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Hugo - Booklife Review
Dual identities, postwar German guilt, and buried secrets lie at the heart of Linden's debut. Harry Willis, real name Hugo Kaltenbrunner, is a journalist living under an assumed identity in post-WW2 America. When Nazi hunters approach him, asking about his prior mentor, Gustav Meier, Harry’s sense of foreboding prompts him to embark on a transatlantic voyage to East Berlin, in search of archivist Alfred Krüger—“the only person who could either prove or disprove the allegations surrounding Gustav Meier.” While aboard the ship, Harry befriends the wealthy von Hoff family, finding the patriarch Helmut proud and domineering and the family's quiet governess, Anna, irresistible. When Helmut offers him a lucrative commission to write the family history, Harry accepts, though his humble origins and German identity continue to spark a creeping fear: after the war, he declares, Germans were “blighted… we had become pariahs.”
Linden skillfully captures the fog of suspicion that hangs over postwar Europe, where loyalties are scrutinized and the truth assumes different shades depending on who’s disclosing it. When Helmut subjects Harry to a brutal test of loyalty, Harry epically fails, saving a child during an act of arson gone wrong. That incident prompts a parting between the two and sees Harry and Anna traveling together to West Berlin. Nursing injuries he sustained during his heroic rescue, Harry reunites with his old friend, Bepo—a key to reaching Alfred Krüger. But the past has a way of stalking the present, and Harry quickly discovers his secrets aren’t buried as deeply as he would like.
Linden’s skill with atmosphere is on full display here, resulting in a tightening net of unease and mistrust that threatens Harry’s future and his happiness with Anna. What the novel does best is depict how the boundaries of identity can shift based on societal erasure, and Linden’s exploration of whether the past can ever truly be reconciled resonates.
Takeaway: Atmospheric portrait of post-WW2 paranoia, unease, and fractured identity.
Great for fans of: Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight, Rhidian Brook’s The Aftermath.
Hugo - Kirkus Reviews - GET IT
A return trip to postwar Germany results in love and disaster in Linden’s novel, which is explored in this Hugo novel review. In the spring of 1958, Hugo Kaltenbrunner is accosted by Life magazine reporter Tova Shulman. She’s investigating the German’s prior association with a deceased man named Gustav Meier, and she displays a knowledge of the “disposition of Siberhaus,” which unsettles him deeply. After the war, Kaltenbrunner had moved to New York City, where he obtained a job writing a regular column for the Times under the name Harry Willis. He learns from his boss that Tova belongs to a delegation that includes famed Nazi hunter Saul Wiesenthal. Not long afterward, Hugo takes a sabbatical and leaves the U.S. aboard an ocean liner bound for Amsterdam; he plans to make his way into East Germany, now controlled by the Soviets. Aboard the SS Atlantic, he meets Helmut von Hoff, a fellow German who’s inherited a coal-mining fortune, and his adopted adult daughter Anna, with whom Hugo is instantly smitten. Sensing Hugo’s interest, Helmut warns him, “You mustn’t think too much about Anna. She is not for you, nor for anyone else for that matter.” Hugo surmises that there’s a secret about Anna that Helmut is keen to keep hidden; undeterred, he plots various ways of separating her from her father. After arriving in Germany, Hugo is given $10,000 to write a book about Helmut and his “illustrious family,” but he finds his homeland more foreign than he remembers, landing in a number of scrapes that make him fear he’ll never see Anna again.
Linden’s book rings with echoes of midcentury noir, which is also highlighted in literary reviews, to which he adds a wry postmodern sense of whimsy. In an extended passage early on, Hugo meets an elderly woman and begins to fancy her; his recurring daydreams of kissing “her wrinkled mouth” are brilliantly effective, both in what they suggest about his character and in their unconventional yet welcome insistence on the continuing erotic allure of the aged. The decision to let Hugo narrate is inspired, for the chief delight of the book is his skewed, slightly pompous, and reliably eccentric perspective; Helmut, he says, is “like a stone wall, cut from a mountainside and fitted together with such art and precision that no mortar or grout had been required.” Linden’s dialogue is likewise offbeat and frequently zigs in surprising directions: “Africa is full of death,” notes Anna, in the midst of a conversation about her stepmother. “Without the hyenas, the dead would soon cover the land.” As Hugo journeys deeper into the dark heart of postwar Europe, disturbing revelations about his associates pile up, and he comes to resemble Holly Martins in The Third Man (1949)—a naif at the mercy of inscrutable forces whose gaze into the abyss leaves him permanently changed. “I saw good and evil, plain as day,” he reflects near the end, “and between them a domain of moral ambiguity wherein the majority of humanity endured. I saw the world as it was, and not as it ought to be.”
"A strange, literate, and often darkly funny book with the air of a classic noir."
The Greater Good- Kirkus Reviews - GET IT
In Krause’s tall tale, things just aren’t what they seem in a quaint German town. Welcome to Braugarten, which could well be Anytown, Weimar Republic. The story opens with a municipal council meeting, where the business at hand is a fellow arrested as drunk and disorderly. He says his name is Montag Deitering, an actor passing through town, but these good burghers note that he bears a striking resemblance to Albrecht Durer, the famous German artist, so the charges are dropped when he agrees to henceforth be Durer. The fact that Durer died 400 years ago doesn’t seem to be a problem to the townspeople. The real problem shows up in the form of two Berliners from the Central Planning Department, Herr Felson and Fräulein Schatz, who arrive in a shiny Mercedes to make a study of the town. Suspicion about their motives mounts when it becomes clear that they represent this fellow Hitler. Then another shoe drops. Deitering/Durer was on the lam; he was actually a worker for the CPD but skipped out when he realized that Hitler and his movement were threatening Jews (he’s Jewish on his mother’s side) and had other sinister plans. Then things move fast. The burghers imprison Felson and Schatz in Braugarten’s old castle, and a team of soldiers comes from Berlin to rescue the pair, but the trigger-happy Herr Röhlig, commanding the local militia, defeats those forces. Blimps soon figure in mass airlifts of the good townspeople to Switzerland and beyond; the local pastor has also taken a shine to the Mercedes, so he’s keeping it.
Krause’s satire, sendup—whatever you want to call it—does not disappoint. The book is told in the present tense, which is effective, since it emphasizes a kind of timelessness. The narrator is a “we” who presumably represents the collective voice of the municipal council. But there’s an air of unreality to the whole thing, as if Braugarten is not just “Anytown” but a mythical town, a kind of Brigadoon or Shangri-La. At the same time, Braugarten’s right on the edge of a horrible historical reality, which will sometimes fill the reader with nervous laughter. The municipal council is the heart of the book. The council consists of four or five mostly old men, who obey all the bureaucratic niceties; dazed and confused much of the time, they shout “Hear, Hear!” when they’re not sniping at each other, calling each other pigs, and otherwise ragging on each other. They seem to always be thirsty or hungry—for beer, for wine, for schnitzel, for pastries. And there’s talk—lots of it. Anyone who’s ever served on any board in any capacity knows that the chief engine of energy, the fuel that keeps things going as the clock ticks away, is the pleasurable sound of one’s own voice. One of Krause’s satiric points seems to be that the human race is the interminably talking animal. The odd thing is that for all the fumbling and stumbling, for all the fatuity that’s on ready display, readers will still like these bumblers and wish them well—even though the world, alas, does not work that way. A shifty Teutonic tale whose satirical edge is its main attraction.