In a first thriller, the Italian writer Fabiano Massimi had tackled the suspicious death of Geli Reubal, the niece (and mistress) of Adolph Hitler. This time, in The demons of Berlinhe tackles a major event in the history of the XXe century, the fire of the Reichstag palace, the German parliament, in Berlin, on February 27, 1933.
It follows the same recipe, a clever mix of historical fact and fiction, an interaction between sinister figures like Himmler, Heydrich and Goering and fictional characters like Siegfried Sauer and Helmut Forster, encountered in Fabiano Massimi’s first novel, The Berlin Angel. The backdrop is the same: the rise of Nazism in Germany.
Siegfried Sauer, a former police commissioner, tries to find the beautiful Rosa, who disappeared in Berlin after joining a resistance movement. During this quest, he discovers that the Nazis are preparing attacks with the aim of destabilizing the republic and thus justifying a new wave of repression.
In fact, historians do not agree on the identity of those responsible for the Reichstag fire: a simple visionary? Communists? The Nazis themselves? Fabiano Massimi embroiders his own vision of history in a story where paranoia reigns. Its hero, Siegfried Sauer, can’t trust anyone, not even his old friends. Anyone can hide Nazi sympathies.
The story knows no dead time, the reversals of situation follow each other at an accelerated pace, the characters do not lack brilliance.
It is once again an opportunity to immerse oneself in a tragic period of history and realize, to use the words of the author in a note at the end of the novel, “that even today it would be enough to very little to go from the most evolved democracy to a totalitarian nightmare: an incident, a pretext, a small distraction”.
The demons of Berlin
Fabiano Massimi
Albin Michael
476 pages