In May 1945, the flat part of Schleswig-Holstein became the political center of the Nazi state. Right in the middle: Inspector Druwe. An unusual thriller that nobody really wants to be.
It was decades ago, but Michael Jensen still remembers it clearly: one of his great-uncles was a colonel in the Luftwaffe during World War II. When he asked him as a child what he had done during the war, a beating ended any further discussion. Another uncle, a simple, good-hearted man, according to Jensen, only pushed him a beer when asked the same question: “Leave it alone, boy.” The war generation passed their trauma on to the next generation, often in silence, sometimes with a beating
Today, Michael Jensen is a physician and writer specializing in trauma therapy. He is not surprised that even young people sometimes have problems with being German. Couldn’t it have been another nationality? Belgian or Danish? Jensen knows such statements himself from his private environment. The heated discussion about the dominant culture, the concept of homeland and the difficulties immigrants face with integration are also part of it for the Hamburger. If questions about nationality and cultural identity still caused uneasiness 80 years after the Nazi era, it was obvious to him how much this society was struggling with severe fractures in its identity.
“Identity comes from the personal storytelling of our lives. Everyone needs a story that roots them in the past that they can derive from,” says Jensen. But for almost two generations of Germans, i.e. those born between 1940 and 1970, parts of the life history of the Nazi period remained unclear. Who was mom, who was dad, who was the grandparents? Were they perpetrators, victims, followers, displaced persons?
History only becomes tangible through emotions
The generation of war children rarely received any answers, and Jensen is convinced that these gaps still have an impact today. In millions of life stories, therefore, there are these loose ends, which one can imagine as a disturbed weaving pattern in identity, he explains. A current study by the Rheingold Institute commissioned by the magazine “Gen Z” shows how great the need for identity is. According to this, the interest of 16 to 25-year-olds in the Nazi period has risen from 66 to 75 percent in recent years. For Jensen this is a good sign and motivation to process story after story in a comprehensible manner. The 1978 US mini-series “Holocaust – The History of the White Family” showed what effect this can have. Only the Hollywood production had achieved what German historical science had previously failed to do: an intensive discussion in the German public, triggered by dismay, about the extermination of the Jews in the Nazi system.
“Right after the war, the Americans began to tell stories about the war. That’s part of every nation’s task of overcoming a trauma collectively. Of course, it’s easier when you’re a winner. But the Germans weren’t just on the losing side, they were on a morally unacceptable side,” says Jensen. We as a society would not have come to terms with this break in identity and the loss of innocence to this day.
Jensen does not exempt himself from this diagnosis. “That was always a central issue for me. Above all, the question of where I would have been at the time. Would I have become a victim or a follower, even a Nazi supporter? Would I have actually believed myself capable of resistance?” As a writer, he worked on it in three books. Three thrillers, the youngest of which has just been published as an audio book. The volumes with the titles Dead land, dead world and realm of the dead tell the story of detective inspector Jens Druwe.
Inspector Druwe and the Nazis
Druwe is 50 years old and a passionate detective, but he’s just getting stuck as a law enforcement officer in Glücksburg, Schleswig-Holstein. He used to be a deputy detective in Berlin. But he doesn’t want to be there right now. Not in early April 1945, when in the capital of the Reich you could take the subway from the Eastern Front to the Western Front, as soldiers joked at the time. Druwe is a typical North Frisian: rather taciturn, stoic and honest. A mixture unconducive to his career in the Nazi state. He can’t keep his mouth shut, refuses to be a member of the SS, which is the norm for police officers. He is transferred as a punishment, demoted, and loses his right hand on the Eastern Front. Not his only loss: his wife files for divorce because he refuses to pursue a career in the system. He hasn’t seen his son or daughter for a long time.
Actually, Druwe is done with everything. With his work as a criminal anyway. Who knows what will come in the next few months. The war is lost, the British have already advanced far into the northwest. But then a dead man throws Druwe into the center of the political events of the collapsing Nazi state. The disfigured body of the local NSDAP district leader is found in a field. Druwe’s colleagues quickly identified the culprit: an escaped concentration camp convict who was caught nearby. The experienced detective inspector doesn’t believe it for a second. However, the collapse of the Nazi regime is imminent and nobody wants to burn their fingers in the last meters of the murder of a Nazi official. Except Druwe.
This is how Jens Druwe’s personal catharsis begins, during which he faces up to his own responsibility for the Nazi terror and the loss of innocence among his compatriots. Anyone who gets involved in the story not only gets exciting criminal cases, but also a well-researched, living piece of contemporary history and the psychogram of an entire generation.
A thriller that no one wants to be
So another crime thriller like the novels by Cay Rademacher or Maximilian Rosar? “I struggled a lot with the crime novel label. For me, it’s novels with crime thriller elements,” Michael Jensen remembers the discussions with the book publisher. As the author, the trauma specialist put his mentally ailing protagonist on the couch.
As if under a magnifying glass, Jensen dissects a period of just four weeks at a time. An exciting trick, because the Nazi state experienced its last days in dull Schleswig-Holstein of all places. In the first part it is the three weeks before and the week after the capitulation. The military pronounced death sentences in court-martials to the very end, Nazi supporters disposed of incriminating material or collected incriminating material about others in order to gain advantages with the Allies after the “lost final victory”. The second volume sheds light on the weeks in May in which the government of Hitler’s successor Karl Dönitz actually believed in Flensburg to be able to continue to govern, even though their sphere of influence only referred to the naval port of Flensburg/Eckernförde. The final volume traces the end of 1945 with the preparations for the war crimes trials in Hamburg and Nuremberg.
Druwe’s story could go on
Michael Jensen is happy about the realization of his novels as audio books with the actor Rolf Berg as narrator. The gnarly voice of the late sixties perfectly embodies the life-scarred Druwe. Even if Rolf Berg is a good ten years older than his alter ego, he could also embody him wonderfully in the film. A dream for Jensen: “I promised Rolf: If Druwe is filmed, then with him in the role.” If perhaps not in the film, the story of Jens Druwe could possibly continue as a book. Michael Jensen could well imagine a prequel 15 years before the events or a sequel 15 years after the end of the war. There was more than enough material.