Another fabulous reissue from Faber Editions - the second and final (1965) novel from Emeric Pressburger following his break with movies and his legendary partner, Michael Powell. At the time, apparently, The Glass Beads was critically panned, thus silencing Pressburger for his remaining twenty-odd years. It's understandable, but a terrible shame. Understandable because 1965 was probably too soon for a sympathetic Nazi as protagonist. A shame because it is a magnificent work of fiction.
We know early on that Karl Braun, an amiable but solitary London piano tuner, is in fact a Nazi war criminal in hiding. Indeed Dr Otto Reitmuller was the very worst kind of war criminal, a brain surgeon who experimented on the brains of living concentration camp victims, thus one of the most wanted Nazis still at large. In February his former colleague von Stempel came to London to try and persuade his friend to emigrate to Argentina - only to die of a heart attack on the London Underground. Worried that the net might be closing, Braun has changed his rented room. He has now moved in with two amiable Jews, Strohmayer and Kolm, in Pimlico.
Braun is still a youngish man, and yearns to find a woman to settle down with. The prim and proper Lilian Hall, at his workplace, has developed a crush on him. He, meantime, is rather taken with Helen Taylor, the letting agent who found him his new accommodation. Braun takes them both to the opera. Miss Hall appreciates the occasion, Helen is just a humble divorcee with a child but eager to learn and easy to impress.
Still Braun finds himself under mounting pressure. The statute of limitations, which had been twenty years and thus about to end, has been extended for war criminals to twenty-five. A former assistant at the camp has started giving evidence against Reitmuller to save his own neck. It's in all the papers. Braun has to find a way out. He and von Stempel smuggled out some hard currency when they escaped Germany and set up a numbered bank account in Switzerland. Now von Stempel has died, Karl can claim the lot, which will easily fund the flight to Buenos Aires and a comfortable retirement when he gets there...
He talks Helen into a brief trip to Paris... And then things start going very wrong...
The twists are brilliant and, unlike critics in 1965 we should never forget that Pressburger lost his entire family in the Holocaust. Hindsight, of course, is a wonderful thing and I for one remember the effect documentaries about the camps had when they started to be shown on TV. But that was in the seventies, otherwise I would not have been old enough to watch. My dad, who was an eighteen year old new recruit when the Hamburg concentration camps were finally liberated, and who processed some of the Nazis involved because he was a good German speaker, never ever discussed it with me but did force himself to watch the docs. I wonder now how he felt. I know absolutely that before about 1970 facing up to those horrors from their youth was too much for most of those involved in the liberation. Hence the failure of The Glass Pearls.
Now, though, when unspeakable autocrats are actively committing crimes against humanity in various parts of the world, might be the perfect time to celebrate Pressburger's achievement. I hope so.
