The Weather in Berlin
By Ward Just
Houghton Mifflin, 305 pages, $24
People refuse to recognize complexity. . . . What’s shame in one man is grief in another, and they are not the same thing. What’s pig-stupidity in one man is cowardice in another and blind evil in a third, and they are not the same thing, either. You’d think that would be simple enough to understand but it’s not, not at all simple.”
So says Harry Greenwood, the guiding voice in Ward Just’s ambitiously complex if not altogether satisfying new novel, “The Weather in Berlin.”
Harry is a bon vivant (“Beautiful skier, beautiful horseman, beautiful raconteur, every day a fiesta.”) who roamed the world all through the 1920s and 1930s while his wife and adoring young son, Dixon, waited in a Chicago North Shore suburb for him to drop in and visit.
His absence didn’t necessarily translate into neglect–at least not from his son’s point of view. For Dixon, whose memory is in continual play on every page of “The Weather in Berlin,” is entranced by his father. Something in the breadth of Harry’s experience feeds Dixon’s ambitions as filmmaker. And the country that obsesses them both is Germany.
Indeed, the pivotal interlude in Harry’s itinerant existence was the time he spent in 1945 interrogating possible Nazi war criminals–not the major figures, but “the ones who went along, the ones who made the machine work.” And the most pressing question he took away from that task was: “Who is responsible for the demagogue?”
It is this question that Dixon tries to answer, however indirectly, in his film work. And it’s this question, too, that apparently drove Just to write this novel–albeit while tangling it up with a plethora of other concerns.
Dixon’s German experience is considerably different from his father’s. His first film, “Summer, 1921,” was set in post-World War I Germany (“where the modern world begins”) and was a highlight–we’re asked to believe–of Hollywood’s late 1960s/early 1970s heyday. (One character in the novel even places it in company with “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Midnight Cowboy” and “Chinatown.”)
Still, “Summer, 1921” is long in Dixon’s past, and as the century rolls to an end, 64-year-old Dixon is painfully aware that he hasn’t made a film in 10 years. His idleness is made the more obvious when his wife, Claire, an actress, wins a possible comeback role in a film to be directed by an old friend.
Dixon, simultaneously, is invited to participate in a Berlin think tank in winter 1999. He accepts, for he senses he has unfinished business in Germany. There’s a mystery surrounding an actress who disappeared from the set of “Summer, 1921” (and possibly drowned) on the last day of shooting. There’s also Dixon’s lively curiosity (as a man with “an interest in difficult regions”) about how the reunification of East and West Germany is proceeding 10 years after the Berlin Wall came down.
Above all, there’s his father’s unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable, question about demagoguery and national responsibility. It’s no accident that Dixon’s return to Germany lands him in the loaded locale of Wannsee, the Berlin suburb where the details of Hitler’s Final Solution were worked out.
Those are only a few of the issues addressed in this jam-packed novel. Others include the continual resurgence of ethnic hatred (“the reptile in our brains”) not just in Germany but throughout the world; the dominance of American pop culture in the post-Cold War era; the ambiguous connection between a creator’s personality and his work; the heightened and ephemeral “reality” that comes into play on film sets; the unsettling ease with which a months-long separation can maroon a couple (Dixon and Claire) in incommunicably different worlds; the temptation, as one gets older, to drift “into the past because the present [is] uncomposed.”
The unpredictable nature of an artistic career, with its inevitable fallow periods, and the refusal ever to commit to such a career wind up on the table too. For when Dixon’s vanished actress, Jana, reappears, she is revealed to have taken an almost Bartleby-like approach to her life and profession. As for Dixon, he ends up re-entering the filmmaking fray by means of a most unlikely vehicle: a popular German TV series, “Wannsee 1899,” that dwells on a Teutonic past unblighted by the horrors of two wars and the Holocaust. Where “Summer, 1921” portrayed artsy youngsters turning their backs on recent battlefield hostilities as they whiled away a summer in the country, “Wannsee 1899” depicts a Germany that has little reason to examine itself.
Dixon’s aim in deciding to direct an episode of the show? To get at the heart of German character in ways that a direct approach to the country’s nightmare history could never do.
It’s a tall order to wrap all these themes and concerns into a single package, and Just visibly strains to make the book a harmonic–or even unharmonic–whole. Still, his flawed attempt to tell a story this wide-ranging in scope is more compelling than a lesser writer’s perfect rendition of, say, strip-mall culture. And “The Weather in Berlin” has strong components to recommend it. Among them are a passage in which Dixon’s meditation on his filmmaking craft leads tellingly into Harry’s recollections of the interrogation approach he used in 1945, and another delineating the tensions surrounding a day trip to the German-Polish border, where the last great European battle of World War II was fought on the banks of the Oder.
Jana works well, too, as she floats free of any agenda that Dixon, either in past or present, has in mind for her. Her role in some ways resembles that of Kathleen Moore, the elusive lover of Monroe Stahr in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Last Tycoon,” and Just’s references elsewhere to Fitzgerald (as a pal of Harry’s) suggest the homage is fully intended.
All that said, there are problems that don’t resolve themselves in the book, the chief one being that it’s difficult to buy into “Summer, 1921” as the masterpiece Just says it is. Instead, with its idling and often naked young cast, it sounds strangely fluffy and pandering. The “Wannsee 1899” TV episode that Dixon works on is, in Just’s account of it, far more substantial and fully realized.
Dixon’s film knowledge comes into doubt, too, when, alluding to the final scenes in Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” he says that rats overrun the explorer’s raft as it drifts down the Amazon. Sorry–they’re monkeys. A minor point perhaps, but Just uses the image twice, and those monkeys, so humanlike yet anarchic in their chatter and movement, are a memorably ingenious stroke in the film’s bleak finale.
Finally, there are too many passages in the novel that need to be tightened or distilled. True, Just is intent on rendering the “complexity” that Harry wants the world to recognize, but complexity need not mean muddiness or prolixity.
In short, “The Weather in Berlin” is a mixed bag: a worthy effort, brimming with promising ideas and possibilities, but not the book to pick up if you’re new to Just. Better starting points are “Echo House,” his National Book Award-nominated family saga about behind-the-scenes Washington politicos, and “A Dangerous Friend,” his most recent Vietnam novel, in which French, American and Vietnamese agendas collide. In those two books, with their stronger, surer narrative rhythms, Just proves himself exactly what he is; one of our best and most far-reaching novelists.
