(University of Portsmouth)
Complicity and ‘Coming to Terms with the Past’ in Contemporary ‘Nazi Noir’ Crime Fiction
This chapter deals with the issue of ‚complicity‘ in select Nazi Noir crime novels in order to assess how Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or ‚Coming to Terms with the Past‘ are addressed via this popular genre. The texts under consideration are Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir trilogy (2012) and Christian von Ditfurth’s first two novels in the new Kommissar Raben series, Tanz mit dem Tod (2022) and Tag des Triumphs (2023). The chapter will argue that those novels firstly show the relative ‚ease‘ with which characters slide into complicity with the Third Reich; it will secondly contend that these novels can offer a creative space to problematise the motivation behind complicity that can all-too-often be oversimplified; and, thirdly, it will assert that successful examples of Nazi Noir allow for a critical engagement with the past that moves away from oversimplified character division into ‚good‘ and ‚bad‘, ‚perpetrators‘ and ‚bystanders‘ and that they, in turn, highlight a grey zone of various complicities that affect characters‘ lives in the long term.