Inspector Bronstein and the Anschluss: Tsuris 1938 by Andreas Pittler (review)

Detective novels have an undeservedly poor reputation among literary snobs. As Vincent Kling notes in the afterword to his wonderful translation of Inspector Bronstein and the Anschluss, students of serious literature have dismissed crime fiction, and detective novels in particular, as meaningless diversions, despite the reality that many of the world’s most well-respected writers, from Dostoyevsky to Faulkner, have used crime and the investigation of wrongdoing as plot devices in their work. Depictions of crime in literature have long helped us to understand who we are and why we hold certain values so strongly, and Andreas Pittler’s novel is a welcome addition to that canon.

Inspector Bronstein and the Anschluss is the fifth in a series of novels focusing on the work of David Bronstein, a police officer working in Vienna in the first half of the twentieth century. The original title of this book, as it was published in German, was Zores (Tsuris in English transcription), which means “troubles” in Yiddish. Each of the five Bronstein novels has a Yiddish title in German (Tacheles, Ezzes, Chuzpe, Tinnef, and Zores—Plain Speaking, Advice, Impudence, Junk, and Troubles), which, as Kling notes, has a dual purpose. The use of Yiddish in this context emphasizes the ambiguous Jewishness of the central character in the series, David Bronstein, who considers himself to be a Protestant but under the Nuremberg race laws is a Jew. It also references the significance of Jewish culture in early twentieth-century Vienna. These are words that would have been familiar to most Viennese, not just Jews. Kling notes that, for the English translation of this book as well as the four others in the series, an editorial decision was made to change the titles slightly. This was probably a wise decision and does nothing to diminish the important history depicted within.

In this book Bronstein investigates the murder of a Nazi, literally on the eve of Austria’s Anschluss with the Third Reich. The city is filled with tension, and Bronstein himself is anxious for the future as he is a racial Jew. The plot of this novel is very much driven by the actual history of the Anschluss, and many of the book’s characters are significant figures from the period, such as Arthur Seyß-Inquart. Pittler depicts an ethnically diverse Vienna (many, if not most, of the characters have Slavic names) but one that is also heavily divided between supporters of Nazism and those who fear for the future under Nazi control. He shows the reader a city where poverty is rampant and a country run by incompetents who are no match for the rising Nazi movement both inside Austria and abroad. This was a time when some Austrians, including characters in this novel, longed for the restoration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while others wanted to join their fate with that of the German people. The only thing that was certain in Vienna in 1938 was that the status quo was unacceptable and that a change of some kind was on the horizon. After Italy’s injudicious forays in Africa, Mussolini was in no position to support an independent Austrian state, and Nazi Germany, with its dream of a Pan-Germanic empire, was prepared to make the most of the situation. Given Pittler’s background as a historian and journalist, it should be no surprise that he is knowledgeable about these events, but his real gift is the ability to integrate history into a compelling murder mystery. The story is primary here, and it is an action-packed one.

Above everything else, Inspector Bronstein and the Anschluss is a gripping book that will captivate any reader familiar with Austrian history but also ardent fans of the detective genre. Thanks to extensive footnotes and a wellwritten afterword, this book is accessible to those who have little or no knowledge of the events of 1938, but the depth of detail that Pittler has included should be of tremendous...