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Die Toten schauen zu (Pulp Master 41)
Als in der von deutschen Truppen besetzten Tschechei der SS-Obergruppenführer und General der Polizei von Bertsch von einem vorbeifahrenden Motorradfahrer niedergeschossen wird, setzt das Dritte Reich 800.000 Reichsmark Belohnung für Hinweise aus, die zur Ergreifung des Täters führen. Als in der Nähe des kleinen Dorfes Dudicka ein verlassenes Motorrad am Uferrand geborgen wird, entsendet die Gestapo den berüchtigten SS-Offizier Heinz Horner, um eine Untersuchung einzuleiten und die Dorfbewohner Horners Repressalien auszusetzen.
Vor historischem Hintergrund schuf der großartige Gerald Kersh 1943 unauslöschliche Bilder vom Hereinbrechen des Schreckens über eine unschuldige Dorfgemeinschaft, die bis heute nichts von ihrer dramatischen Wucht und Sprachkraft verloren haben.
Vor historischem Hintergrund schuf der großartige Gerald Kersh 1943 unauslöschliche Bilder vom Hereinbrechen des Schreckens über eine unschuldige Dorfgemeinschaft, die bis heute nichts von ihrer dramatischen Wucht und Sprachkraft verloren haben.
200 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 1, 1943
About the author
Gerald Kersh
113 books65 followersGerald Kersh was born in Teddington-on-Thames, near London, and, like so many writers, quit school to take on a series of jobs -- salesman, baker, fish-and-chips cook, nightclub bouncer, freelance newspaper reporter and at the same time was writing his first two novels.
In 1937, his third published novel, Night and the City, hurled him into the front ranks of young British writers. Twenty novels later Kersh created his personal masterpiece, Fowler's End, regarded by many as one of the outstanding novels of the century. He also, throughout his long career, wrote more than 400 short stories and over 1,000 articles.
Once a professional wrestler, Kersh also fought with the Coldstream Guards in World War II. His account of infantry training They Die With Their Boots Clean (1941), became an instant best-seller during that war.
After traveling over much of the world, he became an American citizen, living quietly in Cragsmoor, in a remote section of the Shawangunk Mountains in New York State. He died in Kingston, NY, in 1968.
(Biography compiled from "Nightmares & Damnations" and Fantastic Fiction.)
In 1937, his third published novel, Night and the City, hurled him into the front ranks of young British writers. Twenty novels later Kersh created his personal masterpiece, Fowler's End, regarded by many as one of the outstanding novels of the century. He also, throughout his long career, wrote more than 400 short stories and over 1,000 articles.
Once a professional wrestler, Kersh also fought with the Coldstream Guards in World War II. His account of infantry training They Die With Their Boots Clean (1941), became an instant best-seller during that war.
After traveling over much of the world, he became an American citizen, living quietly in Cragsmoor, in a remote section of the Shawangunk Mountains in New York State. He died in Kingston, NY, in 1968.
(Biography compiled from "Nightmares & Damnations" and Fantastic Fiction.)
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 13, 2017
Possibly the most powerful novel I have ever read. The circumstances of it's writing should be explained. In the village of Lidice, Czechoslovakia all the men of the village over the age of 15 were shot, all the women taken to concentration camps and the children, after a short time, were also sent to concentration camps and gassed, a few were considered suitable for adoption by German families. Overall of 105 children only 17 survived. The village itself was razed to the ground completely. Why was all this done? Reprisals for the killing of Reinhard Heydrich.
If possible things seem even worse when you discover that the Nazi machine got the wrong Lidice...
The Lidice massacre happened in June of 1942, Kersh had finished his book by November of the same year so it was written with a real anger and passion and it shows.
I freely admit I'm no book reviewer so here is the review from the Time Literary Supplement from February 1943. Taken from here http://harlanellison.com/kersh/critic...
"Novel Of The Week - The dedication is to ‘the murdered men of Lidice, and their memory.’ Every word that comes afterwards plainly springs from a white heat of passion. It is a terrible and burning evocation, this imaginative recital of the scarcely imaginable event. Completely subdued and non-resistant at the time of reading to Mr Kersh’s unrelenting power and purpose, after an interval one may possibly begin to resist the effect he has had. Is the Lidice massacre, one asks, a subject for fiction here and now? Is it truly a theme to be served up piping hot? The question, perhaps, is irrelevant. Mr Kersh writes with hard, controlled power, building up a German universe of evil, of calculated vileness and bestiality, that freezes one’s mind. Though he calls in the aid of a bold dramatic sense to sharpen the storytelling effect, there is no cheap exploitation of horror.
Somewhere in Bohemia or Moravia a Max Bertsch, SS Obergruppenführer, almost at the moment of expounding to his staff a most methodical and architectonic philosophy of terror, is shot at by a passing motor-cyclist and killed. The sirens sound, the police-cars stream in all directions, Heinz Horner flies from Berlin. This is a description of the man:
‘Heinz Horner sat and thought. He thought best on weak tea. Horner was a thorough man, ambitious, precise, esteemed for his nerveless cunning and his cold inquisitiveness, his dogged obstinacy and hit pitiless energy. You would never have noticed him in a group of ordinary men. There was primness in the shape and set of his rimless spectacles on his nondescript nose; modesty in the cut of his small black moustache....Dull, colourless, plain, passionless, Heinz Horner sipped his tea and sat stiffly in the dead man’s chair. Far beyond earshot, men walked on tiptoe and spoke in whispers.’
An abandoned motor-cycle is found near a little village on a little river. The name of the village is Dudicka. It has a population of some 400. A map spread in front of him, Horner draws a neat ring round the village of Dudicka. At dawn a company of parachutists descends from the sky over the village, a column of heavily armed motor-cyclists follows along the road, with armoured cars and trucks behind. Aircraft patrol overhead.
Mr Kersh sketches the character and history of the village, lightly touches in some of the inhabitants. It is simply and effectively done, and here and there a faintly sentimental touch for decoration seems excusable enough. There is the schoolmaster, Karel Marek, who has a bundle of unpublished stories in a drawer; there is the butcher, Otakar Blazek; there is the glassmaker, the son and grandson of a master craftsman, Jan Balaban; there are the old, somnolent mayor and his wife. But the almost non-human lust for power, the glorying in evil, the delight in cruelty that Mr Kersh reveals in the soldiers and police who round up the population; such episodes as the animal baiting of the woman caught in adultery or the removal of the woman newly given birth to twin children scarcely bear retelling. Mr Kersh exhibits with cold precision the intoxicated savagery that springs from the Teuton myth of racial superiority, the sheer posturing inhumanity to the dogma of Slaven Sind Sklaven. In spare, incisive strokes he hits off the hideously brutal Sergeant Schlager, a prize fighter shaped by Dr Goebbels into ‘a hammer-handed Aryan fighting man;’ the captain of the company of parachute troops with a delicate wit and a developed sensiblerie allemande; the roaring humorist Sergeant Bauer. He catches, too, a momentary confusion or a sudden change of tone in the voice of one of the grey-helmeted Guards as they go methodically about the tasks allotted to them. And there is the grim-faced, ageing Major van Esser, with his Kaiserr Wilhelm moustache and duelling scars, whose rigid sense of duty brings him before Heinz Horner to report that the motor-cycle found near Dudicka is mere scrap-iron and could not have been ridden for years - and who, having thus outlived discretion and usefulness to the Reich, pays the prescribed penalty and wins promotion for his murderer.
The show goes on: the example must be made, the rules of terror vindicated. First, there is salvage in the shape of the lead roof of the church, the church candlesticks, the village stoves and brass lamps, wedding rings, sickles, corckscrews, watches, the tops of soda-water syphons. Then the human material is dealt with. The people of Dudicka are divided into three groups; while the men are made to dig their own common grave, the women and children are taken away, herded like droves of cattle, separately. The firing squads complete their work and then the village is razed by artillery. Three missing people are caught in the end - a half-witted old man and the lovers Max and Anna. Mr Kersh salutes the faith and fortitude of the people of Dudicka, but he leaves the reader with, above all else, an unbearable sense of the nightmare evil, the immeasurable depravity and mania of the oppressor."
For me one of the most telling points in the novel was when a German soldier named Betzendorfer, who we learn has a small child of his own has to lead a young girl to the schoolroom where all the children are being gathered. The girl later screams at him that he has lied to her "The rifleman called Friedrich Betzendorfer clenched his teeth and, in order not to see, looked at his boots."
The novel does end, if not on a happy note, then certainly a defiant one.
This is Kersh angry, without the humour and the tone he gets is perfect.
If possible things seem even worse when you discover that the Nazi machine got the wrong Lidice...
The Lidice massacre happened in June of 1942, Kersh had finished his book by November of the same year so it was written with a real anger and passion and it shows.
I freely admit I'm no book reviewer so here is the review from the Time Literary Supplement from February 1943. Taken from here http://harlanellison.com/kersh/critic...
"Novel Of The Week - The dedication is to ‘the murdered men of Lidice, and their memory.’ Every word that comes afterwards plainly springs from a white heat of passion. It is a terrible and burning evocation, this imaginative recital of the scarcely imaginable event. Completely subdued and non-resistant at the time of reading to Mr Kersh’s unrelenting power and purpose, after an interval one may possibly begin to resist the effect he has had. Is the Lidice massacre, one asks, a subject for fiction here and now? Is it truly a theme to be served up piping hot? The question, perhaps, is irrelevant. Mr Kersh writes with hard, controlled power, building up a German universe of evil, of calculated vileness and bestiality, that freezes one’s mind. Though he calls in the aid of a bold dramatic sense to sharpen the storytelling effect, there is no cheap exploitation of horror.
Somewhere in Bohemia or Moravia a Max Bertsch, SS Obergruppenführer, almost at the moment of expounding to his staff a most methodical and architectonic philosophy of terror, is shot at by a passing motor-cyclist and killed. The sirens sound, the police-cars stream in all directions, Heinz Horner flies from Berlin. This is a description of the man:
‘Heinz Horner sat and thought. He thought best on weak tea. Horner was a thorough man, ambitious, precise, esteemed for his nerveless cunning and his cold inquisitiveness, his dogged obstinacy and hit pitiless energy. You would never have noticed him in a group of ordinary men. There was primness in the shape and set of his rimless spectacles on his nondescript nose; modesty in the cut of his small black moustache....Dull, colourless, plain, passionless, Heinz Horner sipped his tea and sat stiffly in the dead man’s chair. Far beyond earshot, men walked on tiptoe and spoke in whispers.’
An abandoned motor-cycle is found near a little village on a little river. The name of the village is Dudicka. It has a population of some 400. A map spread in front of him, Horner draws a neat ring round the village of Dudicka. At dawn a company of parachutists descends from the sky over the village, a column of heavily armed motor-cyclists follows along the road, with armoured cars and trucks behind. Aircraft patrol overhead.
Mr Kersh sketches the character and history of the village, lightly touches in some of the inhabitants. It is simply and effectively done, and here and there a faintly sentimental touch for decoration seems excusable enough. There is the schoolmaster, Karel Marek, who has a bundle of unpublished stories in a drawer; there is the butcher, Otakar Blazek; there is the glassmaker, the son and grandson of a master craftsman, Jan Balaban; there are the old, somnolent mayor and his wife. But the almost non-human lust for power, the glorying in evil, the delight in cruelty that Mr Kersh reveals in the soldiers and police who round up the population; such episodes as the animal baiting of the woman caught in adultery or the removal of the woman newly given birth to twin children scarcely bear retelling. Mr Kersh exhibits with cold precision the intoxicated savagery that springs from the Teuton myth of racial superiority, the sheer posturing inhumanity to the dogma of Slaven Sind Sklaven. In spare, incisive strokes he hits off the hideously brutal Sergeant Schlager, a prize fighter shaped by Dr Goebbels into ‘a hammer-handed Aryan fighting man;’ the captain of the company of parachute troops with a delicate wit and a developed sensiblerie allemande; the roaring humorist Sergeant Bauer. He catches, too, a momentary confusion or a sudden change of tone in the voice of one of the grey-helmeted Guards as they go methodically about the tasks allotted to them. And there is the grim-faced, ageing Major van Esser, with his Kaiserr Wilhelm moustache and duelling scars, whose rigid sense of duty brings him before Heinz Horner to report that the motor-cycle found near Dudicka is mere scrap-iron and could not have been ridden for years - and who, having thus outlived discretion and usefulness to the Reich, pays the prescribed penalty and wins promotion for his murderer.
The show goes on: the example must be made, the rules of terror vindicated. First, there is salvage in the shape of the lead roof of the church, the church candlesticks, the village stoves and brass lamps, wedding rings, sickles, corckscrews, watches, the tops of soda-water syphons. Then the human material is dealt with. The people of Dudicka are divided into three groups; while the men are made to dig their own common grave, the women and children are taken away, herded like droves of cattle, separately. The firing squads complete their work and then the village is razed by artillery. Three missing people are caught in the end - a half-witted old man and the lovers Max and Anna. Mr Kersh salutes the faith and fortitude of the people of Dudicka, but he leaves the reader with, above all else, an unbearable sense of the nightmare evil, the immeasurable depravity and mania of the oppressor."
For me one of the most telling points in the novel was when a German soldier named Betzendorfer, who we learn has a small child of his own has to lead a young girl to the schoolroom where all the children are being gathered. The girl later screams at him that he has lied to her "The rifleman called Friedrich Betzendorfer clenched his teeth and, in order not to see, looked at his boots."
The novel does end, if not on a happy note, then certainly a defiant one.
This is Kersh angry, without the humour and the tone he gets is perfect.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 7, 2017
Selten vergebe ich mal 5 Sterne, hier hätte es auch gut und gern einer mehr sein können.
January 4, 2025
Taut and sad story of a Czech village in WWII
I was immediately drawn in by Kersh’s writing, which happens every time I read one of his works. It is a moving story about a real place, and his style painted the picture perfectly.
There are some errors of digitizing the copy, but only once did I not understand what the word should have been. The most common error was the word Homer instead of Horner—a major character. I think the OCR software must have seen “rn” as “m” in several places.
I was immediately drawn in by Kersh’s writing, which happens every time I read one of his works. It is a moving story about a real place, and his style painted the picture perfectly.
There are some errors of digitizing the copy, but only once did I not understand what the word should have been. The most common error was the word Homer instead of Horner—a major character. I think the OCR software must have seen “rn” as “m” in several places.
April 17, 2015
If you want to read a terrifying non-fiction account of the limitlessness of human cruelty, read what the Nazis did in the Czech Village of Lidice in June of 1942. If you want to chill your blood, perhaps forever, read Gerald Kersh's novel about Lidice, THE DEAD LOOK ON. A slim book but one of the most powerful anti-war novels I've ever read, Kersh's book has a new relevance in these days of ISIS and Boko Haram. Fiction can show truths that pure reportage sometimes can not. By creating characters, rich with experience, and seeing the wheels of war grind slowly over them, Kersh shows what atrocity really means. My fellow Jews say "Never Again," to which I generally respond "Every Goddamned Day." The corruption that power brings to the powerless, and the murderous certainty of ideologues, is eternal, and Kersh drives that message home in poetic prose. Not for the faint-of-heart.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews