News from Berlin
Switzerland, June 1941, and Oscar Verschuur is a Dutch diplomat, with a reputation as a political firefighter, working in Berne. His wife, Kate, is in London helping in a hospital, and his daughter, Emma, is in Berlin, married to a high-placed, anti-Nazi civil servant in the German foreign ministry. When Emma makes a visit to Geneva, and meets her father in a restaurant at the end of May 1941, she tells him the date of the planned German invasion of the Soviet Union – Operation Barbarossa, having been told it by her husband. Oscar does not know how to use this dangerous information without exposing his daughter and son-in-law to peril from the Gestapo. The marriage between Oscar and Kate is a long-distance, loose state of affairs, and both of them seem to drift towards others – for Oscar it is Lara, a lover he meets in the Swiss mountains; and for Kate it is Matteous – an African soldier who she looks after in the Richmond hospital in England and then attempts to rehabilitate into English wartime society. Oscar flies to London, in order to inform a senior contact about the date for Operation Barbarossa, where he meets up with Kate.
This is a well-narrated and beautifully observed story of how individuals have to function in the stifling, dangerous and treacherous atmosphere of war. It is about grief, memory and the emotional underpinning of life. It is a brief, dense novel, and leaves many loose ends unresolved. But it’s a book that very much deserves reading.
