Rating:
Summary:
Millie Mosbach and her brother David escaped to the United States just before Kristallnacht, leaving their parents and little sister in Berlin. Now they are both back in their former hometown, haunted by ghosts and hoping against hope to find their family. Millie works in the office responsible for rooting out the most dedicated Nazis from publishing. Like most of their German-born American colleagues, the siblings suffer from rage at Germany and guilt at their good fortune. Only Millie’s boss, Major Harry Sutton, seems strangely eager to be fair to the Germans.
Living and working in bombed-out Berlin where the desperate prey on the unsuspecting; spies ply their trade; black markets thrive, and forbidden fraternisation is rampant, Millie must come to terms with a past decision made in a moment of crisis and with the enigmatic, sometimes infuriating Major Sutton who is mysteriously understanding of her demons.
Review:
You most likely want an explanation as to why I have rated this book 2 stars… I will get to that, I promise!
Return to Berlin offers a look at what life would’ve been like in post-WW2 Berlin and the effects the war and holocaust had on the people. I can’t imagine it would have been an entirely pleasant time, even with the relief from the war’s end. I suppose there were a lot of people who didn’t truly understand what was and had been happening while Hitler was in power.
Within the scene-setting of the book, several things were brought up that I had never thought about before. For example, some of the people liberated from the Concentration Camps had forgotten some of those unspoken ‘rules’ of society. There is a moment that talks about them just ‘relieving’ themselves wherever they are when they need to go.
I won’t lie; a large part of the reason this book is 2 stars and that I actually finished it was because of these historical moments and facts. I’m fascinated by history, and when reading Historical Fiction, I want to learn something from them.
Now on to why Return to Berlin, in my opinion, doesn’t get a higher rating…
I found the story itself rather monotonous. I could not pick up on the changes of tone, the building of tension, or the lighthearted moments. This was essentially to do with the fact that I found some of the dialogue somewhat awkward and unnatural. It meant that I was continuously drawn back out of the story. A saying (for lack of a better way of putting it) says that a writer should leave some things unsaid and allow the reader to create some of those moments themselves - the books we each love tend to do this very well. Return to Berlin could have done with more detail, more information and more description. There was too much left unsaid, and thus, to me, it lost its tone and became monotonous.
I think that I have mentioned before that one of my biggest pet peeves in books is to do with time passing too quickly or too much jumping through time (it’s tough to describe what I mean by this, by the way, I think it’s quite a ‘Sarah thing’). This book did the time thing. Time seemed to flip about. It would flashback to a moment and then jump forward days on the same page, which left me somewhat confused. Where the flashbacks came about often seemed sudden and awkward and would once again throw me out of the story. In some ways, I wish that the story had been told chronologically. Starting when Millie and David were kids (when the rules for Jews started), to the train station ‘incident’, to them arriving and living, to David deciding to join the army, to the end of the war and them returning to Berlin - basically the part that is the bulk of the story. It would have made so much more sense and been less confusing, and you would have built more of a relationship with the characters.
Speaking of characters, I never gained any sympathy for any of them. I got a touch frustrated that Millie never seemed to grow or change throughout the story, despite all the ‘learning’ opportunities that arose for her. She never seemed to try to understand or gain any compassions for the Germans. While I appreciate, in the whole scheme of the history, why a German-Jew would have anger toward Germans, it was rather exhausting and tedious to read.
This had so much more potential as it’s set in such an interesting time in history. I wish it had contained more and developed a bit more too.
One final note that I would like to make; I wish it had contained a glossary! There was so much Military jargon and German words used throughout, and I had no idea what they were talking about. Which often just left me even more confused (I feel like, after typing this out, I spent a lot of this book confused, which perhaps says something in itself…).
I would love to know your thoughts on Return to Berlin if you’ve read it. Please leave them in the comments below!
Quotes:
“You mean as a Jew?”
“Awful as that sounds, yes.”
“Why? Because I don’t practise? Neither do you. Because I don’t believe? Do you? But even with all that, or rather without all that, I’m still a Jew.”
“Because the world forces you to be?”
“Yes, but not the way you mean. Because the world forces me to choose to be. As long as it’s a crime or a shame or even a disadvantage to be a Jew, I’ll be one.”
“… You had to prove yourself. Kill Nazis. Beat Hitler. You did. Now it’s time to move on. It’s time to understand not only what happened but why and how it happened. To make others understand. Thinking is better than killing, David. Knowledge is better than anger. Understanding is better than revenge.”