News from Berlin

This wartime story is not only an engrossing and exciting page-turner but also an intelligent exploration of patriotism, morality and loyalty. It’s set in 1941 and the Verschuur family have been separated by the exigencies of war. Dutch diplomat Oscar is in Switzerland. His wife Kate is in London, helping out at a hospital. His daughter is in Germany married to a “good” German, Carl. One day Emma relays to her father a piece of top secret information that she has discovered from her husband and which could change the course of the war. What should Oscar do with that information? He is aware that he is being watched by the Gestapo. His family could be in danger. Meanwhile he has other problems to contend with. His relationship with a young woman he has recently met is becoming more important to him, and in London Kate is wrestling with her own feelings for a young African soldier she has been helping to nurse. These personal loyalties add to the pressure each character is experiencing and themes of betrayal and the “right” thing to do haunt all of them. Well-plotted, well-paced, with well-developed characters and authentic dialogue this a compelling and thoughtful read, and I very much enjoyed it.

This novel has a very promising beginning - the author writes well and the story's premise is intriguing - but the narrative never really fulfills its potential and when I reached the end of the book I felt cheated. I think the length doesn't help - it's more of a novella than a novel - and just isn't long enough to sustain the three separate but linked narratives. As a result, the story fizzles out like a damp firework, rather than reaching the tense climax that the early chapters pointed towards. It was almost as if the writer had run out of time. *SPOILER ALERT* The whole novel could be summed up in nine words: Man learns vital information and does nothing about it.

A good read.

I loved this book, the best I have read in sometime. It covered so many themes: love, loss, memory, loyalty, to name just a few. All done so powerfully and elegantly without one spare word. A joy to read. This is the first book I have read by Otto de Kat and was so impressed I have bought "Julia".

The relationships between the characters was so underdeveloped that it undermined the whole novel. A bit facile. Moral dilemma story.

Storyline Jumps around to much

Switzerland June 1941, and Oscar Verschuur is a Dutch diplomat working in Berne. His wife Kate is in London helping in a hospital and his daughter, Emma, is in Berlin, married to a high-placed, anti-Nazi civil servant in the German foreign ministry. When Emma makes a visit to Geneva, and meets her father in a restaurant at the end of May 1941, she tells him the date of the planned German invasion of the Soviet Union, having been told it by her husband. Oscar does not know how to use this dangerous information without exposing his daughter and son-in-law to peril from the Gestapo. The marriage between Oscar and Kate is a long-distance, loose state of affairs, and both of them seem drift towards others – for Oscar it is a Lara, a lover he meets in the Swiss mountains; and for Kate it is Matteous – an African soldier who she looks after in the Richmond hospital in England. Oscar flies to London, in order to inform a senior contact about the date for Operation Barbarossa, where he meets up with Kate. This is a well-narrated and observed story of how individuals have to function in the stifling, dangerous and treacherous atmosphere of war. It is about grief, memory and emotional underpinning of life. It is a brief, dense novel, and leaves many loose ends unresolved. But a book that very much deserves reading.

I'm afraid this just isn't very good. Whereas "Julia" is a minor masterpiece in melancholia, loss and barely-suppressed longing, "News From Berlin" is merely laboured. The plot "devices" are excruciatingly pedestrian and one in particular appears to be utterly gratuitous, while the overall tenor is unbearably sentimental (and that's criticism from someone who falls into the trap of sentimentality more often than avoids it). I'm beginning to wonder at the author's obsession with Nazi Germany. Is he working through a family or collective memory or attempting something else? I hope it's the former. That would at least be explicable.

The protagonist Oscar is a Dutch diplomat in Switzerland in 1941. The war is raging around the country and Switzerland itself is a nest of agents from all the warring nations. His daughter Emma is married to a high-ranking official in the German foreign ministry. When she gives her father a vital piece of intelligence, Oscar is torn between passing it on and saving thousands of lives in Russia or not notifying the Allies so as not to endanger his daughter. This is a subtle story with high stakes. De Kat keeps the reader in suspense until the end.

When I began News from Berlin I expected something along the lines of Alan Furst (whom I’ve enjoyed), but it turned out to be something slightly different and a bit richer, too. I read this book because de Kat participated in the Jaipur Literature Festival. I’m glad I did. Unlike Furst, who follows a central character through the perils of time immediately before and at the beginning of the Second World War, in this novel de Kat focuses on a family. The father is a Dutch diplomat in Switzerland, the wife volunteers at a hospital in London, and their adult daughter is married to a member of the German Foreign Ministry. The son-in-law is not a Nazi; in fact, he’s unsympathetic to the Nazi regime and certainly watched by the Gestapo. The novel begins in early June 1941. The war has begun. France fell quickly; Britain just barely survived. The U.S. remains officially on the sidelines while Hitler and Stalin have a non-aggression pact. For the family, life seems balanced if tenuous. But then the daughter passes on a secret to her father about a major German action coming soon. The knowledge becomes like an infectious disease passed (intentionally) from daughter to father to mother, endangering the thin tissue of each receiver’s existence and relationships without reducing (as hoped) the burden on the person passing on the moral and practical demands that the secret requires of them. De Kat’s focus, however, is more than espionage and the moral dilemmas of wartime. It also focuses on the members of the family, their relationships with each other and those closest to them. The delicate balance of relationships changes as each comes into contact with the other. New realities reveal themselves and confound the characters perhaps as much as their burdensome secret. History in the family, as in life, intrudes and shapes the present in ways that the characters can’t escape and can only vaguely comprehend. Writers like Graham Greene, Eric Amber (I’m now reading another Ambler), and Alan Furst have written a great deal set in this time period. While titanic military and political forces met in epic struggles, individuals and families—at least those lucky enough to live—continue to try to live and maintain a semblance of ordinary life when the time is not ordinary at all. To me, that's what makes this period so fruitful for novelists and historians (such as John Lukacs) and why I’m so drawn to it. Now I add Otto de Kat to the honor role of writers who explore this dark and frightening time not so long ago.

Marvelous....want to read all his books

Yeah...Got in 2 days !

Excellent novella.