Leave it alone, Jake. It's Berlin Town.

The Good German
By Joseph Kanon

Steven Soderbergh's movie version of this book came out just last week and has been getting poor reviews. I haven't seen it yet, but from what I've read, it seems the film makes big changes to the story told in the novel.

Anyway, I picked up a copy on the free table a couple of months back and I got suckered in. The setting -- Berlin in 1945 -- was so interesting that I was willing to overlook the formulaic touches and the stock characters.

The plot tells the story of Jake Geismar, a reporter who lived in Berlin before the war and had an affair with Lena, a married German woman. Now that the war is over, he's wearing a uniform as a part of the U.S. press corps and he flies to Berlin to cover the Potsdam conference meeting of Truman, Stalin and Churchill. But forefront in his mind is finding Lena again. In the midst of his search he comes across a body of an American soldier who has been shot while carrying a lot of money. In a big coincidence, Geismar happens to recognize the soldier from his flight into Berlin. In an even bigger coincidence, it turns out that the dead soldier had dealings with Lena's husband.

Yes, the coincidences are a bit much. And the characters don't go very deep. But as the story progresses, the scene just gets more interesting. Jake keeps finding Germans -- some of the people he knew before the war, some of the people he cared about -- who did unforgivable things. These can range from a woman he thought of as a kind old lady who turns out to have been a great admirer of Hitler, to a serious academic who turns out to have made mathematical calculations intended to show how few calories slave laborers needed in order to stay alive while they were forced to help build Nazi war projects. A young Jewish woman he knew stayed alive by turning in her fellow Jews to the Nazis. The book's title is not made entirely clear, and that's part of the point. There are few "good" Germans to be found in Berlin in 1945. Everyone is compromised.

On top of that, Kanon gives us a lot of intrigue regarding the Russians and the beginning of the Cold War. At one point, a character says about the Russians, "But we're not at war with them." Another replies, "Who says?"