Quick Links
Help us collect errors and inconsistencies
As most readers will agree, part of the fun of reading a series is spotting continuity errors from one book to the next. And with historical fiction there's also the fun of spotting the occasional factual error. Maybe fans of mystery fiction are predisposed to enjoy this aspect as it invites them play detective themselves. We know we think it enhances the enjoyment of reading series fiction.
Help us create a detailed list of bloopers in the Bernie books -- both continuity errors and historical errors. We don't think there are very many, but there are a few, some of which have already been pointed out in this forum.
Dinah attending "Brown University"
the change in Bernie's age
And we'll add: the mention of Luna Park in The Pale Criminal (according to Wikipedia Luna Park closed in 1933) and the discrepancy in the date of Bernie's first wife's death.
We think there's a slight inconsistency is Bernie's WWI troop movements too -- maybe a WWI expert can weigh in on that.
If you come across anything that sounds wrong to you, please post here. Include the books involved and as much detail as possible. If there's a question in your mind about something you read but you don't have time to research it, post it here and someone will look into it.
Eventually we'll post a compilation of Bernie Bloopers with cross references. Happy reading!!
Help us create a detailed list of bloopers in the Bernie books -- both continuity errors and historical errors. We don't think there are very many, but there are a few, some of which have already been pointed out in this forum.
Dinah attending "Brown University"
the change in Bernie's age
And we'll add: the mention of Luna Park in The Pale Criminal (according to Wikipedia Luna Park closed in 1933) and the discrepancy in the date of Bernie's first wife's death.
We think there's a slight inconsistency is Bernie's WWI troop movements too -- maybe a WWI expert can weigh in on that.
If you come across anything that sounds wrong to you, please post here. Include the books involved and as much detail as possible. If there's a question in your mind about something you read but you don't have time to research it, post it here and someone will look into it.
Eventually we'll post a compilation of Bernie Bloopers with cross references. Happy reading!!
Comments
Possible spoiler for March Violets!
Sort of an inconsistency:
At the start of PC, when Bernie meets with Heydrich, he never mentions that just two years prior in MV's, Heydrich had sent him into Dachau KZ.
I think that's a bit of information that Gunther would remember to tell the reader.
Also, at the end of PC, at the climax, Gunther speaks to Himmler and Heydrich in a manner that just would not have been possible historically, particularly in 1938 (I know it's a novel, but in the spirit of this thread...)
Added after 57 minutes:
In PC, when Bernie is going through Otto Rahn's file in Kindermann's office..it is November 1938. But in Rahn's career file it says that Rahn was posted to the Race and Resettlement office of the SS, in December 1938.
>>> I think this will be an interesting thread.
>>> Possible spoiler for March Violets!
Thanks, WML. Great notes!
Can you give an example or two of what you mean by "Gunther speaks to Himmler and Heydrich in a manner that just would not have been possible historically, particularly in 1938"? Is it a matter of colloquialisms?
"Berlin Noir" Penquin edition, chapter 23, pp 512-518.
Heydrich and Himmler were hand in glove; benefactor and disciple.
Himmler " politically out maneuvered" Goring and his man Gestapo chief Rudolph Diels, in 1934-35 and placed himself and Heydrich as controllers of the German police apparatus secret and otherwise, from that time onward.
I don't think Heydrich would be explaining any of his motives for anything he did to anyone (least of all Gunther), other then to Himmler, Goring, or Hitler.
Historical opinions aside, PC is a terrific story IMHO.
Another one from PC: book time is September '38 and there's mention of the burning of Nuremberg synagogue, but that event actually happened in November '38 (page 415 of BN)
I'm aware that One From The Other was written some 15 years after GR, the last part of BNoir. And at first I was thinking that PK had lost a sense of the character for some reason. However, as One From The Other progressed, the dialogue and style went right back to BG as usual (happily so).
It almost felt like the prologue was not BG "speaking" at all.
Just curious if anyone else noticed this?
I guess the disconnect for me was that, the prologue in One From The Other taking place in 1937..a year prior to PC..yet written 15 years later, seemed character tone wise out of sync.
But again, as the chapters roll out, I find, at least, that BG is back in great form. The scene in the garage with the "old comades" is terrific and vintage BG/PK.
If I may ask, what is your raison d'être, for this web site? Super fan..editorial..publishing?? Just curious..very glad it exits.
1. The train station at Nollendorfplatz ist part of the normal Berlin tube (not part of the Stadt-Bahn). Only the rich boroughs of Berlin had underground-stations, Schöneberg, were Nollendirfplatz lies, was a very poor one.
2. It is impossible, really impossible, to get from Schwanwerder to the Müggelsee by boat in less than 3 hours. Either you use the river Spree or the Landwehrkanal, there are several water locks on the way.
Sorry for the poor english, love the books, that must count.
Philip Kerr himself gave an example in a recent interview he gave to Robert Birnbaum for The Morning News (see Interviews page for link)
….
RB: Do you get readers upbraiding you for factual issues?
PK: I get the odd person who writes and points out some trivial detail that I got wrong. In one of the recent novels I mentioned the synagogue, the Oranienburger Strasse in Berlin, which was the largest synagogue at the time. It had a congregation of 8,000 people. I visited it to research it properly. The mistake I made was that they were not strict Jews. It was a kind of reformed Jewish congregation. I had described the guys as wearing more intense traditional Hasidic stuff. And they wouldn’t ever had worn that. So it was a fact I got wrong. And I put my hands up to that. I felt in spirit it was OK. A forgivable mistake. What was interesting about writing that scene was, when I wrote it, I deliberately put myself in the position of imagining all these people were Muslims. So that I would mine my own borderline racism about Muslims in our society. I thought this was a terribly useful thing to do, to catch myself off, if you like. So that in the same way I look on people wearing burkhas and djellabas in modern 21st-century society and thinking “Why don’t they dress like us?” I was able to use that for how Germans would have reacted to strict Hasidic Jews, who were obvious as well. It was a useful thing to do.
RB: More method acting.
PK: Yes.
….
quote
Kerr is mixing up Lichterfelde, a suburb in the south of Berlin, and Lichtenberg, the district near the slaughterhouses.
Es una faceta poco explotada de la personalidad de Gunther pero es un gran guiño para los aficcionados que realmente lo sumerge en un contexto muy creible y con aromas.... interesantes.
gracias
Gracias - es una idea interesante. ¿Lleva actualmente Bernie estilográficas distintas en de uno libro al otro? No recuerdo. Tengo que buscarlo y notar si eran estilográficas que pertenecian al tiempo y lugar correcto.
For non Spanish speakers, this comment is about the various types of fountain pens Bernie would have carried at different times places in his life.
En las novelas no hay alusiones a estilográficas. Me refiero a q seria interesante q las hubiese. Saludos y gracias.
Is it the same in the English text?
The mistake is funny, since “Bahnführer” would mean something like a streetcab driver!
As for the discrepancy of how Bernie removed the SS tatoo, I note that if one recalls that in the first several books he refers to pistols as "lighters", one might stretch the point a bit and say that cigarette lighter could mean the same as well.
-Mike
Can't remember which page; just found this site.
The Teltower Tor was on the west side of the Lange Brücke. The Train Station on the east side of that bridge was named Potsdam Stadt or Stadtbahnhof, today Potsdam Hauptbahnhof.
And the Police HQ of Potsdam was located at Priesterstraße, not Priest-Straße.
Just a couple of things I've picked up personally...in Field Grey, the murder victim in the POW camp is an SS man captured at Stalingrad, yet to the best of my knowledge the SS were no way involved in the operation. Also, BG states in March Violets (book on loan so can't confirm!) that he only fought in Turkey during WW1? Yet all other references to his service are Western Front ones
Just finished Prague Fatale, love the books to death!
That occurred to me as well, when reading the post Berlin Noir
(15 years lateer) books.
BG refers to the horrors of the trench warfare on the Western front in many of the later books, and doesn't again reference the Eastern theater of war after the BN series.
"I am reading Prague Fatale (and enjoying it: I like BeGu more in Berlin than in foreign places and am amused about realistic details as the clubbing Amis in Berlin disliking coloured people).
But there was no university in The Hague ( see pages 56 and 106) in 1935-1941, just as there is none now."
I'm reading "Prague Fatale" now, and just came on the scene where Bernie sees an elderly Jewish man wearing the Yellow Star on a train. This angers Bernie because the man is also wearing the Knight's Cross and Oak Leaves around his neck. However, the Knight's Cross (and its various grades, including the Oak Leaves) was strictly a Nazi era medal, and there would never have been a Jewish recipient. I think Kerr's intent is to show how badly even brave Jewish veterans of the Great War were treated, in which case it would have made more sense to have the man wearing a Pour le Merite, the highest decoration for bravery in Imperial Germany...but this wouldn't have been historically accurate either. Only one Jewish soldier received this medal during the Great War, a flyer who was killed in action (and ignored in all Nazi histories of the medal).
It would have been best, maybe, to have the man wearing an Imperial Iron Cross First Class pinned to his jacket right below the Yellow Star - this would certainly have made the point pretty vividly. (Btw, Jewish veterans of the Great War with the Iron Cross First Class were supposed to have been treated better than ordinary Jewish citizens by the Nazis....sadly, this rarely, if ever happened.)
Anyway, I hope the Bernie books keep coming...I can't wait to see him get involved in the Berlin events of July 20, 1944....
My biggest gripe is a different one: I don't think Kerr knows the German language very well. To some extend that is understandable, but it unfortunately introduces an element of "unreality" into several of the stories. Let me be more precise: Bernie Gunther is from Berlin, presumably he grew up there. As such he would have a VERY distinct accent (the Berlin accent is easily the most recognizeable of the German accents). There is simply NO WAY he'd be able to get away with as much as his did while he was living/working in Munich and Vienna. By far the biggest example of that is when he pretends to be Eric Gruen, the former Nazi doctor from Vienna. The lawyer in Vienna (One from the Other) would have spotted that fake in 3 seconds. There are many other, smaller examples of this throughout. Since Kerr is from Scotland, it puzzles me that he would pay so little attention to this dimension. After all, the various regional accents in Britain are very distinct, and the culture, as well as interpersonal relations, are - to a significant extent - influenced by this. Germany is much the same.
A minor example of this is when he charaterizes the Nuremberg accent as "Bavarian." Yes, Nuremberg is politically in Bavaria, but culturally it is Franconia, and the accent spoken there is Franconian. Very easily distinguishable.
I am curious if other readers have picked up on this. Also, I have not yet read any of the German translations, but i am looking forward to see how they have dealt with this issue.
AS
Just couldn't happen.
WML
I've only recently discovered these books and am having lots of fun catching up (i'm getting towards the end of Berlin Noir at the moment). I'm pretty impressed with the historical research, but there are some odd oversights, such as the anticipation of the creation of the state of Niedersachsen (which is where I grew up). I also noticed the Bavaria/Franconia inaccuracies (my mother is from Munich). However, the error that really made me groan was the description of Bernie's ex-colleague in PC as a Ostfriese from the Emsland. The Ostfriesen get picked on a lot in German humour for their (alleged) slowness and taciturnity, but they really are quite distinct from other North Germans, they have their own language and culture and tend to be reformed protestant. They have more in common with Frisians from the north of the Netherlands. The Emsland, on the other hand, lies between Ostfriesland and the Muensterland, and is predominantly catholic. They really are very different regions and very different people! And yes, Kerr's German can be a bit dodgy at times: surely the company Koenig used to run should be called "Rekla*m*e und Werbung" (both words meaning advertising)?
Nonetheless, the books are really interesting and great fun to read - I'm really looking forward to finding out how Bernie gets on in post-war Germany!
One that comes to mind is where Bernie is driving down the "Clayallee" (Clay-Avenue) in prewar Berlin. At that time Lucius D. Clay would have been very surprised if someone had told him the capital of a defeated enemy country would one day name a street in his honour. ;-)
(General Lucius D. Clay initiated and organised the famous Berlin-Airlift in 1948/49 when the soviets blocked the Western Allies access to Berlin.)
The book opens with Bernie attending a dinner to celebrate the release of one Franz Meyer - a blond Berlin Jew who "looked as if he had been carved by
Arno Breker, Hitler's official state sculptor. he was noone's idea of a Jew. Half the SS and SD were more obviously Semitic."
Franz is married to Siv, who together with her three sisters, although Aryan "might have been (Jewish) - all were Germans with strong noses,dark eyes, and even darker hair."
The dinner is taking place in celebration of the fact that Siv, Klara and her two other sisters had taken part in a demonstration outside the Jewish Welfare Office in Berlin, an event which actually did happen in May of 1943, and where Gentile wives of Jewish husbands agitated successfully for there release.
On page 14 of the Quercus edition of the British edition there is a description of the event, and then at the bottom of the page it says:
"There were many more of them then I had been expecting - perhaps several hundred. Even Klara Meyer looked surprised, but not as surprised as the cops and the SS who were guarding the Jewish Welfare Office."
The anomaly is that unless Klara was married to a brother or relative of Franz Meyer, she would not have been a Meyer as Franz is married to Siv not Klara.
My name is Ulf, I am a great fan of Phillip Kerr and have read all is Bernie Gunther novels so far.
As a history buff I find his research excellent, as is his ability to always place BG in a plausible historical context.
Phillipp Kerrs research is usually flawless. However, in his latest novel "A Man without Breath", I have found a small mistake:
On page 414, in the second from last paragraph, Kerr describes his heroine Ines Kramsta as follows:
"...she searched her forensic wallet before producing a large curving needle that looked like it could have stitched a sail on the Kruzenstern".
The Russian Sail Training tall ship "Kruzenstern" was originally the German "Padua" built in the 1920s. After WWII she was requisitioned by the Soviet Union as war booty. She was renamed after a German communist scientist? and recommissioned by the Soviet Navy in 1946. She is still active as a sail training vessel for the Russian Navy.
Sine the story takes place in 1943, BG's reference to a sail on a famous sailing ship would have been correct if Phillip Kerr would have let him use the ship's original name "Padua", or one of her sister ships who were equally famous for their huge size and enormous sail-area.
Small mistakes as this does not in any way reduce my pleasure and enthusiasm for Phillip Kerr's work. I am looking forward to reading his future novels.
Kind regards;
Ulf T. Ulriksen, Tonsberg, Norway.
greetings from Sweden. I think I have found a small error. In "Prague Fatale", while investigating the murder in Prague, Bernie receives a letter from a girl in Paris. Bernie has helped her to get a job at the Adlon hotel in Berlin. He says her name is Bettina but in the previous book, "Field Grey", she presents herself as Renata Matter.
All the best,
Peter
/Peter
Other examples are smaller - In A Man Without Breath, Voltaire's novel Candide is referred to as a play. In the same book, Bernie quotes Goethe's Der Erlkonig to the judge he is speaking to, who is noted for his academic prowess: "The judge frowned, trying to recognize my allusion.'Goethe?' I nodded". This poem is the most famous poem in the German language, and about as clever as spotting that "To be or not to be" is a quotation from Shakespeare.
In "A Quiet Flame," Ricci Kamm's redhead girlfriend is compared to Rita Hayworth. If this is supposed to be 1932-33 in the narration, Rita did not change her hair color to red until 1935, and she was not known by that name in 1932. ( I suppose if the narration is 1950 it would be OK, just that it is confusing. )
In "The One From The Other," end of chapter 38, Eichmann mentions the lyrics from the old song "Tomorrow belongs to me." That song was written in 1966 for the musical (and later film ) "Cabaret." Unless the lyrics were adapted from some other German song by John Kander and Fred Ebb...