I recently read Joseph Kanon’s The Good German,
which has now been made into a “major motion picture,” as they say,
starring Cate Blanchett and loudmouth lefty George Clooney. The
setting of the novel is immediate post-war Berlin, and its strength is
its vivid descriptions of daily survival in a destroyed city. Its
weakness is a plot that, after a roaring start, plods in the last third
of the book. I hope the movie is better. No doubt there will be
“lessons” about the state of the world today, like, maybe, we should have
dialogued with Hitler. But at least it has a great poster
(right). Still, it has a tall task outdoing Billy Wilder’s 1948 film
about
occupied Berlin, “A Foreign Affair“.