A German Requiem

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Philip Kerr was born in Edinburgh in 1956 and lives in London. As a freelance journalist he has written for a number of newspapers and magazines. March Violets, his first novel featuring private eye Bernie Gunther, was published to critical acclaim in 1989. The second novel in this sequence, The Pale Criminal, and an anthology, The Penguin Book of Lies, were both published in 1990.

For Jane,

and in memory of my father

These days, if you are a German you spend your time in Purgatory before you die, in earthly suffering for all your country’s unpunished and unrepented sins, until the day when, with the aid of the prayers of the Powers – or three of them, anyway – Germany is finally purified.

For now we live in fear. Mostly it is fear of the Ivans, matched only by the almost universal dread of venereal disease, which has become something of an epidemic, although both afflictions are generally held to be synonymous.

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