The new editions of crime classics are currently increasing. Kampa Verlag is bringing out – in addition to the Maigrets by George Simenon – among others Dashiell Hammett in a new translation, Rowohlt is treating the Lord Peter Wimsey novels by Dorothy L. Sayers to a new edition; and the small Hamburg publishing house Argument with the crime line Ariadne is reissuing Pieke Biermann’s Berlin quartet, which has been out of print for a long time: Potsdam’s death (1987), Violetta (1990), Racing heart (1993) and Four, five, six (1997; the title is a reference to Billy Wilder’s film One two Three).
The four novels set in the decade around the fall of the Berlin Wall and record the upheavals that went with it. At the beginning, the focus is on Commissioner Karin Lietze with her very colorful team. But the real center of the novels is the city: Biermann captures the sound and rhythm of those years in increasingly cryptic plots and in lively dialogues. It is worth reading some passages out loud: The author lets her characters speak dialect. In this way, the most diverse social milieus crash into each other, biographies, job descriptions and ideologies become tangible without having to be explained, portrayed or told in great detail. In general, Biermann is a great artist of omission – which is extremely pleasant in view of the current tendency towards spelling out. A few strokes are enough to turn a figure into a complex character.
Pieke Biermann was active in the women’s movement in Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s and was considered the “front woman” of the German whore movement for years. This commitment is also reflected in the Berlin Quartet down: The self-image of prostitutes and the changing way society treats them are a secondary issue that runs through all volumes. This brings up – unobtrusively – different feminist positions, the problems of reunification, violence against women, violence by women, persistent fascist tendencies in society in both the West and the East and other questions. They form the keynote that the plot picks up, varies and plays back.
Although some of the novels are now more than thirty years old, they are still up-to-date – on the one hand this is due to the content, because in some respects society was really further in the eighties and nineties than it is today (you forget it so quickly, huh?), while other problems have simply remained unsolved since then (such as the popular negation of right-wing extremist and anti-Semitic positions in the middle of society). On the other hand, the daring with which the novels were written makes them so utterly contemporary.
Because Pieke Biermann plays with the genre more intensively from book to book, undermines conventions and expands the boundaries: role clichés are reformulated, characters occupied against the grain; Dreams and visions mix with reality, making the edges blurred and permeable; Instead of cumbersome narration, the author relies on powerful assembly techniques. Although the crime plot remains the driving force at first, it fades into the background from novel to novel in order to make room for milieu miniatures and large social contexts.
This courage is evident when the Berlin Quartet been rewarded: Three of the four novels were awarded the German Crime Prize: Violetta 1991 with first place in the national category, 1994 Racing heart also with first place; and Four, five, six 1998 with second place in the national category.
Those weren’t the only prizes Pieke Biermann received. In 1990 she received the 3sat Prize for her text when she was awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize The law of the eye. The author also works as a translator from English and Italian. For example, she has translated books by Dorothy Parker, Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini or Liza Cody into German. In 2020 she received the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for the translation of the novel Oreo by Fran Ross.
Biermann’s ability to deal with language confidently also shapes that Berlin Quartet. Already in Potsdam’s death the characters are characterized by their different ways of speaking. The crime plot is still quite present: A polarizing radio presenter falls over dead in front of the buffet at the promotion event for a new band.
Beat ready for hospital
Murder or not? Lietze and her team investigate the Berlin music business, a true – and very amusing – shark tank of oversized egos. Violetta takes place in the sweltering summer heat: murders of women with a migration background, machos who have been beaten to hospital maturity and family men who are found dead in bed after sexual escapades. Lietze and her colleagues also play a key role here, but side lines that skillfully target the social milieus of Berlin are already growing. This leads Biermann in Racing heart continued: The city is becoming ever stronger – in the troubled times shortly after reunification – in all its contradictions and diversity, the actual center. Four, five, six finally dispenses with the concept of main and secondary characters: an assassination attempt on Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport is the starting point for a highly complex moral image of the city that also opens up new (historical) perspectives.
Pieke Biermanns Berlin Quartet sticks to the heart of questions and topics that were raised with the reunification in 1989, but were never really discussed, let alone dealt with. The consequences can be felt in every nook and cranny of the Berlin republic to this day (and have become more visible as a result of Corona, as if under a magnifying glass). So the new edition of the novels comes at the right time as a conceivably appropriate impetus. It also shows that there were novels as early as the 1990s that thwarted the often bitterly lamented discouragement and conformity of German crime novels.
The Berlin Quartet Pieke Biermann Argument Verlag with Ariadne 2021, 1,000 pages, € 50
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