Interview | Volker Kutscher – “It’s not always so easy to see: What’s the right thing to do now?”
Imago Images
Audio: rbb24 Inforadio | Sep 26, 2024 | Interview with Volker Kutscher | Image: Imago Images
Volker Kutscher’s Gereon Rath novels describe how cosmopolitan Berlin became a Nazi metropolis. The last volume in the series will be published soon. In the interview, the successful author talks about current parallels, the background to his stories and his new podcast on rbb.
rbb: Volker Kutscher, you were recently writing your current novel “Rath,” which will be published on October 24th. It is the tenth and final part of the novel series. How are you doing with that?
Volker Kutscher: Very good, because a novel takes a long time and it’s all the better when you’re through it and think: Yes, it worked.
What type of writer are you? Do you work at the last minute?
Of course I need a bit of pressure from outside to even get my self-discipline going. What I also need every now and then: I go on a writing retreat and do nothing other than write, eat and sleep for a week or two. I isolate myself from the world a little, that’s when I’m most productive. It always works best at night. Yes, it’s a bit like a prison camp where you don’t do anything other than do your job. But it’s a nice job. Once you get the whole thing into a good shape and see where the story is going, then it starts to be really, really fun again.
rbb podcast
rbb
With Volker Kutscher through Berlin 1929 to 1938 – “The Fall of Babylon”
Volker Kutscher’s novel series about Inspector Gereon Rath provided the template for the ARD series “Babylon Berlin”. Together with rbb presenter Thomas Böhm, he delves into this dark chapter in the capital. In ten episodes, “The Fall of Babylon” brings history to life – can be heard from Thursday, September 26th, in the ARD audio library.
How would you explain your series of novels about Inspector Gereon Rath to someone who doesn’t know them?
I’m very bad at pitching. It’s about a Cologne resident in Berlin – an alien in Berlin – investigating murder cases as a criminal police officer. And that in the years in which Germany is changing completely, transforming from a democracy into a dictatorship. Police work is changing, but so are people’s lives. I have a lot of characters, a large ensemble, and we look into the heads of each one.
Your books about Gereon Rath and Charlotte Ritter are very successful. They became the template for the celebrated series “Babylon Berlin”. Now there is even an rbb podcast with you. What attracted you to take part?
I like to chat, and about my own subject anyway. But it’s not just that. We tell a lot about history, the historical background, and in a relaxed way. Podcast is just a nice format to be able to spread something like that out a bit, which was great fun.
“The Fall of Babylon – with Volker Kutscher through Berlin 1929 to 1938” is the name of the podcast and together with host Thomas Böhm you travel back to a time when crime became the law. What is it about?
It’s about a lot, of course also about the respective novels, there are at least ten – so one novel story in every calendar year from 1929 to 1938. We take up aspects of the plot, but also the historical references. It’s important to me to spark a little interest in history. Especially in today’s times, it is not unimportant not to repeat certain mistakes that our ancestors made back then.
They take up historical events such as the global economic crisis and the Nazis’ rise to power, but the focus is on people.
It’s not about the big historical events, but rather about how this serious change in life in Germany is reflected in people’s everyday lives.
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Imago Images/Vit Simanek
Volker Kutscher
… is a German writer and former journalist. He became known for his crime novels about the investigator Gereon Rath, which are set in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. The series began in 2008 with “The Wet Fish” and served as a template for the successful TV series “Babylon Berlin”. Kutscher, who studied German, philosophy and history, combines historical facts with exciting criminal cases in his novels.
What event surprised you during your research?
That was a lot. The riots of May 1929 in the first novel were not familiar to me, but they are not entirely unimportant because it was the first time that civil war-like conditions prevailed on Berlin’s streets again. Or in the current novel, the Polish actions that preceded the pogrom night. That was the first time that Jews were deported on a large scale. They were taken out of bed in the middle of the night in November and, barely clothed, were deported with little suitcases to the no-man’s land at the Polish border in all weathers and abandoned there. What exactly happened is somewhat lost in general consciousness. Because a lot of things are obscured by the much worse things that came later, like war and the Holocaust.
In contrast to the television series, which ends in 1933, her novel series – and also the podcast – continues until 1938. Why?
It was important to me to show life under the dictatorship, which is slowly becoming established. It didn’t happen all at once. The year 1933, with the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor, was of course a major turning point. But many hoped it wouldn’t last long. He was one of many Reich Chancellors who all had a relatively short half-life at the time, i.e. two to three months, maybe half a year, but certainly not longer. The people who weren’t Nazis also hoped that a little bit from Hitler. But that wasn’t the case, and everyday life continued, people lived their everyday lives. If you weren’t being persecuted by the regime as a communist – which was almost more so than Jews in the first year – you could carry on with your life. You could adapt, you could just ignore it completely.
But it wasn’t a passing event.
People became more and more entangled in guilt because the regime intervened more and more in everyday life. You had to face it – either affirm or deny it. It wasn’t possible to duck away in the long term. This is a very interesting question for me because it is also about my ancestors. How did you behave? How brave did you have to be? What decision is it to emigrate, to say I’m leaving my country for political reasons?
Looking back, it is easy to judge people who lived back then. But when you’re in the middle of it, it’s a completely different question. It is very important for me to show this, because it could also be important for our times to face it. What do I do if the AfD possibly comes into government and if things become more autocratic again in Germany? Do I then stay to prevent something worse from happening? Or do I leave the country? It is not always so easy to recognize: What is the right thing to do now, in which situations? And it’s not wrong if you’ve already thought about it, at least in fiction.
Thank you for the conversation.
The interview was conducted by Fanny Michaelis, rbb24 Inforadio. This article has been shortened and edited. You can listen to the original conversation by clicking on the audio symbol in the header.
Broadcast: rbb24 Inforadio, September 29, 2024, 6:20 a.m
