Berlin Solstice

This powerful historical novel set in Nazi Berlin grips and holds the reader from the first page, as event follows grim event to the fall of the Third Reich in April 1945. The vivid opening passages recreate the social chaos of 1923, when Germany was reeling from one economic crisis to another. As the book opens, a young drifter from the doss-houses of Berlin’s East End, reduced to poverty and hopelessness by the catastrophes that followed Germany’s defeat in World War I, is trying to buy a beer with shopping bags of virtually worthless marks. In these opening pages the chief characters in the book whose lives will be shaped by the ensuing events are young, the turbulent events of the novel are hatching, and the writing vividly conveys a nervous energy: “it was all around you sizzling just under the Kurfurstendamm’s electric skin — an itchiness that relieved itself in craziness, in violence, in the foolish and the bizarre.” In this novel Sylvia Fraser is particularly skillful at recreating cultural ambience.

The fast-paced story follows a group of characters through this stormy period and explores their options for action. Events bombard the reader, who can well imagine these people being swept along with the tide — snatching at each main chance, courageously resisting, or (more often) puzzled, fearful, and acquiescing by their inaction. The cast includes an idealistic young nurse and her husband (the young drifter of the opening scene), who rises from poverty to bourgeois success and is proud of his rise through the ranks of the SS. Both husband and wife become caught up in the atrocities of Himmler’s racial policies. Another character, an industrialist, moves from hardware to munitions manufacture, seizing the profits that Hitler’s militaristic policies offer. His wife, an actress, whose friends among the artistic and Jewish communities flee or are liquidated, is troubled but unable to act. Eventually she makes contact with the resistance, but she is still caught in the role of double agent making propaganda movies for the Führer.

Sylvia Fraser brings alive the Germany of this troubled period in a cast of colourful characters, compassionately looking at the dilemmas that faced the German people. The fictional narrative keeps close to history — in fact, the author contends that “it is likely to be the seemingly most far fetched incidents and dialogue in Berlin Solstice that are the most authentic.”