Lost Kin

January 15, 2016
From occupied Germany in 1946, Anderson (Liberated, 2014) draws a dark tale of brothers, each struggling with a moral dilemma, who become caught up in deadly international machinations. U.S. Army Capt. Harry Kaspar, assigned to Munich's Regional Military Government, has a secret: he killed a deserter. Masquerading as an American colonel, the thief had pirated riches plundered from murdered Jews. There's another secret: Max, Harry's missing brother, has been in Germany since before the war. Was Max a Nazi? Then Irina, a tattered, starving refugee, shows up with word of Max. Harry is swept into a maelstrom of intrigue and violence, its catalyst Stalin's demand that Eastern Europeans in West Germany be shipped to Soviet territories. Those trips terminate in the gulag or execution. Anderson deserves a standing ovation for his gritty sketch of postwar, rubble-laden Munich as an ominous, near-anarchic theater of the absurd. Harry learns that Max, once caught up in false-flag Nazi operations, seeks penance by finding refuge for Irina's clan of Ukrainian Cossacks--but some Cossacks had fought for the Nazis. Harry and Max are empathetic protagonists, but even Anderson's minor characters earn the spotlight: Maddy, Harry's social-climbing paramour; Dietz, a beaten-down German policeman too willing to help; Maj. Joyner, a by-the-book tough guy whose son was killed in action, leaving him hating every German; Aubrey Slaipe, a spook lurking deep in the Occupation's bureaucracy; and mysterious Sabine Lieser, once a Nazi target because of her youthful socialist allegiances, who now runs a displaced persons camp. There's enough action and mystery to keep the pages turning--traitors done in by a shashka, a Ukrainian sword; a dramatic face-off in Czechoslovakia's snowy ]umava Mountains--all spun out in a masterful story of redemption found within the brutalities of postwar realpolitik. Classic noir shadowed by the hulks and rubble of the once-proud city of Munich, a character itself in this haunting tale.

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