Fireweed
It is 1947, and Adam, a British military lawyer, is posted to the German city of Hamburg to prosecute Nazi war criminals. It is a depressing and soul-destroying job. As the true horrors of the death camps are revealed, Adam finds himself prosecuting low-ranking officials, typists and clerks while hundreds of high-ranking Nazis are escaping justice by fleeing to Argentina.
During the Second World War, much of Hamburg was destroyed by Allied bombing. Adam’s walk to work takes him past the perimeter of the ‘Dead City’, the old city centre, now almost totally obliterated. The author’s descriptions are vivid and memorable: Amidst the ruins lie tens of thousands of decomposing bodies, and the air is thick with ‘flies as fat as a man’s thumb’. Equally visceral are the flashbacks to Adam’s wartime experiences, including landing on the Normandy beaches in June 1944.
Adam is a well-rounded and fascinating character. His friends in Hamburg are mainly Germans: the landlady where he lodges, who describes the firestorms after the bombings; Ernst Mann, an elderly, Austrian-born doctor who lives in the attic, and who knew Hitler as a teenager; and Rose, an aristocratic beauty whose family perished during the war. Now destitute, she makes her living in a brothel.
Fireweed is full of unexpected twists and turns—part adventure, part love story, part study of man’s inhumanity to man, and part homage to mankind’s enduring resilience. The novel takes its name from a weed Rose spies growing from a crack in a ruined wall. She sees it as a miraculous sign of rebirth, the city slowly coming alive again after so much suffering and death. Recommended.
