she loses her boyfriend, who has been a stabilizing factor in her life (as demonstrated in a scene where she suffers a panic attack and is calmed down by her boyfriend). With him she also loses the relationship with his young daughter to whom she had become a substitute mother. It is also telling in this regard that the alliance formed at the end of the first season of Bad Banks and that continues in the second season between Jana Liekam and two other young bankers from her team, is not based on friendship and trust, but based on their mutual knowledge about each other’s wrongdoings and therefore their mutual ability to destroy each other’s career or even to put each other behind bars. Such an alliance built on forced loyalty is the new physiognomy of friendship under capitalism.

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More than ten years after the financial crisis, the slim pickings of relevant and significant works of serialized European crime fiction that reflect upon, interpret, explain the historic events, or broaden the popular knowledge about them in any way, lead to the conclusion that crime fiction possesses limited resources to deal with financial markets and the forms of automated, algorithmically controlled financial trading that dominate contemporary economy. In particular, the focus on violent crime and the wrongdoings of individuals hampers the genre’s ability to be on par with today’s financial crime. Crime stories accomplish the most when they do not focus on the average investigator entering the financial milieu from the outside on the occasion of some (usually violent) crime, but when financial institutions or banks are chosen as the setting of a series, so that more aspects of this world can be illuminated more deeply and more extensively. However, Bad Banks demonstrates that even this approach has its limits in terms of elucidating the financial mechanisms as such, and not just as instruments of corporate intrigue or personal greed. This might lead to the further conclusion that high finance is best captured when not represented but expressed through what might appear as a detour. I am thinking of possible films and series that do not approach the world of finance directly, but rather focus on the contaminated life of late capitalism, that capture the dread, anxiety, and apprehension born out of the economic sphere we are subjected to, that delve into the shadow economy of affect (Shaviro 2010; Morsch 2018; Gregor 2021) that is the companion of contemporary capitalist realism. It might be questionable if the most suitable genre to address this affective dimension is indeed crime fiction, but there can hardly be any doubt that the turn to affect would move away from financial crimes to the crime that is capitalism. Acknowledgement  The research presented here has been financed by the research project DETECt: Detecting Transcultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives (Horizon 2020, 2018–2021) (Grant agreement number 770151).

Notes 1. For an overview of the events see Banks (2011), Bernanke (2013), Tooze (2018), and Wigmore (2021, 116–280). 2. For an overview that places fictional films next to documentary films see Kinkle and Toscano (2011). On the treatment of the financial crisis in

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­ ction and media see also Schifferes and Roberts (2014), Müller and fi Schmitt (2015), Morsch (2018), and Berry (2019), and more generally on media representations of economic matters Mattern and Rouget (2016) and Cuonz et al. (2018). 3. On the challenges the filmic representation of capital(ism) poses see Eisenstein’s “Notes for a Film of Capital”, written in 1927/1928 (Eisenstein 1976); on Eisenstein’s project of a film based on Marx’ Capital see Vogman (2019). 4. On high-frequency trading see the special issue of Economy and Society (2016). 5. See also Bennett (1986), Parker (2011), and Storey (2018) on this. 6. See on this Anderson et al. (2015), Bondeberg et al. (2015, 2017), Hansen and Waade (2017), and Hansen et al. (2018). 7. For an overview of the unfolding events of this shameful episode of European history see Karyotis and Gerodimos (2015), Klemm and Schultheiß (2015), Agridopoulos and Papagiannopoulos (2016), and Fouskas and Dimoulas (2018); see also the account of the former Greek minister of finance, Yanis Varoufakis (2018). 8. The situation is very different, however, outside of film and television crime fiction; Katy Shaw (2015) even considers ‘crunch lit’ a literary genre. 9. An important exception is the US series Numbers (CBS, 2005–2010), a police procedural in which mathematics serves as the most important crime solving method. 10. For a scholarly introduction to the concept of ‘bad banks’ see the dissertation by Vieten (2013); for a journalistic take on the subject see Brummer (2015). 11. Translation from German by the author. 12. Thomas Picketty (cf. 2014) has repeatedly urged governments to close such loopholes and to tax wealth more aggressively. 13. Oliver Stone quoted in Kinkle and Toscano (2011, p. 44). 14. Oliver Stone quoted in Nocera (2010).

Works Cited Agridopoulos, Aristotelis, and Ilias Papagiannopoulos, editors. 2016. Griechenland im europäischen Kontext: Krise und Krisendiskurse. Wiesbaden: Springer. Anderson, Jean, Carolina Miranda, and Barbara Pezzotti, editors. 2015. Serial Crime Fiction: Dying for More. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Banks, Erik. 2011. See No Evil: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Financial Crisis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Bennett, Tony. 1986. ‘The Politics of the ‘Popular’ and Popular Culture’. In Popular Culture and Social Relations. Editors, T.  Bennett, C.  Mercer, and J. Woollacott. Milton Keynes, Philadelphia: Open University Press. 6–21. Bernanke, Ben S. 2013. The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press. Bernstein, Jake. 2017. Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite. New York: Henry Holt. Berry, Mike. 2019. The Media, the Public and the Great Financial Crisis. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Birchall, Clare. 2006. Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip. Oxford, New York: Berg. Bognanni, Massimo. 2022. Unter den Augen des Staates: Der größte Steuerraub in der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik. München: dtv. Bondebjerg, Ib, Eva Novrup Redvall, and Andrew Higson, editors. 2015. European Cinema and Television: Cultural Policy and Everyday Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bondeberg, Ib, Eva Novrup Redvall, Rasmus Helles, Signe Sophus Lai, Henrik Søndergaard, and Cecilie Astrupgaard. 2017. Transnational European Television Drama: Production, Genres and Audiences. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Brummer, Alex. 2015. Bad Banks: Greed, Incompetence and the Next Global Crisis. London: Random House. Buck-Morss, Susan. 1995. ‘Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display’. Critical Inquiry, 21:2. 434–467. Collier, Richard S. 2020. Banking on Failure: Cum-Ex and Why and How Banks Game the System. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cuonz, Daniel, Scott Loren, and Jörg Metelmann, editors. 2018. Screening Economies. Money Matters and the Ethics of Representation. Bielefeld: Transcript. Economy and Society, Special Issue. 2016. ‘Cultures of High-Frequency Trading’, 45:2. 149–302. Eisenstein, Sergej. 1976. ‘Notes for a Film of Capital’. October, 2. 3–26. Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester, Washington: Zero Book. Fouskas, Vassilis, and Costas Dimoulas, editors. 2018. Greece in the 21st Century: The Politics and Economics of a Crisis. London and New York: Routledge. Freccero, Carla. 1999. Popular Culture: An Introduction. New York: New York University Press. Gregor, Felix T. 2021. Die Un/Sichtbarkeit des Kapitals. Zur modernen Ökonomie und ihrer filmischen Repräsentation. Bielefeld: transcript. Haiven, Max. 2014. Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Hansen, Kim Toft, and Anne Marit Waade, editors. 2017. Locating Nordic Noir: From Beck to The Bridge. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Hansen, Kim Toft, Steven Peacock, and Sue Turnbull, editors. 2018. European Television Crime Drama and Beyond. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Karyotis, Georgios, and Roman Gerodimos. 2015. The Politics of Extreme Austerity: Greece in the Eurozone Crisis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Klemm, Ulf-Dieter, and Wolfgang Schultheiß, editors. 2015. Die Krise in Griechenland: Ursprünge, Verlauf, Folgen. Frankfurt a. M.: Campus. Kinkle, Jeff, and Alberto Toscano. 2011. ‘Filming the Crisis: A Survey’. Film Quarterly, 65:1. 39–51. Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books. Krippner, Greta R. 2005. ‘The Financialization of the American Economy’. Socio-­ Economic Review, 3:2. 173–208. Kotz, David M. 2017. Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press. Luhmann, Niklas. 1995. Social Systems. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2000. The Reality of the Mass Media. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2012–2013. Theory of Society. 2 vols. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mader, Philip, Daniel Mertens, and Natascha van der Zwan, editors. The Routledge International Handbook of Financialization. London, New  York: Routledge 2020. Martin, Randy. 2002. Financialization of Everyday Life. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Mattern, Nicole, and Timo Rouget, editors. 2016. Der große Crash. Wirtschaftskrisen in Literatur und Film. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Morsch, Thomas. 2018. ‘Melancholie des Katastrophenkapitalismus/ Schattenwirtschaft der Affektökonomie. Zur (Un-)Sichtbarkeit der Finanzwirtschaft im postkinematografischen Film’. In Medialisierungen der Macht. Filmische Inszenierungen politischer Praxis. Editors, I.  Gradinari, N. Immer, and J. Pause. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. 121–153. Müller, Corinna, and Christina Schmitt. 2015. ‘Audio-visual Metaphors of the Financial Crisis: Meaning Making and the Flow of Experience’. Revista Brasileira de Linguística Aplicada, 15:2, 311–341. https://doi. org/10.1590/1984-­639820156315. Nocera, Joe. 2010. ‘When Did Gekko Get so Toothless’. New York Times, September 23. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/movies/26wall.html (accessed 22 Feb. 2022). Obermayer, Bastian, and Frederik Obermaier. 2017. The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money. London: Oneworld. Parker, Holt N. 2011. ‘Toward a Definition of Popular Culture’, History and Theory, 50:2. 147–170.

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Picketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Popper, Karl R. 1962. Conjectures and Refutations. The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. London, New York: Basic Books. Schifferes, Steve, and Richard Roberts, editors. 2014. The Media and Financial Crises: Comparative and Historical Perspectives. London, New York: Routledge. Schröm, Oliver. 2021. Die Cum-Ex-Files: Der Raubzug der Banker, Anwälte und Superreichen—und wie ich ihnen auf die Spur kam. Berlin: Ch. Links. Shaviro, Steven. 2010. Post-Cinematic Affect. Winchester, Washington. Shaw, Katy. 2015. Crunch Lit. London: Bloomsbury. Stäheli, Urs, and Dirk Verdicchio. 2006. ‘Das Unsichtbare sichtbar machen. Hans Richters Die Börse als Barometer der Wirtschaftslage’. Montage/AV, 15:1. 108–122. Storey, John. 2018. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. An Introduction. 8th ed. London, New York: Routledge. Storn, Herbert. 2021. Business Crime—Skandale mit System: Über Konzernverbrechen, kriminelle Ökonomie und halbierte Demokratie. Marburg: Büchner. Thomson, Frances, and Sahil Dutta. 2018. ‘Financialization: A Primer’. Transnational Institute (TNI), September 13, www.tni.org/en/publication/ financialisation-­a-­primer (accessed 17 Feb. 2022). Tooze, J. Adam. 2018. Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. New York: Viking. Varoufakis, Yanis. 2018. Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment. London: The Bodley Head. Vieten, Thomas. 2013. Bad-Bank-Konzepte zur Bewältigung von Finanzkrisen: Ein modelltheoretischer Vergleich. Wiesbaden: Springer. Vogl, Joseph. 2014. The Specter of Capital. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2021. Kapital und Ressentiment: Eine kurze Theorie der Gegenwart. München: Beck. ———. Forthcoming. Capital and Ressentiment: A Short Theory of the Present. London: Polity. Vogman, Elena. 2019. Dance of Values: Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital Project. Zürich: Diaphanes. Wigmore, Barrie A. 2021. The Financial Crisis of 2008: A History of US Financial Markets 2000–2012. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 13

A ‘Bottom-Up’ Approach to Transcultural Identities: Petra and Women Detectives in Italian TV Crime Drama Elena D’Amelio and Valentina Re

An analysis of recent Italian crime series featuring female detectives as lead shows how Italian crime narratives have elaborated original representations of these figures, often in an ambivalent dialogue with other

After working in close collaboration on all aspects of the present chapter, the two authors shared the work as follows: Maria Elena D’Amelio wrote the introduction, the conclusion, and the section “Petra as Feminist Palimpsest”; Valentina Re wrote the sections “Theoretical Framework and Key Concepts” and “Polyphonic Adaptation as Mediated Transcultural Encounter: Petra’s Journey from Barcelona to Genoa”.

E. D’Amelio University of San Marino, San Marino, Republic of San Marino e-mail: [email protected] V. Re (*) Link Campus University, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Dall’Asta et al. (eds.), Contemporary European Crime Fiction, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21979-5_13

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approaches, such as the portrayal of women detectives in Nordic Noir fictions and TV series. Our analysis is functional to conceiving European identity as a space of dialogue between different identity constructs, including gender, within the context of the crime genre. Moving from these premises, our aim is to analyse the Italian series Petra—a Sky original show in partnership with the production company Cattleya, first released in 2020—within the larger context of contemporary European TV crime productions, to investigate the recurrences, similarities, and differences in the construction, representation, and consumption of TV female detectives, through a conceptualization of what has been called ‘mediated cultural encounters’. Moreover, in the final part of the chapter we consider Rosi Braidotti’s claim of the necessity of a “post nationalistic understanding of cultural identity” as a framework of analysis for the inter-related issues of gender, multiculturalism, and European identities (Braidotti).

Theoretical Framework and Key Concepts On the level of co-production and distribution agreements, TV productions may be read as cultural encounters insofar as they can favour transnational mobility, interactions between professionals in the creative industries from different countries, and, more generally, any kind of practical exchange between different production cultures. On the level of both representation and reception, TV series and the social discourses they inspire can be conceived as mediated cultural encounters, a notion that suggests a less tangible mobility of narrative models, visual styles, and social imagery (Bondebjerg et al.). A key asset for European cultural integration, mediated cultural encounters allow “our own local reality and experience [to meet] other European realities” (Bondebjerg et al. 4) so we can experience something new and unexpected that can ‘alter the way one understands one’s own culture’ (Bondebjerg et al. 12). In this respect, mediated cultural encounters can contribute to what Trenz (2016) has called “banal Europeanization”, an expression used to emphasize how the perception of Europe as an imagined community in everyday life can be ‘more important than the grand narratives of identity floating around in both the EU and its individual nation states’ (Bondebjerg et al. 4). Given the massive popularity of the crime genre across Europe, TV crime dramas have an enormous potential in terms of cultural encounters: in fact, social commitment and entertainment can be variously combined in these narratives,

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above all by virtue of the genre’s distinctive narrative mechanisms, which allow the central themes and key challenges of contemporary European societies to be addressed in engaging ways. Furthermore, this specific combination of commitment and entertainment becomes a crucial point when it comes to issues of cultural identity and specifically European identity, defined as the sense of belonging to a common cultural community stemming from the shared consumption and appreciation of both tangible and intangible cultural heritage. We argue that the idea of mediated cultural encounters allows the question of European identity to be addressed from a ‘bottom-up’ perspective. While, on an official level, the European Union’s conventions, treaties, declarations, policies, and legislative and communication initiatives establish a set of shared values on which to base an idea of European identity that is constructed in a ‘top-down’ manner, mediated cultural encounters contribute to actualizing these values’ enormous potential for aggregation and make us experience them in our daily lives. This bottom-up approach to European identity is therefore obviously connected to the idea of ‘banal Europeanization’ and stresses how through mediated encounters “we experience diversity and difference, we get a new perspective on our own life and history, and perhaps we also discover that Europe is not just something over there in Brussels. Europe is actually us…” (Bondebjerg et al. 5). The notion of identity adopted throughout this contribution is ‘inherently plural rather than unitary’ (Connell 106). In other words, we subscribe to the idea that identity can only be understood as a network of diverse belongings referring to different categories, including gender, ethnicity, religion, politics, and many more social and cultural dimensions. A plural conception of identity emphasizes that multiple identities may connect people in various ways, foster their sense of common belonging, and stress their similarities, rather than their differences, thus discouraging the use of the concept of identity ‘for claims made by individuals about who or what they are in terms of difference from other people’ (Connell 107). Accordingly, European identity ought to be interpreted as a space of interaction and dialogue between multiple forms of identity, including cultural, social, national, local, and, indeed, gender identities—which are the focus of this contribution. From a top-down perspective, gender equality is a fundamental EU value and a core EU objective. To achieve this crucial objective, a strong policy background promotes gender equality in all sectors of European societies. In conjunction with this growing political interest in gender

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parity issues in political, economic, and cultural life, starting from the 2010s a large and increasingly growing number of studies have mapped, from a mainly quantitative perspective, the presence and representation of women in different working environments. The majority of these studies today highlight how gender issues can be better analysed within a broader framework aimed to promote diversity in terms of sexual orientation, race, age, religious and political orientation, socioeconomic background, disabilities, and other under-represented dimensions of identity. From a bottom-up perspective and in the more specific context of TV crime dramas, the challenge of the woman detective, a traditionally problematic figure in the light of both gender and genre norms, and the different solutions proposed in different cultural contexts of the continent shed light on the formation of a plural and shared sense of belonging to a European ‘imagined community’ promoting diversity and gender equality. In her The TV Crime Drama, Turnbull (2014) argues that ‘the portrayal of women in the crime drama series has served as an index of women’s changing role in society while providing a catalyst for debate, both in the popular press and in the field of feminist media studies’. Similarly, female characters in the crime genre allow for an understanding of how gender and genre norms are questioned and re-negotiated within the wider social context (Gledhill 2012; Hoffman 2016). As Gates stated, ‘key conventions of the female detective are established at the end of 1800. The problem with having a female heroine at the center of a detective story at this time was how to reconcile traditional notions of femininity with the perceived masculine demands of the detective plot’ (14). Klein has addressed the problem of the intersection between gender and genre through the notion of ‘script’, underlining that “the script labeled detective in readers’ minds did not naturally overlap or even mesh with the labeled woman” (Klein 4). Dresner has expanded this perspective, suggesting that the detective’s qualities are traditionally and culturally coded as masculine, “either the hyper-rationality of the intellectual detective or the casual violence of the hardboiled detective” (1). In this respect, the “female investigator is presented as fundamentally flawed [and] serves as a marker of the incompatibility of the cultural categories of woman and detective” (Dresner 2). Unless she is too young (Nancy Drew) or too old (Miss Marple or Jessica Fletcher) for romantic relationships, the woman detective is often single, divorced, or widowed—in any case, alone. However, as Reddy shows very well, “solitariness for a woman has far different meanings than

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does solitariness for a man, as historically women have been defined by their relationships with men. […] Solitariness of female detectives is not presented as a badge of honour but as a condition dictated by prevailing gender definitions” (Reddy 197–198). The lonely female investigator, unmarried and without a family, tends to be perceived—in fact like her criminal counterparts—as an ‘unnatural’, incomplete, or at least utterly unusual woman. As Gates points out: “There is something unnatural about the woman who denies the socially prescribed but perceived as natural roles of wife and mother” (15). In recent years, ‘unnatural’ and ‘flawed’ female investigators of Nordic Noir like Sarah Lund (The Killing, DR, 2007–2012) and Saga Norén (The Bridge, SVT1 and DR1, 2011–2018) have continued to foster the irreducible ambiguity of the woman detective. On the one hand, both Sarah’s and Saga’s characters respond to stereotypes of female hyper-emotionality and openness with a masculinization of their personality, based on a cold and hyper-rational demeanour that has often been considered a male trait, especially in the context of investigative and police professions. On the other hand, both women are represented as dysfunctional in their private lives, incapable of nurturing meaningful sentimental relations and a gratifying social life, as if they were to be punished for their professional success with their inability to attain satisfying personal relations. The massive success of Nordic Noir across Europe (Badley et al. 2020) has popularized these traits and affected the ways in which different cultural traditions in crime fiction nowadays address the figure of the female detective. A reference point for prestigious productions willing to travel across Europe, the Nordic model for representing fictional detective heroines has been variously transformed, re-located, and translated into different national and cultural contexts, thus proving that these figures continue to represent a great challenge to the norms and conventions of the crime genre, as well as an important key to interpreting how gender identities are socially re-negotiated in the European arena.

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Polyphonic Adaptation as Mediated Transcultural Encounter: Petra’s Journey from Barcelona to Genoa The production and text-based analysis we provide in this contribution, as an exemplary case study at both an international and national level, focuses on the TV crime drama Petra, a project developed by Cattleya and co-­ produced with Sky. On a national level, Sky and Cattleya are key players to understand the renewal processes of Italian TV. In addition to distributing in Italy the most interesting products of ‘quality’ or ‘complex’ TV (Mittell) developed abroad, especially by HBO, since 2008 Sky has been producing original content (the premium-based model; see Barra and Scaglioni 2021) that reworked traditional Italian TV dramas both at a narrative and thematic level, also introducing strongly innovative visual styles. Sky’s first two original productions were crime series: the hit Romanzo criminale— La serie (2008–2010) based on Giancarlo De Cataldo’s novel of the same name (also the basis for a 2005 feature film directed by Michele Placido), which proposed a classic all-male, team-based narrative model focused on criminals as anti-heroes; and Quo vadis, baby? (2008), based on a novel series by Grazia Verasani featuring an unconventional female private-eye, Giorgia Cantini. Although Romanzo criminale set the model of some of the most popular male-led TV crime series of the following years, including global hits such as Gomorrah (Sky, 2014–2021) and Suburra—La serie (Netflix, 2017–2020), the Italian public broadcaster Rai responded to premium fiction with a particular emphasis on female points of view and female characters, especially in detective stories such as Non uccidere (2015–2018), L’allieva (2016–2020), Imma Tataranni—Sostituto procuratore (2019–), Bella da morire (2020), Le indagini di Lolita Lobosco (2021–), and Blanca (2022–) (D’Amelio, Re 2021). In this respect, Thou Shalt Not Kill (Non uccidere) stands out for its experimental character, achieved thanks to its pervasive references to Nordic Noir, from its visual style to the use of locations, from its gloomy atmosphere to the ‘masculine’ female protagonist, combined with the refusal to use comedy insertions. More than ten years after Quo vadis, baby? with Petra Sky and Cattleya joined the trend of female-led detection stories affected by Nordic Noir elements already inaugurated by Rai in 2015. Interestingly, the series press book claims and emphasizes the centrality of the ‘feminine’ (to which the city of Genoa is also referred) in the entire production, that is, both in

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terms of on-screen representation and behind-the-scenes employment of professional women: Petra Delicato, non-conformist heroine. Paola Cortellesi, extraordinary performer. Maria Sole Tognazzi, the intelligence in direction. Alicia Giménez-Bartlett, the inspiring bestseller. Four women, four novels, four episodes, one new series: Petra. And then let’s add Genoa: a beautiful and difficult city, as a great theatrical diva who suddenly returns in a poignant role.1

On an international level, which is the main focus of our analysis, Petra represents a paradigmatic example of a transcultural as well as transmedia encounter. The character of Petra Delicado came to life in the successful crime novel series by Alicia Giménez Bartlett.2 Already adapted for Spanish television in a controversial ‘Madrid version’ in 1999, the literary series has again been adapted in Italy more than 20 years later. In the migration from literature to television, temporal and spatial dimensions are particularly important. In terms of both geographical representation and narrative models, the adaptation appears at first glance entirely internal to the poetics of Mediterranean Noir (Reynolds et al.; Turnaturi), capable of showing its richness and diversity (as in the dialogue between the Italian and Spanish narrative traditions) without leaving the sea but accepting the challenge of transferring the literary storyworld from Barcelona to Genoa. However, the spatial dimension ends up being further enlarged and enriched precisely because of the different context in which the Italian TV series is produced and in light of the temporal distance that separates it from Bartlett’s first novels: as mentioned above, the changed context of production and reception means that the Mediterranean Sea metaphorically meets the North Sea, and that Nordic Noir impacts the TV version produced by Sky and Cattleya as a prestigious cultural model with an international vocation. This transcultural encounter between the Mediterranean and the Nordic traditions is, on the one hand, facilitated by the literary source and, on the other, deliberately sought after in terms of production strategies. As producer Arianna De Chiara3 explains:

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We realised that we had to try and find our own way. On the one hand, we had to differentiate Petra from the typical Italian imagery, as it has been consolidated over the years through the series produced by Rai and Mediaset. At the same time, we didn’t want to go directly towards the dark Scandinavian colours. This search for the right tone was done in parallel, both in writing and in the visual treatment.

One can clearly see the intention to align with an international production model both in the choice and mode of representation of the city of Genoa and in the adoption of a particular visual style. We can understand the choice of location based on three main reasons. The first has to do with the analogies between Genoa and the city in which the novels are originally set. “If you have read the books”, say the scriptwriters, “you know that Barcelona is a character which lives through its neighbourhoods and its social stratifications. It is a big city by the sea, a big port, a bustle of cultures and people”.4 As De Chiara explains, Genoa offered all these elements, and particularly a geomorphological and architectural (and therefore visual) ‘verticality’, as well as a historical, social, and cultural stratification. As director Maria Sole Tognazzi also points out, “Genoa is a city that, depending on the neighbourhood, allows you to narrate different moods”.5 The second reason lies in the use of Genoa to embody Petra’s character and her escape from Rome, her city of origin in the Italian transposition. As the scriptwriters pointed out, “Genoa is also a ‘shy’ city, and it seemed perfect to represent Petra’s character and her choice to ‘stand aside’”. Finally, Genoa appeared to be a lesser seen and less conventional location, able to dialogue with contemporary international models. “The need and desire to broaden narrative horizons” also meant a broadening of “visual horizons” (De Chiara) that made it necessary to “break away from the reference to Montalbano, therefore Sicily was a ‘taboo area”. Production and location manager Michele Ottaggio confirms: “We wanted to rule out any Southern city because we wanted a slightly more Northern setting, a city with an industrial past, with a slightly more European atmosphere”.6 Certainly, a location’s atmosphere and communicative power cannot be separated from the way it is represented. On the one hand, the scriptwriters claim to have “never imagined a sunny TV series, which is the stereotype of Italy in the world. Our references have always been to the North: […] the light in Petra is a Northern light, not a Southern light, and it corresponds perfectly to the type of character and the type of story”. On

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the other hand, they recognize the contribution of Tognazzi’s visual style, which was able to visually represent that kind of atmosphere, and her own specific authorial style, which gives the series a European character because it conveys a particular ‘poetics’. As Tognazzi explained: We watch TV series from other countries. Sometimes we are fascinated by the very fact that they come from abroad, it almost becomes an element of attraction, because it allows you to travel, which is fiction’s great value. […] Exportability should not influence you, you should not shoot having a given country as a target in mind. I knew that Genoa would be seen in many parts of the world, and this was a responsibility, but I had in mind how I wanted to tell and represent it. I didn’t want to deliver a postcard-like Genoa, but I wanted to tell it as if it were a character, and a character to all intents and purposes.

On closer examination, Genoa is both similar to and different from Petra’s character. For example, it takes on bright tones when the wide urban views accompany Petra’s journey from home to the police station. Contrastingly, the environments in which Petra lives and works have dark, aseptic tones and stand out as geometric and ‘angular’ like her personality. A challenging catalyst for transcultural exchange already present in the literary source was the character of Petra, whose characteristics fall perfectly within the trend recently made so popular by Nordic Noir: the tale of an independent female investigator, who does a job she loves, refusing to conform to social stereotypes and deciding freely on her own life. “With regard to female characters, TV series have been forerunners”, says Tognazzi, “not only foreign series, but Italian ones as well, particularly in the crime genre and mainstream TV, certainly not in films. It is as if TV shows opened a new trend of more free, unconventional, and politically incorrect female protagonists”. The scriptwriters mention that Giménez Bartlett once described Petra as an “archetype of a moment in a woman’s life”: like many other protagonists of contemporary European crime, Petra is a woman caught “in the arc of an inner revolution”, and for this reason she is particularly problematic, tough, distrustful, and solitary. The extraordinary strength of this character type lies in the fact that, if it is grasped and represented in all its complexity, it can detach itself from its original spatial-temporal coordinates but then manage to function again as a ‘mediator’ and a

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fundamental key to enter new spatial-temporal dimensions. The main principle here is that of the ‘situated’ character, although the specific territory may change. The scriptwriters conclude: “The challenge was to provide [the character with] a mood. [In this way] the character’s identity won out over the specific places”. Moreover, the subordination of place to the identity of characters and their relationships belongs to Giménez Bartlett’s poetics: When I write detective novels, the location is functional to the characters. Depending on the neighbourhood in which the events take place, you have to consider the social characteristics of that neighbourhood. […] I do relatively little research on locations. I don’t do like those writers who begin their novels in such a way that you can go and visit the places they write about. For example, when I need a place that doesn’t exist, I create it, I position it, and that’s all. And if any of my readers go looking for this specific bookshop or bar, they will probably be disappointed. […] First comes the story, and then comes reality. […] What works really well for me is auditory memory. […] I think this is why I really like writing dialogues and I hate descriptions. I prefer not to be specific about places. […] I prefer impressionistic descriptions […]. I think this is one of the most innovative changes in the modern novel compared to the nineteenth-century novel, which reproduced houses and landscapes in quite exasperating detail (Casavella et al. 34).7

It should be noted that Petra’s character presents distinctive and problematizing features with respect to the Nordic model, which are expressed through irony, which is crucial in both the novels and the Italian series, as well as through Petra’s relationship with vice-inspector Fermín Garzón (Antonio Monte in the Italian adaptation): it is mainly through this relationship that we perceive Petra’s individual traits as ‘anomalies’ and ‘flaws’, but it is always through it that these anomalies are progressively put into a different perspective and that Garzón/Monte’s supposed ‘normality’ is questioned. We argue that the novels and the Italian TV series share a polyphonic approach, in the Bakhtinian sense of the term (Bakhtin 1984), whereby identities are constructed and reconstructed only in relation to another’s gaze. The dialogue between different ‘voices’ and ‘points of view’ is first and foremost an end, rather than a means, and not only takes place between characters, but within each character’s consciousness. This

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polyphonic nature amplifies the power and richness of these crime narratives as ‘mediated cultural encounters’. Alternatively defined as feminist, postfeminist, or anti-feminist, Petra’s character is difficult to pin down.8 Intolerant of labels and heedless of other people’s judgement, she is mostly defined by her ability to overturn those social conventions which she cannot suppress to her own advantage. The situations Petra explicitly refers to as “taking advantage of the fact of being a woman” are essentially the moments in which, in questioning the suspects of the sexual assaults she is investigating in the novel Death Rites, she reverses expectations and assumes a controlling role and an attitude of prevarication, if not of open and harsh humiliation, by means of a violent and scurrilous language that scandalizes, at least initially, her male colleague. In many other cases, the inversion of masculine and feminine traits takes place within her relationship with Garzón/Antonio. This inversion of gender roles, as well as of the expectations associated with them, entirely shapes Death Rites starting with the interrogation of the first victim of rape, whom Petra confronts coldly and uneasily, as opposed to her subordinate, who instead approaches her with empathy and humanity. According to Viñals (2014), Petra acts in a postfeminist environment since she does not fight for women’s rights but for her rights as an individual. Petra denounces gender as a socio-historical role, the same way she denounces all social conventions. However, a postfeminist reading of Petra risks overlooking some other central aspects and reducing its complexity. As the author states in the Sky promo Una giornata con Alicia Giménez Bartlett, “the relationship between Petra and Garzón’s different social classes is as important as their relationship as a man and a woman”. Petra is a well-off, educated woman of middle-class extraction; Garzón is uneducated and of working-class extraction. Furthermore, Garzón is a policeman close to retirement with much experience; Petra is a forty-year-­ old woman who has practised law for a long time and has no experience outside the documentation department of the police force. All these elements determine their relationship and behaviour, which cannot be reduced only to gender issues because these do not exhaust the characters’ complex and stratified identities. Finally, these complex and plural identities are not stable. They change over time and, above all, through the relationships established between the characters. The ironic and critical reflection on identity continues to move between the unmasking of the stereotype and the recognition of the ‘social inevitability’ of the stereotype.

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At the beginning of their relationship, Petra herself is the bearer of prejudices and stereotypes in her harsh judgement of Garzón/Monte’s conformism and moralism. Through her confrontation with Garzón/ Monte, she realizes that she cannot escape prejudice and changes her point of view about her colleague. In the novel, what brings them closer is the discriminatory accusation made by the father of a rape victim: “A woman and an old man, is that all the police have to offer to us citizens?” A little further on, it is Petra herself who bitterly identifies with the stereotypes: “We were ridiculous, incompetent, pathetic: the fat vice-inspector and the 40-year-old woman claiming women’s rights. A farcical picture!” The line is slightly modified in the Italian TV adaptation, and both the feminist slant and the reference to the vice-inspector’s size are removed. When Petra insinuates that he doesn’t like having a woman as his boss, Monte justifies himself by explaining that it’s only because this is the first time for him. Petra sarcastically retorts: “An archivist and a policeman nearing retirement won’t last long, anyway”. As the 1990s feminist attitude is generally softened in the adaptation, the dialectic between the characters is broadened to include other aspects and deepen the characters’ private lives. For example, the dialectic on the theme of food is emphasized, and Monte is entrusted with the typical affective relationship with the culinary world that has so much relevance in the Mediterranean detective fiction tradition: - Look inspector, let’s get one thing straight, I’m not a sandwich person. For me, lunch is a hot dish, and if appropriate a glass of wine. - No… Let’s get one thing straight, vice-inspector: an inspection here at Samarcanda had to be carried out, so we might as well put a sandwich in the middle of it, but… The hot dish, you have your wife cook it in the evening. - My wife is dead. And I live in an apartment building. - Then you’ll have to make it yourself.9

On the occasion of a dinner party, Monte surprises Petra twice, challenges her preconceptions, and proves he can stand up to her in terms of irony and cynicism. The first time is when Petra invites him to accompany her to a dinner with her first ex-husband, and he comments: - Well, you hang out with your ex-husbands a lot. - They’re like grease on your hands. It never goes away.

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- What’s that got to do with me? - I don’t want to go alone. So, are you coming? - That depends. - On what? - On the restaurant.10

The second time, during dinner, is a dialogue with her ex-husband, freely revised from the novel: - Do you know what kind of woman Petra was before? A successful lawyer, ambitious, refined, she never went to bed without a chilled glass of champagne. In the kitchen, of course, she didn’t get her hands dirty, in conversation she was always half a tone below the others, never a word out of place. - And do you know what kind of woman Petra is now? See that bruise? Do you know how she got it? Collusion with a serial rapist. Because our Petra moves between whores and gangsters as if they were family friends. Not to mention certain interrogations, such as the other day, for example, when she put a convicted felon on his ass […] all topped off with a spectacular vernacular… I’m afraid she’s still the same in the kitchen, but otherwise, how can you not love her? She’s such a delight to be with.

In the adaptation, however, it is especially Petra who shocks Monte, upsetting his habits, as if she could drag him along with her in that ‘arc of inner revolution’ that she has chosen to undertake. When, speaking of happiness, Petra seems to take it for granted that Antonio has experienced this feeling during the many years spent with his wife, he comments: “I used to think thought so… Now I don’t know anymore”. And in the dialogue at Samarcanda café that marks the conclusion of the case, Antonio alludes to his intention to be bribed in a smuggling case he has investigated (a free interpolation compared to the novel): - Look, you’ve got the wrong idea about me… I also have a… dark side… - What can I say? I hope you’ve at least got a lot of money out of that. - Just enough to change life. You see, Petra, since I’ve met you, I’ve found I’ve wasted a lot of time. You’ve had two marriages, two jobs… Would you be in a relationship with me? - Vice-inspector! What’s the proposal?

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- No no no… You don’t understand. No, we’re both fine on our own. It’s just that if I had to choose someone to have a chat with, I’d choose you. - Thank you, Antonio, I’m flattered. But… I’ve already changed enough. But it was nice working with you. - For me too.11

Petra as Feminist Palimpsest As already mentioned in the section “Theoretical Framework and Key Concepts”, the choice of a female detective in the crime genre—which presents many conservative elements—implies certain complications in the gender-based genre conventions, and may raise the question of how feminist the text can actually be held to be. As Klein states, the formula of detective fiction rejects feminist change entirely, as the detective is traditionally a male loner who is in charge of restoring the status quo disrupted by criminals, while the feminist movement—especially the radical one— demands social changes and new attitudes in human interactions. Thus, Klein claims that “the feminist detective winds up supporting the existing system which oppresses women, when she re-established the ordered status quo” (201). Alison Littler reinforces the claim stating that If, for example, ‘feminist’ is used in a liberal-humanist-independent career-­ woman-­ in-control-of-her-own-life sense, then most certainly the recent series of women private eyes are feminist. If, however, ‘feminist’ refers to a woman deconstructing phallocentric ideologies wherever they are naturalized and structured into social, cultural and political practices, then a feminist private eye is a contradiction in terms (133).

This contradiction between feminist ideals and the detectives’ behaviour seems irresolvable. However, what happens when the female detective openly acts in defiance of the existing system and the perceived ‘manliness’ of the crime genre? Is it possible for feminism and the crime formula to ever coexist? We think that the flourishing of female detectives in recent TV crime series can offer a clue to answer this question by providing a better understanding of the complexity of gender relations and their connection to power and injustice in a European geopolitical and cultural setting. The literary character of Petra Delicado has been hailed as a contemporary and highly original feminist institutional detective in a male-­dominated

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field (the police) and a predominantly patriarchal country (Spain), in which feminist instances still clash with deep, entrenched forms of Latin machismo and sexism. While never calling herself a feminist, Petra is often at odds with traditional, conservative gender norms: she refuses to have children, divorces two times, and rejects domesticity. Petra is thus best described as having “feminist inclinations without explicitly defining herself that way” (Klein 202). Gimenez Bartlett’s character has even been given her own autobiography, Sin muertos, published in 2021, in which the author sheds light on her complex feminism, firmly setting Petra as a product of changing times in 1970s Spain. Through her autobiography we learn that Petra, born in the 1950s and a young woman in the 1970s and 1980s, is torn between the values she grew up with, associated with traditional feminine conditions such as marriage and motherhood, and the social changes brought by the 1970s, with their re-definition of gender roles and women’s place in society. Petra is a complex character with respect to both gender and genre norms. As a police inspector, she is relegated to office duties until she is given her first investigation, merely due to shortage of staff. While she proves herself in the field and leaves office duties at the end of the first book, she remains an unusual police inspector, too educated, too rich and bourgeois to really belong to the police homicide team, too much of a loner for the male-dominated camaraderie, too independent to fit into the stereotypical gender norms entrenched in the Spanish society. The issue of class—intertwined with gender—is indeed explored in the books and takes centre stage in the autobiography. Petra belongs to the bourgeoisie and has a conflictual relationship with some of the gendered requirements of her class, such as marriage and motherhood, rejecting the latter but accepting the former. Petra’s character in the Italian TV series retains most of the characteristics of her counterpart in the books, in particular the complex relationship with the gender norms that are perceived as ‘natural’ for a woman within her social context and her positioning as a bourgeois woman in a male working-class-dominated field. This complex and often ambiguous attitude toward what it means to be a woman allows the series to avoid not only traditional gender cliches but also new stereotypes, such as the hyper-­ masculine female detective. This complexity is shared by other female detectives of recent Italian TV productions, such as Eva Cantini in Bella da Morire and Imma Tataranni and Lolita Lobosco in the namesake shows.

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In the opening sequence of Petra’s first episode, Petra is presented as a figure at odds with basic conservative understandings not only of womanhood, but of sociality at large. We first see a closeup of her finger kicking a cricket on her cup, then another closeup of her back, and finally a long take of her sitting on the couch, alone, drinking a cup of tea. A courier arrives with a package, Petra greets him with a few words, and lets him in. The courier looks around the apartment, which is filled with unopened boxes. The courier thus assumes that Petra has just moved in, but she replies she has been living there for two years. The minimalist apartment, the carelessness of the unopened boxes, and the attitude of Petra–laconic, nonplussed, cigarette to her lips–depict a woman who refuses both domesticity and attachment. Through the figure of the curious courier we also find out that the crickets in the house are actually food for her pet spider. This detail, which wasn’t there in the books, serves to represent Petra’s conscious effort to reject the qualities that are commonly attributed to women, such as sweetness, dependency, emotionality, and care. Later on, Petra indeed confesses to her colleague Antonio Monte that, after two failed marriages, her spider is her longest and best relationship of her whole life, as a spider “doesn’t ask for anything, doesn’t need anything”. In our interview with director Maria Sole Tognazzi, she explained that while the crime genre and the serial format were both complete novelties for her, the character of Petra was already familiar, as it reminded her of other female characters she had moulded in her previous filmography. For instance, she said that Petra’s self-sufficiency and independence and her desire to live alone reminded her of Irene, the character played by Margherita Buy in her film Viaggio sola (2013). Both women are in their forties, with a demanding yet satisfying job; they both have chosen to live without a partner or children and are self-supporting and content with their lives. In Viaggio sola, Irene does question her life choices at some point, but in the end she recovers her confidence in the life she has chosen for herself. In the Petra series, the protagonist’s life choices are initially questioned by her colleague Antonio Monte, who finds that her lifestyle is not suitable for a woman. In Tognazzi’s words, it is crucial in today’s media productions to support representations of independent women who are happy in their lives even without partners or family, to emphasize that women do not need to be in a relationship to be fulfilled. Indeed, Tognazzi claims that the appeal of Petra’s character lies in her willingness to make her own decisions about her life, even if they are unconventional and not always aligned with societal conventions, such as choosing to

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divorce multiple times, to live alone, and to be emotionally self-sufficient. In the comments section of Sky’s Petra Facebook page, the majority of viewers declared to like both Antonio Pennacchi’s (Antonio Monte) and Paola Cortellesi’s acting and praised both the cinematography and the location, acknowledging Genoa as an unusual yet fascinating choice: Beautiful. Congratulations to Tognazzi. And kudos to Cortellesi, every role she plays is flawless. A beautiful production. Paola Cortellesi confirms to be very good. Then Genoa: a beautiful city. It enraptures you, I always imagined Cortellesi as a comic actress, but in this role, rough, raw, she’s really good, even her colleague, Andrea Pennacchi, really good. Congratulations to the director, I think the casting is really appropriate. Paola Cortellesi finally plays her part. Cortellesi and Pennacchi are very good. The series is a bit noir, I think it reflects the books beautiful settings with engaging atmospheres and realist dialogues, I really liked both Cortellesi and Pennacchi.

However, the construction of the character itself is a matter of controversy, with some commenters praising the depiction of an interesting woman, complex and difficult, and others claiming she is too cold and bidimensional. If this is the evolution of a woman, it is better to have the 1950s model. Being emancipated does not mean being cold, vulgar, arid, and mimicking men. This character is all wrong and over all already outdated. Cortellesi was not the right choice because she was too identifiable with a certain type of cinema and humour. I have yet to understand where the protagonist’s coldness comes from, in my opinion it hides fragility. I had the feeling that her personality comes from the past, the care with which she keeps certain things, such as the dog’s toy… there is something else in Petra, but as always we only focus on the appearance. Will we find out what has made her so unaffectionate? What has happened before???? I’m glad to have seen beautiful images of Genoa, but I do not like the plot and I find the personality of Petra too vulgar and cold.

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Viewers mostly criticize Petra’s extreme coldness, puzzling over the reasons for a behaviour that seems almost pathological, but also finding references to other female detectives popularized by the Nordic Noir, such as Saga Norén in The Bridge or Ellie Miller in Broadchurch. Although Petra is depicted as tough and ironic in the books, the TV series emphasizes the unlikable traits of the character. ‘Unlikable’ is a term that Roxanne Gay attributes to complicated female characters in literature and media, and which underlines their refusal to ‘play the part’ of the nice girl (Gay 2014: 94). Unlikable and difficult women have been at the forefront of TV productions in the last decade, as seen in all genres from crime to drama to comedy, such as in The Killing, The Bridge, Orange Is the New Black (Netflix, 2013–2019), Fleabag (Amazon, 2013–2019), Russian Doll (Netflix, 2019–), and The Queen’s Gambit (Netflix, 2020). According to Pinedo, a new wave of feminist politics has indeed focused on the notion of ‘difficult women’, a term moulded on Brett Martin’s analysis of ‘difficult men’ in his study of the anti-heroic protagonists of recent complex televisual narratives (Pinedo 2019: 2). Unlike the extremely bad, immoral behaviour of their male counterparts—for instance, drug dealing and murders in Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008–2013) and Dexter (Showtime, 2006–2022), however, the attributes associated with being a difficult woman—such as not smiling, cold demeanour, brusque manners, straightforwardness, and an active sexual life—would barely register as bad in a male (Pinedo 2019: 2). On the contrary, when seen in a woman these same behaviours are generally considered to be the result of abnormalities or pathologies and often explained as consequences of trauma, mental illness, or even neurological disorders (Dall’Asta 2021), such as Saga Norén’s autism or, in our case, Petra’s mysterious traumatic past, which left her wary of emotional bonds and sentimental relationships. Despite her detached behaviour, Petra does form lasting attachments: in the books, she goes on to marry for the third time and becomes a stepmother for her husband’s four children. In the series, Petra’s solitude and independence give space to the development of her unexpected friendship with Antonio/Fermín, creating the conditions for the emergence of an odd couple in which their two respective personalities are balanced in an interesting way. As mentioned above, Petra and Antonio come from two opposite worlds: working class and conservative the older Fermin, bourgeois and progressive the younger Petra. However, their friendship allows for a gender reversal that is both an ironic take on and a critique of rigid views of

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gender relationships. For instance, while being a product of his working-­ class, male-centred environment, Antonio seems to be more in tune with his emotions and shows a ‘feminine’ side by often appearing hopelessly romantic and a caring, trustful person; Petra, on the other hand, beyond her ‘in control’ attitude, is clearly in denial about her feelings and emotions. Let’s consider again Petra’s and Antonio’s opposite styles of interrogation of the young girl who has been raped in the first episode. Petra is hasty and blunt; seemingly unmoved by the victim’s plight, she treats her without compassion. Antonio is instead sympathetic, so much so that he offers her something to drink and comforts her before asking questions. Not only does this narrative structure allow for the exposure of the performativity of gender roles, but it enables wider reflection on what it means to be a woman, and a man, in our contemporary times, beyond reductionist, essentialist views of womanhood and manhood. Another question explored through the relationship between Petra and Antonio is their different attitudes towards sex. While Antonio is a romantic who does not understand sex without love, Petra has no problem in pursuing casual sex and is amused by Antonio’s embarrassment. While the sexual promiscuity of female characters has often been linked to deviancy and trauma, for example in the construction of the femme fatale character type in the noir genre, in the case of Petra this behaviour is normalized and even considered physiologically necessary. Is such a ‘gender swap’ a sufficient element to label a series and its protagonist as feminist? Obviously not, but the representation of women who explicitly talk about sexual pleasure and casual sex without being stereotyped as prostitutes, nymphomaniacs, or femme fatales is still very rare, especially on Italian TV, and can thus be considered a step forward towards a new imagination of female desire and affectivity beyond stigmatization and guilt, in line with recent representations of female sexuality in international crime series, such as those seen in The Fall (BBC Two, 2012–2015), Mare of Easttown (HBO, 2021), or even the aforementioned Italian miniseries Bella da morire. Sky’s Petra can thus be regarded as a palimpsest in which the complex 1990s feminism of the books is mixed with the influence of contemporary Nordic Noir TV heroines. Indeed, viewers’ comments on the Sky Original’s Facebook page underline that the series’ heroine doesn’t completely adhere to the literary character and rather brings to mind the female detectives of Broadchurch and The Bridge, especially in relation to the protagonist’s harsh attitude and independent behaviour:

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Cortellesi’s character reminds me of the female detective in the series The Bridge, the original Swedish. I think the inspiration of Petra is the British crime series Broadchurch. Moreover, the cinematography shows Genoa as a Nordic city, immersed in a cold, dark light, with a shy and restrained atmosphere which echoes Petra’s self-imposed solitude and surliness. The parallel between the character and the location—which, as already noted, is often defined in ‘feminine’ terms—emphasizes both the centrality of a new, complex female imagery in recent Italian crime TV productions, mediated through the Nordic Noir influence, and the aim to update the geographical characteristics of the Mediterranean Noir with the choice of unusual, somewhat peripheral locations.

Conclusion In her lecture ‘Gender and Europe’, feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti highlights the need for new images that would help us move towards a post-nationalistic understanding of cultural identity, one that “adequately reflects the social realities which we are already experiencing, of a post-­ nationalistic Europe” (Braidotti 10). Following Braidotti’s invitation, we argue that Petra constructs a ‘new social imaginary’ of European TV crime production, through a reimagining of mediated cultural encounters as pathways for a negotiation between North and South as well as between different models of femininity, both transculturally and across time. The complexity and ambiguity of Petra’s character signal that she inhabits multiple identity positions (woman, police officer, Italian, European), at the same time questioning what it means to have so many different identities. Contemporary TV crime dramas mobilize popular desire and imagination across Europe thanks to their transnational circulation and reception, which not only foster the process of ‘banal Europeanization’ but also offer an opportunity for “a process of transformation of identities parallel to the processes of change in Europe” (Braidotti 17). The relatively new phenomenon of female-led television crime dramas participates in this process by offering positive representations that challenge stereotypical images of both gender relations and national landscapes and culture, thus promoting a novel transnational as well as post-nationalistic sense of European identity through cultural and social imagery.

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Acknowledgement  The research presented here has been financed by the research project DETECt: Detecting Transcultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives (Horizon 2020, 2018–2021) (Grant agreement number 770151).

Notes 1. Nils Hartmann, Senior Director Original Productions, Sky Italia (courtesy of Cattleya). All translations from Italian and Spanish have been made by the authors. 2. The first book, Ritos de muerte, was published in Spain in 1996, translated into Italian in 2002 (Riti di morte) and into English in 2008 (Death Rites). 3. Online interview, 10 December 2020. 4. Online interview with Furio Andreotti, Giulia Calenda, and Ilaria Macchia, 10 December 2020. 5. Online interview, 30 November 2020. 6. Online interview, 7 December 2020. 7. Cf. also King (2017) and Tirone (2019). 8. Cf. also Godsland (2002), Thompson-Casado (2002), Yang (2010), Venkataraman (2010), and Tirone (2018). 9. Petra, 1x01, Riti di morte. 10. Ivi. 11. Ivi.

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Badley, Linda, Andrew Nestingen and Jaakko Seppäla, editors. 2020. Nordic Noir, Adaptation, Appropriation. [no place]: Palgrave Macmillan. Barra, Luca and Massimo Scaglioni, editors. 2021. A European Television Fiction Renaissance. London and New York: Routledge. Bondebjerg, Ib, Eva Novrup Redvall, Rasmus Helles, Signe Sophus Lai, Henrik Søndergaard and Cecilie Astrupgaard. 2017. Transnational European Television Drama: Production, Genres and Audiences. [no place]: Palgrave Macmillan. Braidotti, Rosi. 2022. Gender, Identity, and Multiculturalism in Europe. Florence: European University Institute. Casavella, Francisco, Javier Cercas, Alicia Giménez Bartlett, Marcos Ordóñez and Eloy Tizón. 2001. ‘Cómo escojo los lugares de mis novellas’. El Ciervo, 50:605/606. 33–36. Connell, Raewyn. 2009. Gender in World Perspective. Cambridge, UK and Medford, MA: Polity Press.

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Dall’Asta, Monica. 2021. ‘European Neurodivergent Detectives and the Politics of Autism Representation’. Cinéma & Cie: Film and Media Studies Journal, 21:36/37. 145–174. D’Amelio, Elena and Re, Valentina. 2021. ‘Neither voiceless nor unbelievable: Women detectives & rape culture in contemporary Italian TV’. MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, 7, https://maifeminism.com/ neither-­v oiceless-­n or-­u nbelievable-­w omen-­d etectives-­r ape-­c ulture-­i n-­ italian-­tv/. Dresner, Lisa M. 2007. The Female Investigator in Literature, Film and Popular Culture. Jefferson: McFarland. Gay, Roxanne. 2014. Bad Feminist. [no place]: Harper. Gates, Philippa. 2011. Detecting Women: Gender and the Hollywood Detective Film. Albany: State University of New York. Gledhill, Christine editor. 2012. Gender Meets Genre in Postwar Cinemas. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Godsland, Shelley. 2002. ‘From Feminism to Postfeminism in Women’s Detective Fiction from Spain: The Case of Maria-Antònia Oliver and Alicia Giménez-­ Bartlett’. Letras Femeninas, 28:1. 84–99. Hoffman, Megan. Gender and Representation in British Golden Age Crime Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. King, Stewart. 2017. ‘The deceptive dame: Criminal revelations of the Catalan capital’. In The Barcelona Reader. Cultural Readings of a City. Editors, E. Bou, J. Subirana. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 395–415. Klein, Kathleen G. 1995. The Woman Detective: Gender & Genre. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Littler, Alison. 1991. ‘Marele Day’s Cold Hard Bitch: The Masculinist Imperatives of the Private-Eye Genre’. Journal of Narrative Technique, 21. 121–135. Mittell, Jason, 2015. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York University Press. Pinedo, Isabel. 2019. ‘The Killing: The Gender Politics of the Nordic Noir Crime Drama and Its American Remake’. Television and New Media, 18,.1–18. Reddy, Maureen T. 2013. ‘Women Detectives’. In The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Editor, Martin Priestman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 191–207. Reynolds, Michael, Sandro Ferri, Tobias Jones, Jean-Claude Izzo and Howard Curtis. 2006. Black and Blue: An Introduction to Mediterranean Noir. New York: Europa Editions. Schwartz, Camilla & E. Ann Kaplan. 2018. ‘The Female Detective as the Child who Needs to Know. Saga Norén as an Example of Potent yet Dysfunctional Female Detective in Contemporary Nordic Noir’. European Journal of Scandinavian Studies, 48:2. 213–230.

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Thompson-Casado, Kathleen. 2002. ‘Petra Delicado, A Suitable Detective for a Feminist?’ Letras Femeninas, 28:1. 71–83. Tirone, Mariadonata Angela. 2018. ‘Petra Delicado: Identità e ruoli di genere nella serie di Alicia Giménez Bartlett’. Revista Internacional de Culturas y Literaturas, 21. 174–188. ———. 2019. ‘La Barcelona de Petra Delicado’. In La ciudad: imágenes e imaginarios. Editors, A. Mejón, D. Conte Imbert and F. Zahedi. Madrid: Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. 74e6–754. Trenz, Hans-Jörg. 2016. Narrating European Society: Toward a Sociology of European Integration. Lanham: Lexington Books. Turnaturi, Gabriella. 2013. ‘The Invention of a Genre: The Mediterranean Noir’. In New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies Volume 2: The Arts and History. Editor, G. Parati. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 53–72. Turnbull, Sue. 2014. The TV Crime Drama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Venkataraman, Vijaya. 2010. ‘Mujeres en la novela policial: ¿Reafirmación o subversión de patrones patriarcales? Reflexiones sobre la serie Petra Delicado de Alicia Giménez Bartlett’. In Textos sin fronteras. Literatura y sociedad, II. Editors, H.  Awaad and M.  Insúa. Pamplona: Universidad de Navarra. 229–240. Viñals, Carole. 2014. ‘Cánones de género y género negro en la serie Petra Delicado’. In La (re)invención del género negro. Editors, A.  M. Escribà and J. S. Zapatero. Santiago de Compostela: Andavira. 133–142. Yang, Chung-Ying. 2010. ‘Petra Delicado y la (de)construcción del género y de la identidad. Hispania, 93:4. ֔604.

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CHAPTER 14

The Excavation of History and the Quest for Identity in Contemporary Polish Crime Fiction Magdalena Tosik

In 1999, ten years after the elections that initiated the process of democratic transition in Poland, Marek Krajewski published his first crime novel, ́ Smierć w Breslau (translated as Death in Breslau, 2008). The ‘Breslau’ series is now widely considered as marking the birth of the genre of retro crime novels in Poland (Gemra 2013; Krzywicka 2019), and the author is acknowledged as the precursor of a new wave of Polish crime fiction which, after years of stagnation, has enjoyed great success among readers, and has come to be regarded as a phenomenon within popular culture. The socio-economic changes of this transition to a new capitalist reality, and the ushering in of a set of harsh, brutal experiences for the general population, have inspired the authors of bestselling crime novels such as Uwikłanie (Entanglement, 2010) by Zygmunt Miłoszewski, which became

M. Tosik (*) Nicolaus Copernicus University (Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika), Toruń, Poland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Dall’Asta et al. (eds.), Contemporary European Crime Fiction, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21979-5_14

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an immediate success in 2007. Indeed, most crime fiction of the last few decades has tended to address socio-cultural issues and deserves to be recognised as socially engaged. In the same way, the novel by Miłoszewski is regarded as being deeply involved in contemporary social and political discourse (Będkowski 2019), and constitutes a rare example of unequivocal social critique in contemporary Polish crime literature. This chapter argues that this tendency is intensified at times when the status quo of the political, social, and economic system is under threat, and at these times the inclination to investigate the significance and meaning of national history is enhanced within the genre. Well-known examples of this process include the ‘Pepe Carvalho’ series by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and the ‘Mario Conde’ series by Leonardo Padura. In both cases, the interrogation of the nation’s past presupposes and activates the evolution of the genre itself, and introduces a new voice to be listened to in the debate over the character of “imagined community” (Anderson 1997), that is, it allows us to think about how “imagined communities” are formed and in turn how they produce particular kinds of identity. As mentioned, the trauma of the transition period did not occasion the immediate development of an authentically Polish crime fiction that would involve straightforward social criticism of the contemporary transition moment, comparable to the Spanish post-Franco noir novel. Rather, the new wave of Polish crime fiction—what I am calling ‘retro crime’—that has flourished in Poland for the last twenty years tends to recreate the past, paying particular attention to the interwar period, in order to both unpack the meaning of this past for questions of national identity and use this questioning to more obliquely reflect on contemporary issues. Commentators argue that this tendency might be explained by the fact that writers can finally represent the past, especially those topics that were distorted or forbidden by the propaganda of the Polish People’s Republic (Wróblewska 2011; Buryła 2018), and suggest that the notable attraction of writing about the period between 1918 and 1939 lies in the exoticism of the Second Polish Republic, which, unlike the Poland of today, was multinational and multilingual (Buryła 2018). The retrospective inclination of the genre and the need to articulate Polish history once again would seem to be a reaction to the circumstances of democratic transition, a move that in turn enabled the restoration of themes that were deemed to be inconvenient to the former regime. Indeed, the noteworthy historicity of Polish crime fiction might be explained by the need to update the national iconography, among other

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things, and also by the fact that Polish literature as a whole has since 1989 been undergoing a strenuous process of searching for a language to express the experience of the new reality, which is hardly possible without a full and thorough re-articulation of the past (Czapliński 2009). The process is particularly challenging when it comes to the moments that are seen as constitutive for creating an imaginarium communis, such as, in the recent history of Poland, the interwar period of 1918–1939, or the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. It should come as no surprise that the moment in 1918 when Poland regained its independence after 123 years of absence from the map of Europe became one of crucial importance for Polish culture and, consequently, significant for Polish retro crime narrative. One of the main characteristics of this sub-genre, therefore, is a process of recovery of the past, supported by the authors’ historical research into the locations, objects, social frameworks, and linguistic diversity of this particular historical moment. While re-examining the interwar period, retro crime fiction proceeds to critically dissect and indeed demythologise the meaning and character of this period, rather than subject it to nostalgic representation (i.e. where the focus is only on what the past looked like). As such, I argue that the Polish retro crime novel serves to fill the vacant spaces in the national historical and cultural imaginary. The complexity of this process is brought into focus by Andrzej Leder’s diagnosis of Polish symbolic order in his book Przes ́niona rewolucja: Ćwiczenie z logiki historycznej [The Overslept Revolution: An Exercise from Historical Logic, 2014]. Drawing on Charles Taylor’s theory of the social imaginary, the Polish philosopher argues that the revolution that took place in Poland during and soon after the Second World War left the nation with an empty symbolic order. According to Leder, this period of revolutionary change was ‘overslept’ by Poles, since they did not consider themselves active agents in the process of creating the new communist state imposed forcibly by the USSR. Diagnosing the problem of identity, Leder highlights the fact that Poland had been deprived of its urban middle class as a result of Nazi occupation, since this had largely been of Jewish origin. The cultural ethos, which until then had been the domain of the post-Sarmatian symbolic order cultivated by the landed gentry, was replaced after the war by an egalitarian communist ideology. In towns and cities all over Poland the new inhabitants of homes previously occupied by Jewish and German families had gained their status by means of a revolution carried out by foreign forces. Thus, the interwar period is important to the social imaginary, not only because it was a formative moment for

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the Polish state, but also because it was the only period in recent history that could provide a middle-class template. According to Leder, the 1990s were the years when the middle-class revolution was completed in Poland. Leder argues that the new middle class, which he defines as the children of the Polish intelligentsia, the descendants of civil servants of the Polish People’s Republic, and activists of the Polish United Workers’ Party, took over power and set up their businesses in a new democratic country. All of them were the inheritors of the upward mobility initiated by the 1939–1956 revolution—a fact that many of them have yet to acknowledge (Leder 2014). This hegemonic class seems to “dream while awake” (Leder 2014: 198), because it has not yet discovered its own identity. The social imaginary is void, the symbolic order a vacuum. Consequently, after 1989, the Polish nation is imagined as still virginal—innocent of declaring any wars, never having espoused communism or propagated antisemitism. The war and the postwar period need to be discussed openly with a new vocabulary, since Poland, as it now exists, an ethnically and religiously homogeneous country with barely diversified social classes, has no idea how these particular qualities have dominated society in the past (Czapliński 2009). The impact of both the industrial and educational modernisation implemented by the communist administration and the new economic deal which initiated a new process of modernisation and neoliberalism has yet to be fully reckoned with. Certainly, neither of these periods of modernisation were accompanied by an attendant scrutiny of the value systems that might become part of “the kind of common understanding that enables us to carry out collective practices that make up our social life” (Taylor 2004: 24). It can consequently be argued that Polish retro crime narrative is prominent as a creative field in which writers articulate the missing elements of national imaginary which Poles have previously refused to define. The urge to re-define the national and cultural identity in the face of the encroachment of capitalism has led to the revival of historical research which has shed a new light on the events of the twentieth century,1 along with attempts at articulating a defence of capitalism within literature, for example, as the “magic realism of the middle class” (Czapliński 2009). Polish retro crime narrative continues and extends this enquiry by reconstructing the interwar period in order to provide a foundation that allows for the articulation of middle-class anxieties and preoccupations. In doing so, the genre domesticates capitalism by incorporating the figure of a hard-boiled detective, who has typically operated according to a

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middle-­ class code underscored by individual attainment and home-­ ownership (both elements congruent with a capitalist ethos or values). This type of crime fiction has also been meticulous in its reproduction of the interwar everyday, serving to explore the urban space, a territory that has been neglected in Polish literature, and examine the process of modernisation which Poland underwent after 1918 and the corresponding process of democratic transition after 1989. While in Europe the process of modernisation had made the bourgeoisie the most powerful social class, in the Poland of the interwar period the urban middle class was not represented in the social imaginary or in political life (Leder 2014) and, as mentioned, after the Second World War, the Polish middle class continued to be deprived of its cultural identity. Critics consider Polish retro crime fiction to have been inspired by classic hard-­ boiled narrative (Browarny 2010; Gemra 2013), particularly in terms of its urban setting, location during the interwar period, and most probably its characteristic male gaze, tough worldview, and voice. Together with historical realism, the latter should also be acknowledged as the constitutive elements of retro crime novels. Stephen Knight credits the hard-boiled crime novel with the individualistic aspects of the private eye, who “operates alone, judges others by himself, shares no one’s values” (2010: 112), but it is evident that Polish retro detectives are in fact representatives of the middle class. First, they are police officers. Retro detectives work for an organisation, just as most city dwellers do, and it is equally true to say that they are able to pursue their investigations as long as they are anchored in urban society, which is entirely unlike the setting of hard-boiled crime novels: “the shapeless, valueless, traditionless cities of the far west” (Knight 2010: 112). These apparently Chandleresque characters are actually ready to work hard in order to maintain their social status. In control of their income, they are proud householders who provide for their families, and thanks to their education, their perception of social complexities is on a high level and their social and cultural engagement evident. This chapter does not simply focus on those writers who are only perceived as a commercial success or have managed to develop within their series the panorama of the interwar everyday;2 the authors analysed in this chapter also recall the past in order to reproduce the middle-class ethos. Marek Krajewski, for example, admits that he wanted to create the ‘Breslau’ series in order to explore the German past of the city of Wrocław, and talks of his fascination with German inscriptions on buildings in his hometown.3 Marcin Wroński, who made his debut in 2007 with the series featuring

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detective inspector Zygmunt Maciejewski, encourages the reader in the epilogues of his novels to find parallels between the socio-economic situation of interwar Lublin and the present moment in Poland. Meanwhile, the protagonist of Konrad T. Lewandowski’s series, Jerzy Drwęcki, resident in Warsaw and a close friend of interwar celebrities and politicians, represents an impeccable model of a middle-class lifestyle. Polish retro crime writers recreate the interwar period through reconstructing particular urban locations and attributing middle-class qualities to retro detectives. As such, these novels both activate and contribute to a particular Polish social imaginary and speak to a more general transition to a neoliberal market society and economy whereby Poland is assimilated into the European Union and thereby becomes just like everywhere else. Far from being outsiders, retro crime detectives are active agents of society, among them the career-minded Eberhardt Mock, the protagonist of Krajewski’s Breslau series. Originating from the lower classes, and always conscious of his social position, Mock, inspired by the glamorous lifestyle of his wealthy companions at university, rejects the chance of an academic career and takes up a position in the vice squad. He enjoys the bonuses he receives by virtue of his professional relations with brothels, and operates carefully within the institution he works for, both to gain the support of people he can blackmail and to prove himself irreplaceable. Unlike the typical hard-boiled detective, Eberhardt Mock seems strongly attached to social organisations and able to enjoy the pleasures that are the consequence of his middle-class status. In Phantoms of Breslau (2010) the policeman lives in a revolting flat that used to be a butcher’s workshop, and every time he recalls his childhood home he remembers the smell of the bones cooked to make glue by his father, a shoemaker. It comes as no surprise that Mock, due to his humble origin and wartime experience, appreciates the value of a three-room flat with a lavatory just as much as he enjoys sumptuous meals, chess, sex, and the stability of married life. The retro crime detective holds tightly to his independence and individuality while pursuing his investigations, but at the same time understands that he is no longer an urban crusader without any social attachments. To be able to perform his investigation, there is no better place than the well-­ established institution of the state police. Within the social system Mock realises the middle-class dream that is represented by the elegant office furniture which he manages to negotiate with his supervisor. He aims eventually at the stability that is provided through a marriage of convenience with a wealthy woman, and his individuality is indicated by means

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of his infatuation with antique culture and chess problems. Misogynist and brutal, intellectual, and sybaritic, Mock rejects the benefits of being recruited by the secret misanthropes’ organisation whose aim is to ensure the absolute invulnerability of its members, but accepts membership of the freemasons, who offer to support his career. He gains the trust of the other members of the Masonic lodge to which his supervisor belongs after being described thus by his patron: “He is the son of a penniless tailor, and takes his career exceptionally seriously”4 (Krajewski 2007: 238). Mock’s eagerness for professional success does not hinder him from breaking the law and, consequently, his ambition to become a respected member of the middle class is grounded in a recognition that class aspirations are bolstered by a willingness to cross certain moral boundaries. The biography of Maciejewski, the detective of the ‘Lublin’ series, is deeply immersed in his social and historical contexts. The son of socialist militants, raised by an aunt who was a shop owner, Maciejewski soon realises he cannot follow the occupations his family had cultivated. Working for the system of justice, however, allows him to develop his socialist sensibility and, even though he is ruthless and violent at times, he always senses the social problems that the poor and the middle class of his hometown are facing. The formative moment in his life turns out to be the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1921, when the young Maciejewski volunteers to join the army. He returns to his hometown with the guilt of having been unable to prevent the deaths of innocent people. A mistaken decision on the part of his superior marks him with a contempt for all authorities, ranks, and bourgeois comforts. Rejecting the active patriotism of his parents, he is content with his humble position as a civil servant, but neither does he accept his aunt’s pragmatic philosophy: “Amongst the whole family, only his aunt believed that Poland was created with money, not with a sword” (Wroński 2014: loc. 2399). Maciejewski raises his social awareness in the professional field, and in his perception of the world the vulnerability of a young cadet coexists with the verist eye of an observer who understands social complexity. When forced to explain his actions Maciejewski emphasises that the social context of his professional “criminality […] isn’t some kind of cancerous growth, it’s as natural as a cold in autumn or the clap in a brothel. I hate it when amateurs set about dealing with criminality” (Wroński 2015: 112). One senses that Maciejewski shares middle-class values in his own way. Since he ignores the fact that his position in the police force is a form of social advance that provides him with an opportunity to climb the

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corporate ladder, Maciejewski exemplifies a lower middle-class philosophy that is predicated on a stable social position and economic security. Unlike Mock, the detective is careless with regard to his outfit and living conditions. Mean as regards money, though, Maciejewski reveals his feelings buying ordinary flowers for his fiancée, Róża, and he is not indifferent to the sense of order which she imposes when they live together. The prospect of professional promotion that would provide financial stability allows him to consider the idea of getting married despite his predilection for alcohol and his fiancée’s occasional problems with narcotics. The admiration for the stability of family life is embodied in the ‘Lublin’ series in Róża’s desire for having a baby and Maciejewski’s respect for the traditional family of his supervisor, superintendent Kraft. The couple, however, project a progressive image of the family-to-be since they are known to be living together unmarried, and Róża, a qualified nurse, scandalises prominent members of local society when she proposes giving a lecture on family planning. And no matter how awkward Maciejewski appears as a life partner and how brutal as a police officer, at work he is a professional who relies on in-depth inquiries and expert knowledge: “He became increasingly convinced that every Investigative Department ought to contain a separate unit for reading books, and particularly newspapers” (Wroński 2015: 152). The subject of the middle-class lifestyle is also significant in the ‘Warsaw’ series by Lewandowski. Jerzy Drwęcki, a veteran of the Polish-Soviet war, traumatised by the fact that he found himself capable of enjoying killing, struggles for normality, and the whole series seems to be a hymn to the life of the middle-class family, whose wisdom is anchored in the heroic experience of countless wars and insurrections that provided the Polish nation with common sense, a rational attitude to life, and the ability to enjoy good food, company, friendship, and sex. The common sense and traditional values personified, among others, by the respected figure of a veteran of the January Uprising of 1863 are presented as a remedy that resolves all the conflicts that derive from political, ethnic, religious, or regional differences. Having rejected a promising academic career, Drwęcki applies his knowledge of “three-valued logic” he studied at university to rationalise in practice the reality he lives in, and even when shocked by the hypocrisy of a Catholic family, he still defends the Catholic Church, whose tradition and position in Polish society makes it indispensable to the maintenance of the social status quo. On the one hand, the policeman believes in progress, science, and modernity. He impresses his

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colleagues with novelties such as his Colt 1911 revolver, and, thanks to his own ambition and talent, Drwęcki, despite his young age, is promoted to superintendent. On the other hand, however, he is afraid of revolutionary changes, and his position is always bolstered by tradition and the natural order of things. Representing the conservative worldview, Drwęcki embodies the middle-class persona that is deprived of the ability to offer a critical outlook on society due to the tendency to subordinate other people’s actions to his own values and beliefs. It seems right to say that, for retro crime detectives, the experience of war becomes the factor that not only determines their life philosophy but also provides credentials for their ability to introduce new qualities that help them deal with capitalist reality. The past leaves its mark on Mock’s biography. The experience of the First World War is recalled by Mock’s army friend: “Our comradeship was cemented by daily humiliations, by the daily contempt to which we were subjected” (Krajewski 2010: 86). Alone and facing death, Mock and his companion found brotherhood in the experience of humiliation when having to use the toilet together and on command. Historical events mark the reality of the ‘Breslau’ series with violence and cruelty. The critical moments of the epoch (the global economic crisis, the growth of Nazism) as well as future events in the postwar era generate a sense of the futility of the individual’s actions in the face of history. The experience of war simplifies the way Mock acts, since he applies a “principle of vice” to his professional and private life that could be interpreted simply as a combination of violence and blackmail that breaks other people. Similarly, in the ‘Lublin’ series, Detective Inspector Maciejewski’s beliefs are conditioned by wartime experience, and his social sensitivity enables him to investigate society by reading people’s economic situations. However, when the policeman prevents the execution of a warrant for distraint, his actions are motivated partly by the terrifying poverty of a Jewish family, and partly by the condescending attitude of the bailiff. His colleague from the ‘Warsaw’ series openly comments on social inequalities but, although Drwęcki pities prostitutes, he seems to believe that his wife, a middle-class woman, is insulated from such misery: “Marysia and her friends […] belonged to a completely different race, even to a different kind. No amount of dressing-up or cosmetics could have altered this” (Lewandowski 2009: 54). Drwęcki still perceives himself as a warrior, and his wife personifies all the qualities of a practical wife, a passionate lover, an innocent woman, a best friend, and an excellent mother. Polish retro crime thus becomes the arena for re-examining the national imaginary, and

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inaugurates a debate that examines how at certain times the values of the imagined community might become an obstruction militating against a critical viewpoint on the community itself. The manner in which the retro detective recovers from the trauma of war becomes a means through which Polish crime fiction revises the ideals of the landed gentry, anchored as they were in the ethos of an honourable warrior, and useless in understanding the capitalist (neoliberal) world. Mock rationally chooses to become efficient in his work by means of violence and ruthlessness. The lesson that history teaches Maciejewski is to explore the complexities of social and economic relations. Drwęcki, however, continues reading reality according to outdated values of honour that do not contribute to any understanding of the complexity of the modern world; as such, the ‘Warsaw’ series remains an idealised version of prewar middle-class life. Polish retro crime narrative is noted for its urban character, and this tendency is attributed to copying and simplifying the ideas of so-called homeland novels that facilitate the discovery and understanding of the past (Nowacki 2019), especially in terms of the local specificity. The tendency to historicity, though, is not exceptional for the genre either, since this trend has been observed among international crime fiction writers for the last few decades (King 2019). However, Polish crime fiction as a vehicle that transports the reader into the past not only offers the possibility to recover an unknown or forgotten historical moment, but also provides the means to raise questions about borders and national identity. Poland belongs to those European countries whose frontiers have undergone numerous transformations during the course of their history. The drastic change on the European map after the Second World War is one of the aspects of the national imagery that has been “overslept”, according to Leder’s terminology. The limits of Polish territory agreed at the Yalta Conference in 1945 were not widely debated at the time, but it became a significant issue during the transition to a market economy and European democracy after 1989. Through a meticulous reconstruction of ‘real’ historical locations, Polish retro crime novels seeks to fill in the blanks of this memory map and, in doing so, uncover the ways in which the process of map-reading is tied to the construction of a broader social imaginary. Mapping urban space within the genre was initiated in a somewhat scandalous way by Marek Krajewski in his ‘Breslau’ series. The author himself admits that using the German version of the name Wrocław in the title of the first volumes of the series was intended to intrigue and even

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provoke Polish readers (Gemra 2013). It can also be interpreted as an explicit indication that the reader is entering historical territory, and that Wrocław was a German city before the Second World War. After 1989, the new generation, the grandchildren of those who were transplanted to Wrocław after 1945 from the Eastern territories that had been annexed by the Soviet Union, understood that the city did not fully belong to them, and Krajewski’s novels are a way of exploring the discrepancy between their ancestral memories and their actual place of residence. As a result, the German period of the history of Wrocław has been restored and reclaimed as an element in promoting the city (Kubicki 2011). The process initiated by the ‘Breslau’ series is aimed at recognising the German past of the city that had been expunged from Polish official memory, and its author, Marek Krajewski, became a dedicated medium in the reconstruction of the interwar city that had been demolished during the Second World War. Weighed down with specific names and detailed descriptions of historical locations, these novels offer a list of German street names and their present-day Polish equivalents in order to support a wider claim to historical authenticity. The author’s meticulousness when it comes to reconstructing the topography of the city is dismissed as mock realism by some critics (Gemra 2013; Mazurkiewicz 2013), since the reader is able to experience only the ghost of a city that belongs to the past and which cannot be reconstructed on an actual map. Still, the perception of historical reality is further intensified by the author’s careful delineation of historical brand names for clothes, cigarettes, and drinks. These historical realities are intended to strengthen the authenticity of the fictional world, but they also help to conjure a past kept alive in the cultural memory of its residents following the destruction and atrocities of the Second World War. The topographical and sociological panorama of Breslau is reconstructed by means of careful descriptions of the political, social, religious, erotic, narcotic, alcoholic, and gastronomic aspects of urban existence that are responsible for the image of a decadent metropolis (Browarny 2010). This focus on the materiality of existence is contrasted in the series with the reality of the violent and brutal life of the city, a move which in turn underscores social divisions—the sense of a city riven by class conflict, pitting the rich and privileged against the poor and marginalised. The same tensions are apparent in the protagonist, as he is presented in a way that combines a tough Chandleresque detective determined to uncover the truth at all costs with “a typical character from bourgeois literature”

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(Browarny 2010: 253). Though criticised for creating a violent macho type who despises homosexuality and is distinguishable from the people he polices only by virtue of his knowledge of Latin (Szybowicz, Warkocki 2010), Krajewski is also praised for reproducing a nostalgia for “middle-­ class stereotypical affluence” (Szybowicz, Warkocki 2010: 78) that in turn contributes to the reconstruction of a middle-class imagery. The process of validating the map is also connected with discovering new perspectives for reading the territory. When Wrocław is presented through the eyes of Mock, Polish readers, while accepting the historical viewpoint, also adopt the perspective of a foreigner. The protagonists of the ‘Breslau’ series occasionally travel through Polish territory and, from the position of strangers, notice the linguistic peculiarities or the differences among representatives of German and Polish Jewish culture. The significant topographic perspective is also noticeable in the ‘Lublin’ series, whose protagonist, Zygmunt Maciejewski, lives in a town located in Central Poland during the interwar period, a fact that forces today’s reader to actualise his memory map, since the situation of Lublin now belongs to the eastern edge of Polish territory. The character of geographical and social conditions consolidates the reality in the ‘Lublin’ series. During the interwar period, Lublin was an important railway junction, and the Jewish community numbered one-­ third of the total population of the city. Over the course of ten volumes, Wroński displays the panorama of his hometown with all of its particularities, for example the circulation of daily newspapers, the nature of the Jewish community, the aviation industry, film production and distribution, and sport, while altering the accents used in keeping with the needs of the investigation. In the epilogues, the author comments directly on the sources and fragments of local history he has drawn upon in the particular volume, and encourages readers to discover parallels with the present. Wroński’s extensive reading of Lublin’s archives results in a grounded and mimetic representation of interwar reality. A dense social panorama forms the basis of his historical realism, and Lublin becomes a lens that draws attention to the characteristics of interwar urban society in Poland restored to collective memory. The most significant feature of the interwar Polish society that the ‘Lublin’ series emphasises is the presence in the social fabric of the Jewish community, which had been carefully erased (if not completely, then diminished successfully) from the collective memory of the citizens of the Polish People’s Republic. As has been stated earlier, according to Leder,

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Jews were the foundation of the Polish middle-class in the interwar period, but remained excluded from the Polish imaginary. For the sake of historical realism, Wroński creates a multicultural Lublin of Orthodox Christians, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, but for the reasons already outlined, the latter becomes the most important minority. The reader is made aware of this community’s everyday existence through the sound of Yiddish voices and the image of Luftmenschen debating on the streets. Maciejewski understands the problems of the Jews who want to assimilate and those who have opted for a traditional and religious life, and also of the character of the Jewish press, of antisemitic comments and activities on the Polish side, and of the specificity of Jewish schools and organisations. The figure of the detective embodies an awareness and acceptance of ethnic diversity and the complexities of multicultural coexistence. Maciejewski learns the difference between kibbutz and hakhshara, and needs to speak Yiddish in order to update his knowledge on current affairs by reading Lubliner Togblat. When he discovers that one of his fellow policemen has converted to Catholicism in order to be promoted, Maciejewski asks this person, who retains some elements of his Jewish identity, for assistance when in need of expertise on Jewish culture. The collective image of the Jewish community, comprising numerous references to culture, language, history, and everyday events, is nothing more than elements in the policeman’s natural environment, but this portrait also acts as a reminder to today’s readers about how these two cultures and traditions continue to shape Polish identity. Polish readers recognise the reference to a saying that is easily ascribed to both traditions when Maciejewski is asked to interpret the words of a Jewish worker: ‘And what exactly does “zkem amol zayn ager” mean?’, asked Zielny, observing the unemployed man. “‘S’ken alemol zayn erger’”, the sub-commissioner corrected him— ‘Things can always get worse’. (Wroński 2011a: 114)

In this way, Wroński assumes the challenge of examining the complex, overlapping relations between these two groups. The understanding of cultural diversity as represented by Maciejewski is mitigated by openly antisemitic attitudes like that of a train passenger who comments, “I see you also like travelling on a Saturday? The carriages smell less of garlic then” (Wroński 2014: loc. 4085), or the apparent indifference of a Polish woman: “Of course I am not an anti-semite, heaven forbid! […] Let them

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live the best way they can. But does it have to be in Poland?” (Wroński 2011a: 231). Even Maciejewski, despite his elevated cultural and social consciousness, notices that he is not free of prejudices. After interrogating the director of a Jewish bank, the police detective realises he has underestimated the suspect: “Everything fell apart when he came across Golder. This is very Polish, he reflected, putting all the blame on a Jew. Shit, with anyone else I would have been more careful, whereas I approached him just like an idiot. What did I expect? Oy vey, have mercy on me, officer, sir!” (Wroński 2010: 172). Critical Jewish voices are also heard in the novel, like that of a young hakhshara activist: “I hope, a year from now, not to be here any more. I will happily forget both Lublin and Poland, I will forget everything about the place” (Wroński 2011a: 88). In the volumes of the series that encompass the period of the Second World War, Wroński also explores the difficult topic of the Holocaust. Under the Nazi occupation, Maciejewski and Róża are not heroic figures. The detective is obsessed with another investigation, and Róża is forced to work in the place where at night she witnesses, but does nothing to stop, the evacuation of the ghetto: “No, it was not the shouts of those being driven along the road that horrified her, since it was rarely that anybody shouted. What was ghastly was the steady hum of quiet voices, the scraping sound of wooden shoes. At first she wept, but now, whenever she heard the sound of gunshots, she prayed that they might be well-aimed” (Wroński 2011b: loc. 3794). The helplessness of Róża, as individual, in the face of massive and highly organised genocide is a trauma that continues to haunt and affect Polish memory and identity in the contemporary. The perspective of the Second World War that is offered in both the ‘Breslau’ and ‘Lublin’ series is part of a wider process of filling in the gaps and absences in the nation’s collective memory. In 1952 Maciejewski, now a boxing trainer in the Polish People’s Republic, experiences a sensation of being an alien in his own hometown, and the war is to be blamed for it. “The carts probably made their way when the avenue alongside the barracks was still named after Piłsudski, and did the same when it was Lublinerstrasse, and do so now that it is Stalin Avenue […]” (Wroński 2014: loc. 1976). The disassociation experienced by Maciejewski corresponds to the situation of the third generation of Poles whose ancestors were forced to move to Wrocław and thousands of towns scattered in the western part of Poland, and who woke up after the political transition of 1989 to an unknown land.

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Interestingly, the historical perspective of the ‘Warsaw’ crime novels is focused on the wars preceding the 1930s, the decade in which the story is set, and the series itself is not continued into the Second World War. Allusions to the future serve as evidence that the protagonists are unconscious of the chaos that will be unleashed by impending war. Instead, the characters discuss such possible achievements of humanity as flights into space, and the reader is given no indication of their future, neither during the war nor after. When Drwęcki has to work with an antisemitic driver, the latter’s philosophy is neutralised when he expresses his gratitude to a Jewish policeman for saving his life. Hitler is portrayed as merely ridiculous, and Drwęcki asks for clarification when hearing the new word ‘Nazi’. The innocence of the protagonists corresponds with the state described by Leder as “dreaming while awake”. As stated earlier, Drwęcki accepts the social status quo and, consequently, the series becomes an uncomplicated celebration of life in the Second Polish Republic (1918–1939). The fact that a talented detective is delegated to various cities expands the map of interwar Poland (Warsaw, Łódź, Poznań, Katowice, Zaleszczyki), but as an outsider in new places, Drwęcki portrays each location stereotypically. If Łódź is commonly associated with the textile industry and the Jewish community, a kaleidoscope of common connotations appears: Jewish policemen, a crowd of workers on the way to their factory, certain Yiddish expressions, the Kabbalah and a dybbuk, the sons of textile magnates shooting with firearms in the streets, and in consequence the author presents a conventional and lightweight version of historical realism.5 In conclusion, it seems appropriate to claim that the variant of Polish crime fiction known as retro crime, as well as becoming an excellent example of historical crime narrative, reflects the process of restoring the Polish “imagined community” in the wake of the 1989 transition. While the historicity of Polish retro crime seeks to re-examine Polish national imaginary, the convention of the hard-boiled crime novel is utilised in order to open up new cultural imaginaries in the light of socio-political changes in Poland. The tensions that are released in contemporary Polish democracy are exposed by means of the endorsement of middle-class values in retro crime. In revising the middle-class model of life, the retro novels examined in this chapter shed light on the new social status quo that originates in democracy and the liberal market, and the genre, consequently and at times in spite of itself, provides the contemporary readership with a far-­ reaching critique of social cohabitation.

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Notes 1. Some publications on recent history that have incited public debate: Jan Tomasz Gross: Neighbours: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, 2000; Piotr Zaremba: Wielka trwoga: Polska 1944–1947, 2012; Jan Sowa: Fantomowe ciało króla, 2011; Andrzej Leder: Przesniona ́ rewolucja: Ćwiczenie z logiki historycznej, 2014; Magdalena Grzebałkowska: 1945: Wojna i pokój, 2015. 2. Nevertheless, the authors are the most successful representatives of Polish retro crime narrative. The ‘Breslau’ series has been translated into more than twenty languages and awarded the High Calibre Award (2003), the most prominent prize for a crime novel in Poland. The volumes translated into English are: Death in Breslau, 2008; Phantoms in Breslau, 2010; The End of the World in Breslau 2010; and The Minotaur’s Head, 2012. The ‘Lublin’ series was awarded the High Calibre Award in 2018. It is worth noting that the ‘Warsaw’ series was created on commission from the publishing house (Nowacki 2019), which also evidences the commercial success of the genre. 3. See “Rok 1999. Marek Krajewski wydaje ‘Śmierć w Breslau’”. Emilia Padoł, https://kultura.onet.pl/wywiady-­i-­artykuly/100-­lat-­polsko-­r ok-­1999-­ marek-­krajewski-­wydaje-­smierc-­w-­breslau/r0hzn42 (20.11.2021) 4. All quotations translated by Krzysztof Cieszkowski. 5. See also Elżbieta Dutka’s comments on the stereotypical presentation of ́ ̨skie dziękczynienie in Silesian culture in the volume in the series titled Sla ́ ̨sku w literaturze przełomu wieków XX i XXI. Zapisywanie miejsca: szkice o Sla

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. 1997 [1983]. Wspólnoty wyobrażone. Rozważania o źródłach i rozprzestrzenianiu się nacjonalizmu. Kraków, Znak. Będkowski, Leszek. 2019. ‘O kilku aspektach kryminałów Zygmunta Miłoszewskiego i ich recepcji w świetle świadectw odbioru trylogii o prokuratorze Szackim’. In Literatura popularna. Kryminał, Vol. 3. Editors, E. Bartos, K. Niesporek. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śla ̨skiego. 271–294. Browarny, Wojciech. 2010. ‘Dyskretny urok mieszczańskiego demonizmu (powieści Marka Krajewskiego)’. Studia Filmoznawcze, 32. 245–258. Buryła, Sławomir. 2018. ‘Pamięć powojnia w kryminale retro’. In Popkulturowe formy pamięci. Editors, S.  Buryła; L.  Ga ̨sowska; D.  Ossowska. Warszawa: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN. 97–126. Czapliński, Przemysław. 2009. Polska do wymiany. Późna nowoczesnosć́ i nasze wielkie narracje. Warszawa: WAB. ́ ̨sku w literaturze przełomu Dutka, Elżbieta. 2011. Zapisywanie miejsca: szkice o Sla wieków XX i XXI. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śla ̨skiego.

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Gemra, Anna. 2013. ‘Eberhard Mock na tropie: Breslau/Wrocław w powieściach ́ ̨skie pogranicza kultur, 2. 119–142. Marka Krajewskiego’. Sla King, Stewart. 2019. Murder in the Multinational State: Crime Fiction from Spain. New York and London: Routledge. Knight, Stephen. 2010. Crime Fiction since 1800: Detection, Death, Diversity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ́ Krajewski, Marek. 2003 [1999]. Smierć w Breslau. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Dolnośla ̨skie. ———. 2010 [2005]. Widma w miescie ́ Breslau. Warszawa: WAB. ———. 2007. Dżuma w Breslau. Warszawa: WAB. Krzywicka, Ewa. 2019. ‘Polska powieść kryminalna retro. Czołowi przedstawiciele subgatunku i ich pomysły na cykle’. Literatura popularna. Kryminał, Vol. 3. Editors, E.  Bartos, K, Niesporek. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śla ̨skiego. 205–218. Kubicki, Paweł. 2011. Nowi mieszczanie w nowej Polsce. Warszawa: Instytut Obywatelski. Leder, Andrzej. 2014. Przesniona ́ rewolucja: ćwiczenie z logiki historycznej. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej. Lewandowski, Konrad T. 2009. Perkalowy dybuk. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Dolnośla ̨skie. Mazurkiewicz, Adam. 2013. ‘Strategie rekonstrukcji przeszłości we współczesnej polskiej literaturze popularnej (rekonesans)’. Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis, No 3577. Literatura i Kultura Popularna XIX. 13–28. ———. 2018. ‘Fantomy przeszłości. Artystyczne strategie uobecniania pamięci w kulturze popularnej (na wybranych przykładach)’. Popkulturowe formy pamięci. Editors, S.  Buryła, L.  Ga ̨sowska, D.  Ossowska. Warszawa: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN. 13–32. Nowacki, Dariusz. 2019. ‘Po trosze powieść kryminalna. Przypadek Zbigniewa Białasa’. Literatura popularna. Kryminał, Vol. 3. Editors, E.  Bartos, ́ ̨skiego. 171–190. K. Niesporek. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Sla Szybowicz, Eliza, Warkocki, Błażej. 2010. ‘Mock w mieście potworów’. Krytyka Polityczna. 20–21. 70–78. Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press. Wroński, Marcin. 2010 [2007]. Morderstwo pod cenzura ̨. Warszawa: WAB. ———. 2011a [2008]. Kino Venus. Warszawa: WAB. ———. 2011b. A na imię jej będzie Aniela. Warszawa: WAB. [Kindle]. ———. 2015 [2012]. Skrzydlata trumna. Warszawa: WAB. ———. 2014. Kwestja krwi. Warszawa: WAB. [Kindle]. Wróblewska, Violetta. 2011. ‘Tendencje rozwojowe polskiej literatury kryminalnej po 1989 roku’. Literatura popularna. 17. 127–145.

CHAPTER 15

Euroscapes: Space, Place, and Multi-Level Governance in European Television Crime Series Caius Dobrescu and Anne Marit Waade

In this chapter, we present a theoretical framework for analysing the interaction between European governance models and the representational policies of places in crime narratives, by drawing on perspectives from, respectively, media and cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and political science reflecting on popular culture. Our understanding of ‘Euroscape’ is premised on Arjun Appadurai’s concept of ideoscapes, as transnational imagined worlds which “consist of a chain of ideas, terms, and images, including freedom, welfare, rights, sovereignty, representation, and the master term democracy” (Appadurai 1996: 36; Mihelj et al.

C. Dobrescu (*) University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania e-mail: [email protected] A. M. Waade Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Dall’Asta et al. (eds.), Contemporary European Crime Fiction, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21979-5_15

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2008). Our notion of ‘Euroscapes’ draws on aspects of multi-­level governance theory and shows how European television crime series give narrative substance to the interplay between the “territorially overlapping” jurisdictions of the multi-level model of European governance (Hooghe and Marks 2001a, b; Piattoni 2010; Enderlein et al. 2010), and the overlapping spheres of “myth, memory, fantasy and desire” of densely textured European places (Parsons 2000: 1). Crime series are instrumental in understanding the connection between (a) poetics of location and place, articulated within identity building processes and (b) concepts of governance as means of organizing, and even generating, space, in both symbolic and practical terms. At the same time, crime narratives are about safetyscapes (Maguire et al. 2014; Lowe and Maguire 2019) that balance pragmatic policies of controlling, preventing, and combating violence with the empathetic effort of preserving a sense of commonality, protective inclusiveness, and ‘home’. In our analytical framework, we distinguish between (a) the public/ private frontier; (b) the national/international frontier; (c) densely populated frontier regions of bordering states; and (d) local government interacting with community associations (Hooghe and Marks 2001b). Our examples are based on production and thematic elements, but the analytical model allows for future in-depth analytical case studies combining, for example, textual analysis and audience and media coverage studies, to critically discuss how the poetics of space and place reflects European governance in TV crime narratives.

The Multi-Level Governance Model European contemporary crime series are sensitive and responsive to multi-­ level and multi-actor governance models. According to Hooghe and Marks, the type of multi-level governance characteristic of Europe is supposed to comprise “specialized, territorially overlapping jurisdictions in a relatively flexible, nontiered system with a large number of jurisdictions” (Hooghe and Marks 2001b: 10f). In this chapter, we understand the notion of governance as a “multi-actor and multilevel game” (Hooghe and Marks 2001a). Governance is explained in contrast to government: ‘government’, referring to an analytical and practical focus on the formal structures of government, on the state as the central governing actor, is

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being replaced by ‘governance’, referring to a focus on the process of governing and on the multiple state-society interactions that constitute it. (Kooiman 2003: 4)

Government customarily conveys a holistic political and managerial vision anchored in the territorial representation of the nation. By contrast, governance is “a form of social self-regulation instead of hierarchical government” and “a concept for the analysis of societal capacities ‘beyond’ government (no more dualism between state and market but direct interaction: ‘bargaining’, ‘negotiation’, ‘enabling’, ‘facilitating’, ‘mediating’, ‘entrepreneurial policies’)” (Salet, Willem 2003: 9, after Gualini 2001). This interplay between power and management tiers can no longer be conceived as exclusively hierarchical, with the corollary that it is no longer exclusively amenable to the abstract space of holistic government. Flexibility, dynamics, specificity/specification, even creative playfulness seem to convey to the model resulting from the “devolution of governmental competencies” (Salet, Willem 2003: 9) features of the lived experience usually associated with experiential place. Nevertheless, this multi-level interplay which generates changing patterns of decision-making still presupposes a logical-connective, cybernetic organizational frame that is closer to conceptual ‘space’. Moreover, even if national government is no longer the only significant player, it is equally true that “the idealised concepts of a self-regulating society based on spontaneous action by its citizens and enterprises belong to the realms of Utopia” (Sallet et al. 2003: 9). Multi-level governance theory has developed a diversified and spectacular operational pattern over the last two decades, of which the core elements are the following: (a) devolution, based on the principle that problems should be solved at the jurisdictional and managerial level where they occur, without any unnecessary approval ‘from above’; (b) development of local and regional autonomies with a redistribution of authority between them and the national state; c) reshaping national sovereignty in adjustment to European jurisdictional frames; (d) flexible overlapping, that is, cooperation, of jurisdictions that allows for ‘non-tiered’ interactions between different levels of government—that is, local authorities directly addressing the European level, without necessarily going through a regional and national chain of decision; and (e) flexible cooperation between state and society, implying, with respect to economic policies, the development of public-private initiatives, together with an increasing involvement of NGOs and citizens’ initiatives in the elaboration and implementation of social and cultural public policies.

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Setting multi-level governance as a conceptual reference does not imply in any way that this model is perceived as a panacea for all economic or social-cultural contradictions of European societies. On the contrary, we propose that this vision of blended tiers and spaces of imaginary politics creates the premise for a more accurate and deep exploration of inequality, discrimination, and disenfranchisement. In fact, multi-level governance might be seen as a framework that cannot by itself avoid social conflict, but that can at least offer the opportunity for honestly mitigating and, possibly, overcoming tensions that might initially appear irreconcilable. From this point of view, the setbacks, detours, delays, and cognitive and moral hesitations inherent in the narrative poetics of crime fiction may be seen as expressive vectors best suited to convey the difficulty, complexity, painful responsibility, and even frustration regarding the incapacity to right obvious wrongs, which are part and parcel of the actual process of governance. But it is highly significant that the representation of crime investigations tends to become a pars-pro-toto synecdoche of governance in general, and of European governance in particular.

Crime Narratives as European Storyworlds or Conceptual Maps In his interdisciplinary work on geopolitical television combining international politics and television drama series, Robert Saunders (2017, 2021: 8) operates with similar geographical scales when analysing television fiction series, spanning community (home, Gemeinschaft), the local level, borderlands (territorial frontiers), and the nation/state (political imaginaries). His work reflects a more general academic interest in geopolitics in film/fiction studies, for example Klaus Dodds’s (2018) work on screening the Arctic, and crime fiction as world literature (Pepper and Schmid 2016; Nilsson et al. 2017). Saunders’s overall ambition is to describe the relation between television fiction and the actual social and political realm (Saunders 2021: 16), and as such there are many overlapping ideas and interests with this chapter on Euroscapes in crime narratives. However, our Euroscape framework differs from this model in that we focus on crime narratives in particular, consider exclusively the European Union, and specifically allude to the multi-level governance theory at a European

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level, and not at the global scale envisaged by Saunders. At the same time, while Saunders may take into account different levels of government, from global to regional and local, we focus (following the multi-level governance theory) not on the layers as such, but on the various forms of interference between the layers of government—as processes that give substance to the very notion of governance, as opposed to government. To develop a framework for understanding how crime narratives are conceptually impacted by and to a certain extent engage in the process of governance, it is important to consider how this effect is related to, on the one hand, the genre-specific contract of realism, and on the other, the popularity and market penetration of specific crime fiction narratives. In general, the crime genre is characterized as encompassing both elements: it is the bestselling and most popular of all genres, attracting both male and female audiences, and young and old (Jensen and Jacobsen 2020; Bondebjerg 2020; Pagello and Schleich 2020), and it is the genre most characterized by a specific claim to realism, that is, where places and characters are displayed in a realistic style (Hansen and Waade 2017). One might argue that the only odd/unrealistic aspect of crime fiction is the crimes themselves, namely, that there are far more homicides and serial killers in these series than in real life. These intimately joined capacities to arouse excitement and elicit a sense of solidarity and responsibility are the forces behind the success of quality crime series, and their influence on political opinions (Hall et al. 1978; Sparks 1992; Mutz and Nir 2010). It should be added that responsibility-cum-solidarity does not imply in any way blindness towards the dramatic dysfunctions of a system. Of course, not all European crime series can be brought under this ethical-political denominator—some may even choose to stress social breakdown and inequality rather than solidarity. However, a bleak social vision saturated in violence is not necessarily indicative of a pessimistic social philosophy, but rather points to dramatic/rhetoric conventions specific to the symbolic manner in which the crime genre apprehends social reality. Let’s consider, for instance, the crucial point of the Dutch series Bellicher (2010), which features the eponymous lead character holding at gunpoint the whole of the European Commission, in a desperate attempt to prevent it from unwillingly playing into the hands of cynical anti-democratic conspirators by voting in drastic repressive measures against European Muslims. At first glance this could be seen as an expression of the alienation of ordinary Europeans vis-à-vis the esoteric endeavours of European political elites. Nevertheless, for the crime and thriller genres, conflict and violence are

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not only substantial concerns, but also the main tools of their representational strategy. This perspective could, then, shift the sense of scene described above  from an  expression of social-political failure towards a symbolic shortcutting of traditional hierarchies, that juxtaposes supranational European authority with the power and authority embodied in the European Citizen. Some of the series we will discuss use the representation of conflict and violence not only as a warning of future social disaggregation, but also as a means of dramatizing antiphrastically what we see as the core European principles of social cohesion. In other words, these productions represent European governance as a complex and sometimes painful effort of safeguarding a sense of multi-layered social cohesion even in spite of significant discrepancies between intentions and outcomes, principles and realities. This influence has generally been comprehended and explored from the perspective of representations of law (Greenfield et  al. 2001; Aristodemou et  al. 2017; LaCroix et  al. 2017; Andrzejewski and Salwa 2018). We propose to shift the focus towards a territorial understanding of governance, premised on the phenomenological distinction between ‘space’ and ‘place’. We will attempt to retrace through our selection of representative crime series a model of European governance that resonates with Daniel Davison-Vecchione’s bold comparison of EU constitutional pluralism with the storyworld of the Marvel Universe. In his view: the shared [fictional] universe provides an example of multiple, previously separate storyworlds now combined into a single storyworld, with fundamental tensions arising from apparent incompatibilities between the established elements of the pre-existing worlds … While perfect unity and consistency are impossible, meaning that these worlds will always be ontologically unstable, a transient and fragile form of stability remains, providing the reader can perceive some deeper coherence or continuity within them, even if this is ultimately artificial. (Davison-Vecchione 2017: 187, 188)

This shared fictional universe perspective is highly relevant also for European crime series and their connection to the multi-level model of governance (Bache and Flinders 2004). But we do not follow Davison-­ Vecchione’s analogy between the Marvel storyworld and national constitutional orders co-existing as distinct systems that have to negotiate “common underlying elements such as tropes, archetypes, and principles”

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(130). Rather, we premised our understanding of the “shared and interdependent world” (Gibney 2011) and “collaborative worldbuilding” (Hergenrader 2019) of European crime series on a pan-European perspective, that is, on the intersections between the different layers of territorial jurisdiction. As such, we do not in fact present the aggregation of all European crime series into a homogeneous European storyworld, but rather we try to monitor their location on a more conceptual map of European governance. Let’s begin by pointing to one of the most obvious European examples of convergence between the specific focus of crime investigations and large-scale governance. Initiated in 1970, the Tatort/Crime Scene project implied from the beginning both the collaboration and the creative autonomy of different regional branches of the public television of the Federal Republic of Germany. These regional branches produced parallel crime series, exploiting their own urban landscapes and local specificities, albeit under the same Tatort franchise. After the reunification of Germany in 1989, the network was extended to include the new federal states in the East. At the same time, the most popular crime series of the defunct German Democratic Republic, Polizeiruf 110/Police Call 110, was also restyled according to the same policing geography and turned into an equally resilient franchise. What is relevant here is that this polycentric structure follows and, to a certain extent, revamps the foundational federalism of the German polity. It should also be noted that the public broadcaster ARD consistently balances the crime series dramatization of domestic federalism with a Euro-Krimi franchise located in different cities of Europe: Amsterdam-Krimi, Barcelona-Krimi, Irland-Krimi, Island-­ Krimi, Kroatien-Krimi, Lissabon-Krimi, Prag-Krimi, Urbino-Krimi. On the other hand, there are signs that the Tatort model tends to be creatively adopted in other European areas: since 2013 French public television has been producing the anthology series Meurtres à…/Crimes in…, in which every installment is placed in another city/historical region/administrative unit, and plays on a local urban myth. The connection between governance and televisual fiction can be inferred also from the manner in which the social impact of crime series is assessed and explicitly targeted by the Danish national broadcaster (Redvall 2014; Hansen and Waade 2017). According to the Danish production philosophy, each series should play on two different layers: along with the crime investigation, there should be a more general narrative that raises important societal and political questions, relating to the welfare system,

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gender conflict, racism, or social inequality. For example, the double plot in Forbrydelsen comprises the police investigation into a specific murder seen from the perspective of police detectives and the bereaved, and a more general and critical plotline/premise positing that everyone is or could be a potential murderer, together with a perspective linking societal inequality to criminal deviance (Redvall 2014). Among the different subgenres of crime fiction, we chose to focus on ‘quality’ television series, paying attention to the circulation and the structure of this format. European audiences seem to manifest an interest in limited series (6–8 episodes, sometimes expressly reduced to only one season) that develop a continuous, multi-layered narrative, spanning several story arcs and raising complex moral, social, and political questions (Mittell 2015). This category of television series is suited to an easy transgression of European language and cultural borders, insofar as national audiences also have significant inter- and transnational exposure (Agger 2011, 2016; McCabe 2020). Given their thematic interests in issues such as safety and justice, they seem well positioned to dramatize debates about competing notions of public good, which more often than not touch on the conceptual agenda of European governance.

The Poetics of Space and Place in European Crime Series The sense of place characteristic of crime fiction series is constructed through what we see on the screen, as representation, and a more general understanding of place linked to collective knowledge and the particularities of production. Paying attention to the Nordic model, the location study framework as suggested by Hansen and Waade (2017) considers factors that influence the choice and emphasis of locations in a specific screen production context (e.g. production facilities, know-how, funding, geographical places, tourism), as well as the particular characteristics of the Nordic landscape ranging from climate and architecture to geographic features such as inland/shore/island and urban/rural space that are most often seen in Nordic television crime series. Following Henri Lefebvre (1991), we can distinguish between the physical place, the mediated place, and the imagined place, whereby the interplay between the three forms generates complex referential circuits and spatial practices (see Hansen and Waade 2017: 41).

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This model is taken as a point of departure for exploring the space/ place dynamics of European crime series. But, at the same time, we don’t attempt to embrace the diversity of the off- and on-screen factors accounted for in the Nordic Noir case. Our point of reference shifts from the managerial and administrative factors that create actual production environments, to the interaction of crime series with both actual places and the conceptual environment of European ideoscapes. Since ideas of ‘Europe’ and ‘Europeanization’ are currently understood in a predominantly political and administrative context, we will test how far we can read the concept and practices of multi-layered European governance (Kooiman 2003; Treisman 2007; Mihelj et al. 2008; Piattoni 2010) into these on-screen representations. Europe has typically been defined as an economic space, a space of exchanges, and of free (but abstract) movement. European governance aims at a supranational equilibrium of national equilibriums. It extends over a vast territory and therefore calls for or demands a functional degree of standardization and cohesion, as well as a set of powerful common identifiers, that is, political symbols connected to ‘transcendental’ rules and principles. The symbolic and representational dimension of Europe—as expressed, for instance, in the complex architectural programme of the Hemicycle or the expositional programme of the Bruxelles Parlamentarium—is generally perceived as derogative and somewhat ornamental. But given the increasingly polycentric structure of the European governance, cohesive symbolism might prove crucial to upholding the possibility of a comprehensive perspective on Europe. European crime television series, as privileged sites for the direct and symbolic representation of governance processes (Dobrescu 2020), offer a vivid dramatization of the tensions between the necessity of centripetal cohesion and the urge for centrifugal autonomy at work in the European ‘chaosmos’.

Examples of European Television Crime Series In our mapping of European crime series’ storyworlds, we follow, while slightly adapting, the interfaces of four distinct scales and contexts considered by Hooghe and Marks, that is, (a) the public/private (and also personal) frontier; (b) the national and regional/international frontier; (c) the densely populated frontier regions of bordering states; and, finally, (d) forms of government interacting with community associations (Hooghe and Marks 2001b: 10f). In general, our theoretical approach

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focusing on European multi-level governance and the poetics of space and place in European crime narratives informs the analysis of specific television crime series, as we will demonstrate  throgh focusing on the following filmographic selection: Euroscapes: space, place, and multi-level governance in European television crime series Geo-­ graphical scales

(a) The public/private frontier

(b)  The national and regional/ international frontier

(c) Densely populated frontier regions of bordering states

(d) Local government interacting with community associations

Examples:

Forbydelsen Dicte Wallander Bellicher Commissario Montalbano Los Misterios de Laura Los Hombres de Paco Vine Poliția Policias Hinterland Shetland Fortitude

Crossing Borders Hackerville The Team Paranoid The Missing The Pleasure Principle The Silence Mar de plástico Baptiste 4 Blocks Dogs of Berlin Monster O sabor das margaridas

Bron/Broen (The Tunnel, Der Pass) Wolfland Usedom Krimi Masuren Krimi Wataha Mar de plástico Commissario Montalbano Laura

Ultraviolet Code 37 Midsomer Murders Midnight Sun Y Gwill/ Hinterland Spreewald Krimi Zone Blanche Crimes at

A. P  ublic/private (and/or personal) frontier is an overall theme in Scandinavian crime series. The anti-hero investigator’s private problems overlap and collide with public- and work-related issues, as we see with figures like Kurt Wallander, Annika Bengtsson, Sarah Lund, Saga Norén, Rebecka Martinsson, Dicte, and Harry Hole (Roberts 2016). In the Danish crime series Forbrydelsen the private/public frontier is reflected in the basic dramaturgic structure consisting of three main plotlines involving different socially relevant milieus: the family, the political class, and the police. The plotlines are profoundly intertwined, and in all three the private/public and work/home spheres overlap. One example is the fact that the ‘uncle’ of the grieving family is also the father’s close working partner, and later turns out to be the murderer of their young daughter. The narrative arcs go in two directions: from

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public to private, where we see the consequence for Sarah Lund of suppressing her personal life, but also from private to public, insofar as the workspace is seen as embodying a living place and even the features of a ‘home’. While such Scandinavian examples tend to associate personal trauma with social conflict, in much Mediterranean crime fiction, the personal domain of the investigators is presented as a comforting harbour meant to attenuate and occasionally humanize what is a hazardous and often violent social environment. For instance, to the non-Italian aficionado of the Italian series La Piovra/The Octopus (1984–2001), which presents a bleak picture of organized crime and political corruption in the Peninsula, the convivial atmosphere of the series Commissario Montalbano, based on the novels of Andrea Camilleri, might come as a genuine shock. Even though it is situated in the South, the inquiries of the eponymous character are not, as always used to be the case in Italian crime cinema, revelations of the omnipotence of the Mafia and of an utterly failed nation state. The essentially incorruptible commissioner Montalbano systematically mixes public duties and work with pleasure (mainly gastronomic) by solving mysteries that reveal the complicated network of kinship and interests in the highly picturesque (and completely fictional) town of Vigata. Montalbano constantly mediates between the letter of the law and the customary balances of the local culture, while implicitly advocating for a subtle personal and communitarian savoir vivre. An equally interesting case is the Spanish ensemble series Los Hombres de Paco/Paco’s Men (nine seasons, 2005–2010), remade into the Romanian series Vine Polit ̦ia/The Police are Coming (one season, 2008). Situated in a fictional neighbourhood of Madrid, the series presents the investigations carried out by the picaresque team of inspector Francisco ‘Paco’ Miranda Ramos. Police work is represented here not primarily as an institutional-­ managerial process, but as something close to a family or convivial condominium. The same template of multiple intersections between criminal investigations and the personal lives of the members of the investigative team is clearly recognizable in the Portuguese series Policias (two seasons 1996–1997). The care for his own family as a foundation for his relationship with his team and for the manner in which he approaches the social and ethical difficulties of his murder investigations is also at the core of the character of Kostas Charitos, the Athenian inspector made famous by Greek author Petros Markaris, and brought to television by the Hellenic public broadcasting company in two distinct series (1998–1999 and

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2007–2008). The intimate proximity of the public and the personal in such Mediterranean series is meant not just to thematize the corruption of the system, as it used to be with countercultural crime fiction of the European South, but also to humanize bureaucratic institutions. B. The national (and regional)/international frontier. European crime series also enact international cooperation using transcultural personal interactions as a means of representing the scope of overlapping national/international networks of both policing and organized crime. An obvious example is the international production Crossing Borders, even if, strictly speaking, this show alludes not to the jurisdiction of the European Union but to that of the International Court of Justice in The Hague. More specific pan-European examples would be Danish-­ Belgian-­German cooperation in the international series The Team (two seasons, 2015–2018), German-British cooperation in the UK series Paranoid (2016), or two East-European co-productions focusing on the drama of sexual trafficking: the Polish-Czech-Ukrainian series The Pleasure Principle (2019) and the Croatian-Ukrainian series The Silence (2021), the latter being based on the only slightly fictionalized novels of Croatian investigative journalist Drago Hedl. In the case of two German public television (ARD) series, it is even the case that the fictionalized transnational policing arrangements seen on screen prefigured the creation in real life of two permanent bi-national police units: a GermanPolish crime department in the subsection of the Polizeiruf 110/Police Call 110 network of regional crime series which features detectives Lenski and Raczek, later on Raczek and Ross (2015–); and the FrancoGerman police unit represented in the series Über die Grenze (2017). Another version of this intertwining of national and international frontiers is found in the UK-French series The Missing, especially in its spin-off Baptiste, set in Amsterdam, with French, British, Dutch, and Romanian characters and displaying distinctly Nordic Noir atmospherics, all orchestrated by Icelandic director Börkur SigÞórrson. This category of series plays on mutual symbolic conversions between cityscapes or landscapes validated culturally and touristically as ‘European’ and the representation of a European judicial space. This symbiosis between the national and international through the imbrication of the abstract-judicial-institutional into the peculiarities of cultural landscapes understood as ‘homes’ could be construed as a Euroscape.

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Furthermore, the overlaps between frontiers is also indirectly thematized in the prominent representations of regional/local ‘homes’ that seem to transcend (or relativize, provoke, tease) the established authority of the national state, by feigning to ignore it and by implicitly raising the region to international visibility/legitimacy. Examples include the French/ Swedish arctic noir series Midnight Sun and Monster; the BBC Wales series Y Gwill/Hinterland; the Galician series O sabor das margaridas/Bitter Daisies; and the representation of cosmopolitan T ­ imișoara/Temesvár/ Temeschburg in Romanian-German HBO production Hackerville. A very special case, as we have already argued, is the German franchise Tatort, a network of local series set in different cities and regions in Germany and the wider German-speaking area (i.e. Tatort Wien, Tatort Zürich) (Eichner and Waade 2015). C. Densely populated frontier regions of bordering states. The best example here is Bron/Broen, which has a setting that strictly illustrates the above description in a powerful and iconic manner through its central symbol, the road and rail Öresund/Øresund Bridge that connects, over the marine strait of the same name, the Danish capital, Copenhagen, with the Swedish city Malmö (Dobrescu 2019). The series follows the general ideas and style of many other Nordic Noir series, emphasizing the particular Nordic climate and nature, and offering us a powerful female anti-hero. At the same time, the series plays with cultural nuances that span the Swedish/Danish border (mainly picked up by local audiences): funny language issues and different lifestyles, stereotypes and values, for example, the strict Swedish policewoman following rules and structures to the extent that she is characterized as mentally disordered, and her laissez-faire Danish counterpart, overweight from eating his pastries, and unable to fully take responsibility for his own non-nuclear family. The bridge between Sweden and Denmark enacts a larger idea of overlapping jurisdictions. Bron/Broen bridges Sweden to the European continent. The bridge brings international crime into the small city of Malmö. We pay particular attention to The Bridge because it can be seen as a full-fledged laboratory for experimenting with the fictional representations of non-tiered levels of governance. Its narrative arcs expose the imbrication of complex public debates on social, gender, and racial

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equality with the difficulties of policing complex polities, and the interpenetration of public and personal drama, coupled with the questioning of any distinction between straight and queer lifestyles. But all these are augmented by a sophisticated assessment of overlapping jurisdictions, since the Øresund Bridge projected as the focal symbol of the series not only connects Sweden and Denmark but also construes the Copenhagen-­ Malmö twinning as a European cross-border area, bi-cultural as well as innerved by multi-ethnic influences, which is functionally and symbolically distinct from the two nation states. The series also articulates an expressive Euroscape through its representation of the way these provincial parts of Europe are highly dependent on, and interwoven with, the rest of the Union. This representational policy is equally visible in other EU transpositions of the series, such as the British-French The Tunnel and the German-Austrian Der Pass/The Strait. Related examples are the numerous series situated at the German-­ Polish border (Wolfland, Usedom Krimi, Spreewald Krimi, Masuren Krimi). In these and other cases, such as the Polish HBO production Wataha/The Pack, set at the Polish-Ukrainian border, the Russian-­ Estonian transposition of The Bridge, or the Spanish Mar de plástico, set close to the maritime border between Spain and Morocco, we can see the complex interplay between national, European, and international jurisdictions. D. Local government interacting with community associations. The domains of the public and the communitarian overlap whenever and wherever people’s everyday lives are dependent on a physical or mental landscape that constitutes their identity, their history, their mythology and belief system, and their social and personal relationships. This is the case with the French-Swedish crime series Midnight Sun which thematizes the tensions between indigenous Sami people, local mine workers, environmental activists, and international capital investors— all with distinct investments in and perceptions of the land. The investigative couple—a French policewoman with a Berber-Algerian ethnic background and a local enforcer with mixed Swedish-Sami origins— enact national/international/ethnic cooperation in order to solve the murder mystery and avoid a violent confrontation between competing and to some extent warring factions.

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This interaction can also be seen in the Polish series, Ultraviolet, which features a citizens’ network, coordinated mainly through internet/social media, which takes over the investigation of cold cases from the public authorities once the police have reached their operational limits. Smaller communities where problems are typically solved through face-to-face interactions also allow us to see how governance models premised on distinctive tiers are problematized. Examples include Nordic rural noir series such as Norskov, the British series Midsomer Murders (BBC), or the double-­version series (in English and Welsh) Hinterland/Y Gwill (BBC Wales), which explicitly plays on the preserving of a Welsh communitarian legacy. Giving locally rooted crime series a supernatural twist can also be seen as an effective tool for emphasizing devolution processes. Communal autonomy is mitigated through the symbolism of local myths and legends, which operate to counteract the pressure of rationalized bureaucracy and encode very real social and ecological threats to traditional ways of life. In this subspecies of rural noir, the crime investigator who represents an extraneous authority has to work hard in order to win even reduced access to the trust and to the mental universe of the grieving community. The series Spreewaldkrimi (2006–), produced by the German public television ZDF, is based on connecting the Communist past and the present of the swampy Spreewald through constant allusions to the popular beliefs of the Sorbs, a local Slavic ethnic community (i.e. the plot of the fourth 2004 installment of the series, Eine tödliche Legende/A Killing Legend, revolves around the myth of the Snake-King). The Spanish series Néboa (2019), set on an imaginary Galician island with the same name, is rooted in the folk belief in El Urco, an anthropomorphic creature with a wolf’s head. The French series Zone Blanche/Black Spot (two seasons 2017–2019) is also relevant here. In an isolated mountain community (imaginary, but clearly set in the Alsace region), Franck Siriani, prosecutor of the Republic, has to come to terms with local autarchic mentalities represented primarily by the Gendarmerie major, Laurène Weiss. Siriani is a playful and ironical embodiment of the idea of central power, since he is an endearing anti-­ hero obsessed with his allergies that would seem to be inspired by American fictional detective Adrian Monk. The ironic rendering of the theme of central bureaucracy is evident in the following dialogue between the prosecutor and a sanitary agent, in the third episode of the second season: “Do you work for ONCFS or the DTT?” “For the DREAL, under supervision of DGRP of course”. While institutional authority is diffused through

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such strategies, the communitarian cohesion of the rural mountain locale is symbolically highlighted through references to ancestral mythology— that is, Cernunnos or the Celtic “god with antlers” that acts in mysterious ways against greedy entrepreneurs who are secretly depositing toxic waste in ‘his’ forest.

Conclusion: Cohesion Through Doubt? The crime narratives we have considered seem to resonate with a concept of European governance, with the European project of respect for individual and collective rights, and of effective and fair balance between supranational-national-regional-local administrative and judicial tiers. But it is distinctive and decisive that this more often than not implicit commitment goes hand in hand with an inquisitive and problematizing proximity of disruptive social conflicts and awareness of tensions created by these overlapping authorities. In our research, we haven’t simply placed European crime series on the conceptual map of European multi-level governance. Crime series are not mechanically reproducing a mainstream ideological discourse but are negotiating between different hubs of the multi-level government model and the felt experience of commonality. In this sense, they act in the manner of a mediator, somewhat like the symbolic equivalent of the office of the European Ombudsman (on the role thereof, see Hofmann and Ziller 2017; Vogiatzis 2018). American crime series are archetypally centred on the competition between layers or centres of law enforcement, as textbook examples of “cohesion through conflict” (Hirschman 1995). The quasi-ritualistic agon, or turf war between different levels of spatial authority (dramatically epitomized in institutions and representatives that deal with crime, and especially with homicide), is a paradigm of the American imaginary of multi-level government. In tacit convergence with the modelling of the European integration dynamics, contemporary crime series take further the idea of jurisdictional distribution as a fundamental source of dramatic tension. For European crime series, noir, with its many nuances, is the colour of doubt, at times even radical doubt. The gradual advancement in uncharted territory is the most encompassing spatial metaphor for a crime investigation. It expresses and generates a sense of commonality in confronting the quintessential uncertainty and fragility of European integration. Crime narratives are also about mediation. Because, besides a vision

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of governance that bypasses hierarchical jurisdictions, it is highly relevant that in each of the above considered examples we have to carefully balance opposing values and interests. Instead of cohesion through conflict, European crime series seem to foster cohesion through doubt. In American crime series traditions, the investigation processes by local, state, and federal jurisdictions delineate each other through a process of almost ritualized mutual provocation and testing. In European crime series the structuring function of doubt within the represented investigative process becomes a symbolic enhancer of jurisdictions intertwined in a form of creative ambiguity. We argue that it is an inquisitive and empathetic doubt, primarily derived from the complex task of creating a balance between the real places of multi-stable solidarities and the virtual space of multi-level governance modelling. It is also a creative doubt, because it conveys a sense of vibrant extended order not through a hardboiled competition between but rather through an overlapping and interplay of jurisdictions, both pragmatic-institutional and moral-symbolic. Acknowledgement  The research presented here has been financed by the research project DETECt: Detecting Transcultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives (Horizon 2020, 2018–2021) (Grant agreement number 770151).

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Index

A Acocella, Joan, 45 Adorno, Theodore, 42 Amazon, 4 Amaraggi, Maurice, 64 Anderson, Jean, 3 Appadurai, Arjun, 271 Aust, Stefan 100, 102 B The Baader Meinhof Complex, 13, 95, 96, 98, 100–104, 107–109 Babylon Berlin, 12, 77–89 Bad Banks, 16, 217–221, 223, 224 Bellicher, 275–276 Berardi, Franco, 13, 122, 124 Berberich, Christine, 60 Bingham, Dennis, 102 Birkerts, Sven, 43 Blekingegade gang, 104–109 Bondebjerg, Ib, 75, 77 Boucheron, Patrick, 155, 157, 162 The Bridge, 18, 233, 283–284 Braidotti, Rosi, 248

Britain, in crime fiction, 10–11, 13, 25–38, 113–125 Buck-Morss, Susan, 210 Bussi, Michel, 188, 198, 200 C Cacucci, Pino, 145 Camilleri, Andrea, 132, 198, 281 Cantaloube, Thomas, 202, 203 Chainas, Antoine, 203 Chandler, Raymond, 49 Chiara, De Adrianna, 235, 236 Christie, Agatha, 25, 29, 30, 173 Cold War, 13, 14, 52–54, 79 Collovald, Annie, 6, 197 Colonialism/imperialism, 11, 26, 32–35, 37, 154 Cortellesa, Andrea, 168 COVID-19, 10 D Daeninckx, Didier, 7, 14–15, 149–162 Dalrymple, William, 37

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INDEX

Damrosch, David, 4 Davison-Vecchione, Daniel, 276 Deer, Patrick, 28 Denmark, in crime fiction, 95, 96, 98, 104–110, 213–214, 216–217, 277–278, 280 Derrida, Jacques, 114 Desnain, Véronique, 152, 158, 162 DETECt, 3, 4, 162 DOA, 197, 199–200 Dodds, Klaus, 274 Donnarumma, Raffaele, 135, 136 Dresner, Lisa, 232 Dunn, Kevin, 121 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, 43 E Eco, Umberto, 62, 132 Eichinger, Bernd, 100 Ellroy, James, 116, 119 Elsaesser, Thomas, 99, 103 Erdmann, Eva, 198 ‘Europeanization,’ 231, 271–287 European television, 75–77, 79, 83, 88, 89, 230–232, 234, 246, 248, 272, 274–275, 277–286 European Union (EU), 2, 4, 10, 16, 27, 41, 42, 54, 79, 88, 209–210, 231, 258, 274, 276 F Fabra, Jordi Sierra i, 15, 168, 172, 176–180 Férey, Caryl, 196–199, 201 Financial crisis, 2008–9, 16, 88, 196, 209–224 Fisher, Mark, 118, 121, 123, 124, 223 Fois, Marcello, 145 Follow the Money, 16, 213–217 Forbrydelsen/The Killing, 233, 277–278, 280–281

Fordsick, Charles, 158 Foucault, Michel, 8 France, in crime fiction, 14, 16, 149–162, 187–205, 285 Freccero, Carla, 211 G Gates, Phillipa, 232, 233 Gender, in crime fiction, 10, 17, 26, 34, 86–87, 230, 232, 239–240, 242–248 Gerhardt, Christine, 96 German television, 78, 79 Germany, in crime fiction, 12, 43, 95, 96, 98, 104–110, 217–221, 277 Berlin, in crime fiction, 79–80 Weimar Republic, in crime fiction, 12, 46, 50, 59, 77, 78, 82–84, 86, 88 Gilroy, Paul, 35 Giminéz-Bartlett, Alicia, 17, 234, 237, 243 Gorrara, Claire, 6, 157, 168 Grangé, Jean-Christophe, 188 Greece, in crime fiction, 12, 59–71, 212, 281–282 Gulddal, Jesper, 2, 3, 169 H Hägglund, Martin, 114 Hall, Katharina, 44, 169, 176 Hall, Stuart, 121 Hamilton, Cynthia, 8 Hammett, Dashiell, 5, 50 Hansen, Toft, 278 Hardboiled, 61, 62, 70, 151, 257, 258 HBO, 4, 79, 234 Historical crime fiction, 11, 26, 30–32, 48, 60–61, 70, 150, 167, 168 Holocaust, 43, 47, 48, 51, 53, 66

 INDEX 

Hooghe, Lisbet, 18, 272–273, 279 Hutcheon, Linda, 62 I Israeli-Palestine conflict, 95–96, 98, 103, 106–107 Italy, in crime fiction, 14, 15, 17, 131–145, 168–170, 172–176, 229–230, 234–248, 281 Genoa, in crime fiction, 236–237 Izzo, Jean-Claude, 9 J Jameson, Fredric, 50 Jewish communities, in crime fiction, 7, 37, 60, 62–64, 66, 70, 71, 255, 264–266 Jørgensen, Niels, 105 K Kerr, Phillip, 11–12, 41, 45–54, 59–71 King, Stewart, 2, 3, 169 Kinkle, Jeff, 210 Kirst, Hans Hellmut, 44 Klein, Kathleen, 232, 242 Klein, Naomi, 223 Knight, Stephen, 257 Krajenbrink, Marieke, 3 Krajewski, Marek, 17, 253, 257, 261, 263, 264 Kucia, Marek, 48 Kutscher, Volker, 42, 44 L Larsson, Stieg, 6 Lauesen, Torkil, 105 Le Corre, Hervé, 196, 202

293

Leder, Andrzej, 255–256, 262, 264 Ledun, Marin, 196, 198, 199, 201 The Left Wing Gang, 13, 95, 96, 98, 104–110 Left politics, 95, 96, 98, 101, 104–106, 114–117, 120–122, 124–125, 133–135, 153–154, 157, 187–191, 202, 204–205 Leitch, Thomas, 44 Lemaitre, Pierre, 196 Leroy, Jérôme, 197, 202, 203 Lewandowski, Konrad, 258, 260–261 Littell, Jonathan, 42, 46 Little, Alison, 242 Lucarelli, Carlo, 15, 139, 145, 168, 170, 172–176, 178, 180 Lukacs, Georg, 61 M Machiavelli, Loriano, 14, 131–145 Major, Laura, 69 Manchette, Jean-Patrick, 5, 13, 113–114, 149, 187, 190, 191, 196 Mankell, Henning, 44, 188 Manotti, Dominique, 152, 153, 196, 197 Mantel, Hilary, 48 Marks, Gary, 18, 272–273, 279 Martin, Elaine, 97 Marxism, 12, 60, 70, 71, 98 Matzke, Christine, 3 May 1968 (or ‘1968’), 13, 96, 101, 109, 110, 190, 191 McNamee, Eoin, 7 Mediterranean Noir, 9, 76, 235, 240, 248, 281 Mikos, Lothar, 79 Milanesi, Claudio, 168 Miloszewski, Zygmunt, 253 Miranda, Carolina, 3

294 

INDEX

Montalbán, Manuel Vásquez, 171, 188, 254 Morris, Heather, 49 Muhleisen, Susanne, 3 Multi-level governance, 18, 272–274, 276, 279, 286 N Nazism, 8, 11, 14, 27, 29, 30, 32–35, 37, 41–54, 59–60, 65–71, 77, 83, 84, 99, 110, 255, 266 Nemes, Lászlo, 42 Neoliberalism, 115, 121, 122, 124, 210 Néo-polar, 5, 14, 16, 152, 187, 188, 204 Nestingen, Andrew, 6 Netflix, 4, 12, 78, 79 Neveu, Erik, 6, 197 Niel, Colin, 200 Noir, 5, 9, 113, 144–145, 150, 151, 203, 286 Nordic Noir, 9, 76, 214, 233–235, 238, 247, 278, 279 Nora, Pierre, 64 O O’Gorman, Ellen, 61 P Padura, Leonardo, 254 Peace, David, 13–14, 113–125 Pepper, Amdrew, 3 Petra, 17, 230, 234–248 Pezzotti, Barbara, 3, 6, 133, 198 Plain, Gill, 29 Poland, Polish crime fiction, 7, 17, 253–267, 285

Popper, Karl, 215 Prudon, Hervé, 196 Punk, 13, 114, 117–121, 124, 125 Q Quinn, Kate, 3, 8, 61 R Rau, Petra, 45. 50 Red Army Faction, 95, 96, 98–100, 103–104, 110 Red Brigades, 131, 134 Reid, Donald, 157 Rolls, Alistair, 3 S Sabin, Roger, 114 Saltiel, Leon, 64 Saunders, Robert, 274 Sayers, Dorothy, 43 Scaggs, John, 26 Scerbanenco, Giorgio, 188 Schmid, David, 3 Shaw, Katy, 115, 122 Sheller, Mimi, 31 Simpson, Mark, 122 Situationist, 9, 187 Somigli, Luca, 171 Slocombe, Romain, 203 Spain/Catalonia, in crime fiction, 15, 168–170, 176–180, 281 Spanish Civil War, in crime fiction, 170, 171, 176–178 Staun, Jörgen, 97 Stone, Alison, 119 Stone, Oliver, 222 Storey, John, 211

 INDEX 

T Terrorism, 96–98 Tetarti 04.45, 212 Thessaloniki Jews/‘the Greek Shoah,’ 60, 62–64, 66, 70, 71 Todorov, Tzevan, 61, 68 Togmazzi, Maria Sole, 236–237, 244 Toscano, Alberto, 210 Transnationalism, 1, 3–5, 9, 11, 14, 15, 17, 37, 52–54, 76, 100, 124–125, 168, 172, 180–181, 188, 197–199, 209, 212–214, 217–221, 230, 282–285 Trauma, 6–8, 12, 14, 16, 66–71, 84–85, 180 Treat, John Whittier, 43 Turnball, Sue, 232 U Ukraine war, 10 V Vallorani, Nicoletta, 123 Vardy, Christopher, 116 Vargas, Fred, 188

295

Viart, Dominique, 150 Vilar, Jean-François, 190, 196 Viñals, Carol, 239 Vuorensola, Timo, 42 W Waade, Anne Marit, 278 Weimann, Jan, 105 Winspear, Jacqueline, 10, 25–38 World War 1, 10, 12, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 77, 78, 84–85 World War II, 6, 8–12, 14, 15, 33–35, 42, 59, 65, 67, 77, 108, 110, 121, 133, 153, 169–171, 173, 257, 262, 266 Worley, Matthew, 118 Wronski, Marcin, 7, 17, 257–261, 264–266 Y ‘Years of Lead,’ 14, 77, 131–145, 188 Z Zielke, Dustin, 96