Sebastian Nettelbeck makes the mistake of conscientiously fulfilling his assignment. The year is 1951, and the young man takes on the task of working on a Time.news of the tranquil town of Opladen. Then a notebook falls into his hands. It contains records of a soldier from the Second World War. Nettelbeck evaluates the material. A short time later he was run over and nobody in town had any interest in solving the death.
Paul Kohl’s novel They were never gone is a kind of “True Crime” novel. Not that this is a real murder or murderer. But it’s about a true story. After the “zero hour” the table is cleared – for the perpetrators, of course. The background to the fictional murder is formed by an almost forgotten chapter in West German post-war history in the early 1950s: namely, the attempt by former National Socialists to infiltrate the North Rhine-Westphalian state association of the FDP. The central concern of the group is a general amnesty for Nazi criminals; but you don’t stop here. I also want to tie in with the good old days ideologically.
The central figure of the attempt at infiltration is Werner Naumann, among other things State Secretary in the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Naumann is not an actor in the novel, the narrator only reports soberly about him, around Naumann, however, the protagonists are grouped as if around a dark center – including influential lawyers who all have a Nazi past and are now respected lawyers and judges in the Federal Republic of Germany . The police stations are also penetrated. The author has a number of lawyers and police officers appear, including Police Chief Hannes Stadler, who moves to Opladen with his wife and son Ludwig, known as “Luggi”, after the war.
Luggi has one of the key roles in the novel when it comes to coming to terms with it. Although Luggi is the son of a perpetrator, like Luise, the Jewish daughter of Nazi victims, he will push ahead with coming to terms with the Nazi past. But their investigations remain inconclusive. Because justice can only be created by authorities who have themselves been infiltrated – or because of the political situation as a whole have no interest in investigations. The murder of Sebastian Nettelbeck is not solved. And every other person who takes on the mysterious notebook gets caught in the crosshairs.
Paul Kohl’s clever move is to leave the perpetrator in the dark. This not only shifts the center of the text in the direction of a psychopathology of a society that has got used to crime and has learned to look the other way at the decisive moment. One could accuse the author, however, that the former Nazis are a bit too overtly evil in office and dignity. Or, to be more precise, anyone who can make evidence disappear and manipulate witnesses so easily shouldn’t be alarmed by evidence from the past. The novel also explains in detail that there is no interest in the search for Nazi perpetrators even at the highest political level. Rather, one invokes the need to hold on to the old power elite of the second row – who else is supposed to run all the offices up and down the country? But if there is no threat to careers from this side, where is the motivation for a murder? The only answer could be: History should be manipulated in a lasting way. The next generation should be deprived of the possibility of knowledge once and for all. Unlike contemporary society in the 1950s, it shouldn’t be able to decide whether it wants to know more.
The text immerses the storyline in the background sound of contemplative miner’s songs, hits and movie songs. This is where Kohl’s experience as a radio writer can also be seen: The quotes seem like a game with audio recordings in a radio feature. Sometimes the style of the songs is reflected in the text, unfortunately in a pseudo-lyrical language: “Nobody will confiscate their treasures or even set fire to them,” thinks antiquarian Anselm, who temporarily owns the notebook. As a counterpoint, so to speak, to the shallow hits of the post-war period, Kohl brings a number of authors into play who shape Luggi and Luise, the two children of war. For example Wolfgang Koeppen or Heinrich Böll.
Small drawback: The first third of the novel in particular suffers from textual redundancies because, for example, protagonists repeatedly sum up elements of their story. In addition, the narrator tends to stiff platitudes. For example, when Kohl makes the narrator think with Luise, whose mother was murdered in the concentration camp: “How can you go on living without her mother? She doesn’t know how to get over it. ”Basically, you can imagine that. Fortunately, the redundancies disappear in the second half of the text, and the story speeds up considerably. This then unfolds the whole horror of the story of desk criminals and the banality of evil.
They were never gone Paul Kohl Emons Verlag 2021, 448 S., 14 €
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