Crime novels by Horst Evers and Anne Stern: Hope in a dark night

Will this be a depressing autumn for crime fans? At least for the readers of the Gereon Rath series it will be hard. For almost 20 years, Volker Kutscher had published a new volume every other autumn, in which he accompanied his commissioner from the Weimar Republic deep into the Nazi era. The 10th volume was published in 2024, now it would be time for the 11th - but the series is over.

There is little consolation in the fact that the last season of “Babylon Berlin” is currently being shown on ARD, which is set in 1933 – the year the country came to power. The series is based on the books by Volker Kutscher, the inspector there is also called Gereon Rath, his companion and colleague is also called Charlotte Richter. But otherwise the film adaptation is so free that one wonders whether the screenwriters have even read the novels. In any case, they don't seem to have had much interest in it.

But there is hope in the dark night. Because two new crime novels play with the core elements of the Rath novels: Berlin. And right-wing extremism. On the one hand, there is – somewhat surprisingly – “Hope Joanna” by Horst Evers. Over the decades he has worked his way up from a reading stage author to a well-known cabaret artist on radio and television, which is a bit irritating when reading the crime novel. It takes a little time to get his pithy voice out of your ear.

But this succeeds because, unlike the classic Evers texts, “Hope Joanna” not only relies on wonderful slapstick, but actually offers a good crime thriller - with suspense, dazzling characters, and surprising twists. And with Nazis. Unlike Gereon Rath, they are very contemporary. Reichsbürger:innen and Teutonic cult fans, a former Interior Senator who hates squatters, who dreams of being even further to the right - and promptly becomes one of the corpses without which no crime thriller can do.

Horst Evers: “Hope Joanna”. Rowohlt Berlin, Berlin 2026. 320 pages, 24 euros.

In contrast, Evers presents a duo of investigators, led by the eponymous Hope Joanna, a former taekwondo fighter with Olympic ambitions who is now giving Nazis a... Further ingredients: A Norwegian professional footballer from 1. FC Union Berlin who enjoys playing with the German language. And who has a Maserati but no driver's license. In addition: the incumbent Senator for the Interior with a penchant for strange costumes. A police colleague named Siri. Right-wing beer brewers who explain the success of the AfD. And the story culminates in a somewhat crazy showdown high above the rooftops of Berlin.

“No one could have come up with such an outrageous story,” Evers himself writes late in the book. Which is of course outrageous because Evers shows that he can do it. But you can already tell. Evers cannot and does not want to offer the depressive depth of the Gereon Rath crime novels. The right-wing people are more likely to be laughed away here than taken seriously.

Reading it makes you smile. That can't be wrong in these times. And it has been known at least since “Views” by Marc-Uwe Kling that authors who are better known as humorists can write very good contemporary crime novels.

“The White Night” by Anne Stern is even closer to the concept of the Gereon Rath crime novels. So close that you can easily imagine how it came about on the drawing board of the editors at Piper Verlag, who urgently needed a successor to their Rath series.

There is also a duo of investigators here. The detective inspector Alfred König and the photographer Lou Faber, with whom you literally wait for something to work out between the two at some point. Here too, the city of Berlin, described precisely and with a lot of local color, plays a main role. Just not pre-war Berlin, but post-war Berlin. The story takes place at the end of 1946.

So that the last person understands that this is essentially a sequel, the publisher has not only packed the book in a cover similar to the Rath crime novels. He promotes it himself so much for fans of the series that one has to be skeptical.

Anne Stern: “The White Night”. Piper Verlag 2026, Munich. 400 pages, 25 euros. Anne Stern is currently on a reading tour with the crime novel.

Luckily, Anne Stern isn't just anyone. The prolific writer has already set stories about a Berlin midwife from the 1920s in a historical setting. And she succeeds again with “The White Night”.

Ostensibly it's about several corpses that are found strangely presented. The main role is played by Berlin, which was largely destroyed in the hunger winter of 1946/47. Anne Stern's descriptions make you shiver when you read them, even in summer. It's coming through the joints everywhere. The protagonists can be happy if they even have an apartment and don't have to look for shelter in the snow-covered cemeteries in Kreuzberg. Anyone who can hawks the last of their belongings on the black market at nearby Marheinekeplatz.

“Anyone who is still alive today has only themselves to blame,” Anne Stern tells an old man on the subway. A sentence that could hardly better describe the hopelessness in the city that had been liberated from the Nazis but was lying on the ground.

A surprising location in Anne Stern's “The White Night” is at today's Torstrasse 146 in Berlin-Mitte. According to the crime novel, the murder squad of the Berlin police was housed there for a few years after the war. The interesting history of the house lies in the pre-war period. Because it was there until around 1941... (Attention, this text box reveals a few details from the novel)

... a Jewish hospital. The east-west connection between Rosenthaler Platz and Friedrichstrasse was still called Elsässer Strasse at the time. Until 1941, house number 85 was home to the “Israelite Hospital” – the hospital of Adass Yisroel, as you can read on the website of this Jewish community. Accordingly, the hospital there opened in 1909 with 36 beds, in the 1920s it had 56 beds and also made a name for itself as a maternity hospital.

During the Nazi era, the hospital was increasingly harassed. In 1938, the Gestapo complained that there were “a number of Aryan patients” in the Adass Yisroel hospital. However, since Jewish doctors' licenses to practice medicine were revoked from October 1, 1938, they were only allowed to treat Jewish patients.

The hospital was probably closed at the end of September 1941, according to the website. The last grave cards from the Adass Yisroel cemetery index, which indicate the hospital as the place of death, bear this date. It is not known what form the closure took and where patients, staff and equipment went. With one exception, all of the doctors at the Israelite Hospital were killed or driven abroad. Only one survived the murder and was in Berlin in 1945.

We know more about later use. Until 1945, the house was HJ home and the seat of an office of the Nazified “Reich Association of Jews in Germany,” which had to work on the liquidation of Jewish assets, according to Adass Yisroel.

Until 1945, the police headquarters had its headquarters at Alexanderplatz, in the “Red Castle”, which is well known to readers of the Gereon Rath crime novels. Today the Alexa shopping center stands in approximately the same location. Since the building was largely destroyed during the war, the police headquarters were moved to Elsässer Straße 85 in 1945, including the murder squad, which was then still responsible for the entire city, which was divided into four sectors. It was not until 1948 that a separate police headquarters responsible for the western sectors was established in Berlin-Kreuzberg.

In the 1950s, the former hospital housed a Deutsche Reichsbahn office. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the house at the address, now renamed Torstrasse 146, stood empty for decades. In 2017, a BZ reporter found a torn poster with the GDR State Council Chairman Erich Honecker next to rubble and scrap. “It is a ruin, not a place of remembrance,” said the BZ report.

The house has now been completely renovated. Inside you will find the offices of a company that takes care of artificial intelligence. However, large areas are vacant and are being offered for rent. “Thanks to the extensive renovation, historical architecture and contemporary office comfort are combined,” says an advertisement on Immobilienscout24.

But you don't learn anything about the history of the house. On site you can only see a faded “85” on the facade, the old house number from the time of the Israeli Hospital. But there are no stumbling blocks or a memorial plaque. (ga)

Stern cannot quite keep up with the density of precisely described, historical places known from the Kutscher novels. But she also manages to surprise readers with stories about the city. For example, the murder squad was housed on Torstrasse in Berlin-Mitte after the war - in a former Jewish hospital, the history of which (see text box) is unknown even to many locals. Or that the murder investigators in already divided Berlin were still responsible for the entire city - and were already caught up in the tug-of-war between East and West.

And of course there are the Nazis. The war may be over, but the Nazi era is omnipresent. Former NSDAP officials are still or are already in positions with the police - or with another clinic that will play an important role. In this city no one is without history. And Anne Stern writes it down skillfully.

By the end of the book you have become so close to the characters that you would like to know more about the one-eyed inspector and the photographer who accompanies him. Luckily, Stern has already finished the second volume. He will play in the hot summer of 1947. Fittingly, Stern wrote the final pages on the deadly hot weekend at the end of June. Only a release date is not yet known.