Jean-Christophe Grangé (Paris, 1961) is 1.77 meters tall and had a Catalan grandfather, which is not unimportant, as will be seen later. This popular French novelist is the author of successes such as The Purple Rivers, made into a film (he is also a co-writer of the film Vidocq). He just published Death in the Third Reich (Fate). The Spanish publisher has preferred this title to the original, the more poetic Les promises (The promises).
Les promises, despite its rejection, refers to another gem about Nazi Germany, Les bienviellantes, by Jonathan Littell (Goncourt Prize in 2006). The translation did respect him: Las benevolosas (RBA). Les bienviellantes are the deities of revenge; Les promises, the ladies of the Third Reich. His promises (and also his fiancées). Rich and invulnerable. Invulnerable? No, a serial killer kills and eviscerates them.
Except for the final chapter, which takes place in 1942, everything takes place in the days immediately before and after the invasion of Poland, "when the war was on the next page of the calendar", in a time "when love no longer existed." in Germany” and “fear had seized everyone”. In this Berlin "with the apocalypse underway" an unusual triple alliance is set in motion to solve four crimes.
Without eviscerating the plot (a very appropriate verb here) it is possible to explain who makes up this unusual society: a corrupt and cynical psychoanalyst, an aristocratic and dipsomaniac psychiatrist, and a brutal SS and Gestapo officer who will end up falling off his horse, in a biblical sense (and not literally, as Murillo painted Saint Paul). They are three perfect anti-heroes, wow, who redeem themselves in the end, transformed by the power of literature.
Grangé knows a lot about this redemptive power, which puts the reader in the skin of the cynical psychoanalyst and makes him feel his "Lilliputian complex" for measuring 1.70 meters (only seven less than him). A minor in the novel, a movie star with a tumultuous end, is practically the same size and yet seems "a giant." Magic? No. As the psychoanalyst himself says, "all this is nothing more than a novel."
The polar, the detective genre, knows no borders or times. Lindsey Davis already demonstrated it with her fetish character from classical Rome, the researcher Marco Didio Falco. Philip Kerr, also British, who died prematurely in 2018, discovered with his detective Bernie Gunther's series that Hitler and National Socialism were the ideal ingredients for crime fiction. Grangé now returns to that same scenario.
“The murders in my novel are a drop in the ocean. Anyone could die under Nazism, a regime that was a serial killer and made death an everyday occurrence. That was what interested me in a criminal investigation in a country and a time when everything was about deaths”, says the writer, who deals with all the horrors of barbarism: anti-Semitism, racial laws, eugenics, torture, the fear…
“Many today wonder how the majority of Germans succumbed to madness. It doesn't surprise me. We all have a seed of violence and destruction. A small detonator can set it off. She spent in Rwanda: half the country murdered the other half. They treated me wonderfully in Germany during the presentation of the novel, but I was raised by a grandmother who lived through the war and I couldn't escape certain thoughts”.
What thoughts? “A Frenchman of my age and with a grandmother like mine, who spoke to me about the resistance and the disasters of the war, has an image that is difficult to get rid of. 'Nazism left here', he thought on tour when he remembered the accomplices, the bureaucrats of destruction. Sure they were lovely people in their homes, but in their offices they planned raids, transfers and executions.
“I grew up in a modest family. I was raised by my mother and my grandmother. I always thought that I did not have any class complex, but with age I realized that I suffered harassment in my youth because of my origins. That wound has marked me. It is part of the engine that gave me the energy and the will to succeed, to work hard. I went to a school for rich kids, but a lot of them didn't make it and I think I know why."
Because? “Because they didn't have that anger, that motor of mine to push myself. That spirit of overcoming in a big and threatening world, that eagerness that is born of rage, is present in some of my characters. Those of Death in the Third Reich pursue a serial killer and on the way discover an unprecedented tragedy of an extraordinary dimension. And another serial killer, but one on an industrial and institutional scale.”
The novel has meant a great deal of documentation and revelations for its author. “I am Catholic and I have discovered that all the talk of the Nazis about the Jews as murderers of Christ did not matter to them because in reality they were very anti-Catholic. There could only be one god: the god Hitler. When you study Nazism, you have vertigo. It seems that you have reached the end of the horror and there are still more rungs.”
The cinema, which invented a sequel to The Purple Rivers, loves its author, although he doesn't love the sequels. He will not have it Death in the Third Reich, for which the audiovisual industry has already been interested. “I like to start from scratch. I have just finished a new book which, however, will also have three protagonists. I love that three-dimensional vision, contrasting sensibilities, opinions that evolve”.
All novelists, he says, should aspire “to get in and get into the shoes of those who have nothing to do with us. Whether they are a corrupt psychoanalyst, an aristocratic psychiatrist or an SS officer. I am French and the quintessential example for me would be Madame Bovary: Flaubert manages to fully incarnate himself in the soul of a dissatisfied young woman from the provinces. The duty of the writer is that. Get out of yourself."
The end of this nightmare in Nazi Germany has a surprising ending, with an uncertain truck trip that leaves the soul in suspense. Privileges of the trade: the chronicler asked Jean-Christophe Grangé to explain the end of a story without an explicit ending and that each reader will interpret to their liking. But how would he like it to end? We cannot reveal what he said, but we can give a clue: "I wish that trip would come to fruition."
(When the talk ends, the interviewee asks: "Can I add something?" The nightmare of any interviewer, who fears he has forgotten a point that his interlocutor believes is important. And then Grangé gives us a gift: "My grandfather was Catalan, Lluís Roca, now deceased. I am moved and proud that this newspaper interviews me. In my childhood memories, he is always with his bible, with his morning ritual, reading La Vanguardia").
