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Christian v. Ditfurth:
The Stachelmann Novels

Mann ohne Makel. Stachelmanns erster Fall, Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2002. An Impeccable Man. Stachelmann's First Case	Mit Blindheit geschlagen. Stachelmanns zweiter Fall, Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2004 Struck Blind. Stachelmann's Second Case	Schatten des Wahns. Stachelmanns dritter Fall, Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2006. Under an Illusion. Stachelmann's Third Case

 

Achim Saupe
Translation: Anne Foster

The abolition of torture as a way of getting information and the introduction of laws relating to circumstantial evidence at the beginning of the 19 th century led to the emergence of a new literary genre in the form of detective fiction. The concept of circumstantial evidence had awakened a new empirical spirit in the field of historical research and gave historians more scope for interpretation. Historians in the 19 th and 20 th centuries compared historical work to that of investigators, detectives and criminalists, where they could emphasise the stock themes of history of ‘the world on trial' or the historian as judge of the past, and thereby showcase their own viewpoint. Historians recognised their own research methods in investigative practices as depicted in literary fiction. It was only a matter of time until crime novels turned to the political past. By the end of the seventies the historical crime novel had become a subgenre of crime fiction, although this followed an already established tradition of contemporary political thrillers. In principle there are two types of historical crime novels: either the investigator becomes involved in a case in which the past is a factor, or the plot is set in the past where the investigator explains not only the crime, but the past as well.

Christian von Ditfurth's crime novels involving the historian Dr. Josef Maria Stachelmann are an example of the first of these. The first book, ‘An Impeccable Man' (2002), has now been translated into French under the title ‘Un Homme Irréprochable' and the third novel, ‘Under an Illusion' (2006) has just been published in Germany . ‘A historian is the perfect detective' says Ditfurth, himself a historian, ‘because every murder is historical, its cause can always be found in the past.'

In ‘An Impeccable Man', we meet a protagonist who teaches a course at the University of Hamburg . His twin bugbears are arthritis and his post-doctoral thesis on the history of Buchenwald concentration camp, which he can't get finished. He can't get through to his students, who have no interest in anything political, although there is one who has her eye on him. Then there's the young PhD student Anne who is wary of working in historical archives. That doesn't really fit our idea of a professional historian, but doesn't stop Stachelmann getting involved with her. What starts off as a campus romance changes when ‘Ossi' Winter, Stachelmann's old acquaintance from their days as left-wing students, appears. He's changed sides and is now a police detective and has come looking for Stachelmann to ask for advice on a case with links to the past.

Soon afterwards the wife and children of a Hamburg estate agent are murdered. It seems clear that someone had an old score to settle with the respectable family, but what? With the help of Stachelmann's historical knowledge and experience in researching archives, the trail leads back to Nazi times and to former Hamburg estate agents and their accomplices who expropriated goods and property belonging to Jews. Ditfurth handles the detective novel very skilfully. He lays several trails, exposes his arthritic anti-hero to various dangers and slowly but surely narrows down the list of suspects, only to then stage a surprising twist at the end.

Ditfurth is equally good in the historical arena, where it is not a question of laying trails but of increasing our understanding. Because the motive behind many murders in crime novels is often to do with economic factors, this particular aspect of the Holocaust, the so-called ‘uncontrolled Aryanisation' is tailor-made for detective fiction. However this presents a danger for a historically-based detective novel. Robbery, dispossession and the linked annihilation of the Jews seem not to have much to do with specifically German anti-Semitism. So it seems logical to assume that the historian Stachelmann is having a dig at the book ‘Hitler's Willing Executioners' by the American historian Daniel Goldhagen, by reproaching Goldhagen not only for having nothing new to say but also for appealing to the ‘guilt complex' to which ‘excitable sections of the German community are particularly sensitive', and ‘from which mostly those who have nothing to be guilty about suffer.'

However, during the course of his investigations, Stachelmann himself comes to see how closely personal guilt and collective repression are connected when he must ask his father for the first time about his experiences of Naziism. Thus he learns that his father joined the Nazi Storm Troopers in 1932, how he later became an auxiliary policeman and guarded concentration camp inmates forced to defuse unexploded bombs after the bombing of Hamburg .

Ditfurth's afterword to his first novel points out the interplay between historical fact and plausible fiction when he says that he wouldn't have had to invent the characters and events of the novel if the German Inland Revenue had made public their files relating to the Third Reich. Good for literature, not so good for freedom of information you might say. But in 2002, the same year the book appeared, the new Federal Archive law cut short the moratorium on finance files, admittedly somewhat belatedly. So now historians have access to new material for their work on the not exactly unresearched history of Aryanisation.

In ‘Struck Blind' Stachelmann had to deal with former East Germans who helped people escape the regime, and the after-effects of East German state security, but in Ditfurth's new book ‘Under an Illusion' he deals with the downsides of the ‘German Autumn' of 1978. Again historical fiction has the ring of authenticity, as it brings to mind the murder of Ulrich Schmücker, the 22 year old shot by the left-wing group the ‘2 nd June Movement'.

The novel starts with the death of two people. Ossi Winter, Chief Superintendent of the Hamburg Police has killed himself, or at least it appears so. Stachelmann, who has been brought into the investigation by Ossi's colleague and partner Carmen, has his doubts. Then a pile of old leaflets and a newspaper article about the murder of a revolutionary from their time at Heidelberg University in the 70s, when Stachelmann and Winter were involved in the class struggle, seem to point in another direction. Was Ossi Winter on the trail of the perpetrators of that murder? Was he murdered by them? Who was involved? Did the perpetrator belong to one of the left-wing groups at Heidelberg University ? Were the Nazis involved or were the security services behind it? Enough questions to keep the historian Stachelmann busy. His detective's instincts are aroused and he increasingly has to examine his own left-wing past.

His work on his thesis has made him forget the political struggles of his past and the lengthening shadows of the German Autumn have faded. Now he is forced to remember them again. He goes to Heidelberg to question old revolutionaries and friends. Remembering one's own past is bound up with loss and sadness, particularly in historical novels. His old Heidelberg girlfriends drink too much and stagger around. His mother has had an operation for cancer and is dying. There's no going back to one's youth.

The political equivalent of grieving is the working through of old struggles. Christian von Ditfurth's new detective novel is not just a requiem to terrorism, but also to the ideals of the student movement. None of those involved, including the author, knows what they were really fighting for. Stachelmann, whose business it should be to illuminate the political climate of the 70s as an historical experience and as part of our understanding of the past, is himself increasingly unable to make sense of it. The student protests of the 70s seem either to be over the top activism and menacing rhetoric, or based on the admiration of ‘Mao the mass murderer' or ‘Brezhnev the oppressor', on political delusions whose radical character led to political suicide. This is the abiding criticism of the idea of the ‘German Autumn', repeatedly dismissed by the protagonists as ‘liberal claptrap'. Why the time of self-confessed class-warriors was in fact a revolutionary spring has been lost from the memory.

To clear up the mystery Stachelmann takes on a retired policeman with a Gestapo-past to keep an eye on two former class-warriors who are now a respectable Heidelberg lawyer and doctor. His own political claims are abandoned when it comes to investigating murders. Stachelmann gets a scare, but soon recovers himself.

Stachelmann is convinced that historians should not write the story of their own actions. That is a little disingenuous, because the investigative work of remembering helps an unstintingly critical picture of the past to emerge. There is plenty for fans of detective series keen to know more about how Dr. Stachelmann's private life turns out. But after Stachelmann has investigated Naziism, present-day socialism and the German Autumn, the question still remains of what is left of contemporary history to write about. Christian von Ditfurth, narrator of German history as detective fiction will surely think of something. His hero gives us a feel for the past, which can only help our understanding of it.