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Das Kindermädchen
Elisabeth Herrmann

Rotbuch Verlag • Hamburg • 2005

Achim Saupe
Translation: Rosine Lang

 

When speaking of crime fiction, Eric Ambler's hero probably represents the typical historico-political stories character. It is a hero who against his own will is obliged, whether he likes it or not, to take a stand in complicated political issues. In the classical Ambler book from the thirties or the forties, the political aspect is of course concerned with private affairs in the form of basic survival, but without ever intervening into the family history.

Modern crime literature is something completely different. When History surfaces, it is primarily linked to the family theme, as can be noted in Meurtre pour mémoire by Didier Daeninckx, a classic of its kind. In this book can be seen the beginnings of such a movement. In this novel, Bernard Thiraud is researching the life of his father, a historian who was murdered by the Police when he happened to witness the Parisian demonstrations of 1961 against the Algerian war. Anyway, in Daeninckx's book, past will not be resolved by the keen on history son, a character directly involved in the story : the author gets rid of him by having him murdered. The inquiry will be taken on by a member of the French Police judiciaire (C.I.D.), who will explore this masked chapter in the history of the French police.

Another example can be found in Christian v. Ditfurth's books. In his novel Mann ohne Makel, the hero, a historian called Stachelmann, works on the subject of National Socialism and has problems obtaining his accreditation. Through a policeman friend of his, he takes part in an inquiry which brings him on the trail of the Aryanisation of real estate property in Hambourg. However, to write such a fascinating book, Ditfurth does not merely use the hero's historical knowledge and his professional researching techniques. Stachelmann in fact learns a lot more things during his inquiry ; and first of all on his father who has been a National Socialist too. Thus the investigator cannot escape the past.

In the novel, Das Kindermädchen by Elisabeth Herrmann, the profiteers of Aryanisation and of the National Socialist racial policy don't live in the residential area of Hamburger Elbchaussee, but in an Art nouveau villa located in Grunewald, a suburb of Berlin. Lawyer Joachim Vernau is about to get married with Berliner Senator Sigrun Zernikow, who is only devoted to her own political rise. On a financial level, he has little problems : Joachim Vernau owns a Porsche and will very soon become a partner in the family law firm, as wished by his father-in-law, Utz von Zernikow. From the very beginning, something appears to be wrong between Joachim, the narrator, and Sigrun : « We spend more time washing our teeth together than making love ». And it is not really surprising that this piece of news comes to the ears of the gutter press. In the novel Das Kindermädchen, the big wheel of History will announce the end of the relationship between Vernau and Sigrun when Vernau takes on an inheritance case concerning a real estate property in East-Berlin, which in 1933 has fallen into the hands of a close friend of the Zernikows. The previous owners, a Jewish family, are allowed to a compensation, as per the agreements signed with the Jewish Claims Conference. But one day, an older Russian woman called Olga appears in the Zernikows' garden. She wants Utz von Zernikow to sign a document written in Cyrillic script. He refuses and the paper lands in the dustbin. Vernau picks it up and some time later, the Russian woman's body is fished out of the Landwehrkanal by the Berliner police.

Who hides behind the name of Natalja Tscherednitschenkowa pronounced by Olga during her visit ? Vernau faxes the document to Marie-Louise, an ex-fellow student of his who speaks Russian. But she has difficulties finding information on Sigrun Zernikow. It seems obvious that it is not the right moment to unearth the Zenikows'past : Sigrun is very concerned with her career and reputation, her father takes on an irreproachable past and her grand-mother, who calls herself the « von Zernikow free woman », holds from her wheelchair the reins of the family business. She doesn't try to hide her loathing for Joachim Vernau, because she finds him much too bourgeois to her liking and above all because he didn't do his military service.

However, Vernau, with the help of Marie-Louise, will get right to the bottom of this story. The firm law of the story looks like some kind of leftist community. Natalja is indeed one of the 160 000 slave workers who came from Poland and Ukraine in 1942 and were forced to labour at the service of large families, relatives or friends of senior officials of the NSDAP. Utz von Zernikow was convinced, 60 years later, that his former nanny was dead. He even owned a report about her execution.

To write this novel, Berliner journalist Elisabeth Herrmann has carried out a long term inquiry. When the question of compensation for slave workers and of the creation of a German help fund was discussed in Germany toward the end of the nineties, the daily Berliner Tageszeitung received mail from older Berliners who could remember nannies forced to work for private households. Herrmann contacted a Berliner association (www.kontakte-kontakty.de ) interested in the fate of former slave workers and went to Ukraine to collect the testimony of these women forcefully deported in Germany. The novel focuses on the destiny of these young girls and women forgotten in the discussions about slave labour profiteers. Today still, they are confronted with numerous administrative obstacles when they want to have their labour acknowledged and obtain a financial compensation. It is important that Herrmann should present those facts without any consternation : one could almost have the impression to witness the advent in Germany of a new objectivity on the theme of compensation of the injustices perpetrated by the National Socialists.

Precisely because of this new stand, one can wonder why the Zernikow family doesn't simply accept the requests of their former nanny, if she is really still alive. It seems then that the members of the family don't want her to learn the origin of their fortune. Even if in a crime novel critic one shouldn't reveal the ending of the story, I'd still like to mention the not very inventive construction of the intrigue : the family has built its fortune on works of art stolen during the Nazi regime. But the author offers us an explosive ending with a chase, shootings and a confrontation.

Elisabeth Herrmann did give a good realistic view of the unfathomable and pretentious world of West Berlin lawyers, as well as of the banality of the electoral campaigns to which Sigrun sacrifices her private life as well as family life. Herrmann's novel is not only a crime book, but also a book about love and family. Thus, it is not really a society novel but a novel on the nobleness of the Berlin suburbs. When Vernau has to take care of his blackened mother who welcomes him at the end of the novel, purists of the genre will think this interest in the family theme goes somewhat too far. Elisabeth Herrmann moves on well known grounds when she describes Berlin financial, political and noble elite. It doesn't seem to be so much the case for the leftist world represented by Vernau and his fellow student Marie-Louise, this word being of course present but treated only on the surface. Researches on the Zernikow family's past will naturally bring Vernau to risk his Porsche as well as his social position. However, he still remains a prisoner of the central values of this world in which social market economy is considered as a revolutionary invention : Herrmann describes, with a lot of humour, Vernau's tormenting of his young trainee as he should. So, only a deep work on oneself will allow a political commitment and the advent of a historical conscience.

In the novel, one of the characters says : „Good and Evil. You can throw as much earth on them as you want and bury them very deep, they will always come back to the surface ». A truism, maybe. But it not only concerns the past, but also the characters in the novel, and it is one of the elements brilliantly rendered by the author. The detective reader may well try to solve the mystery, the whirls of the inquiries running all through the novel will leave him barely enough time to anticipate the ending.