Described as “a novel of war-torn Berlin”, Cesare’s blend of historical fiction and dark fairytale put me in mind of Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum, especially as we first meet its protagonist, Erik Holdermann, as a young boy. Rescued by Jewish Baron von Hecht and his daughter, Lisalein, Erik immediately forms an attachment to Lisalein that as time goes on becomes an obsession, even after she becomes the wife of an SS officer. She remains an enigmatic character throughout. “She was Mata Hari one day, and Rosa Luzemburg the next. He could never really find Lisa. No sooner did he catch the baron’s daughter than she metamorphosed into something else.”

Having saved his life, Admiral Canaris (referred to as ‘Uncle Willi’) takes Erik under his wing and makes use of Erik’s ability to remain undetected to have him carry out assassination missions for the Abwehr. “The Abwehr had no mandate to murder anyone, but it’s enemies still disappeared. And that’s how the myth of Cesare was born.” I found the glossary of German terms essential for unravelling the internal workings of Third Reich and the competition between different branches of the military.

Like pretty much everyone in the book, Admiral Canaris is at best a flawed and often paradoxical character. He’s a man who does everything he can to scupper the wilder schemes of Hitler, confesses, “I wanted to knock Hitler’s teeth out, poison his dog, piss on Goebbels, shit on Göring’s carpets”, who hides his daughter away for fear she will be caught up in the Nazis vile plans and goes out of his way to save a young Jewish girl, but whose officers are responsible for helping to hunt down and murder Jews. Even his desire to save Erik, to “cure his own magician of the Third Reich”, ends in failure.

The book features a cast of eccentric (some might say, grotesque) characters such as the hunch-backed “little baron” Emil von Hecht, the twin assassins Franz and Franze Müller, and Fanni Grünspan, one of the so-called “grabbers” who lure Jews out of hiding and hand them over to the Gestapo in return for either money, protection or other favours. Real life figures also feature such as silent film star, Pola Negri, and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem installed in the luxurious Hotel Adlon in Berlin against the threat of assassination by the British.

The sections that were most successful for me were the author’s forensic dissection of the hypocrisy of the Nazi regime. This is most obvious in the chapters towards the end of the book in which the “Nazi cabaret” of Theresienstadt (which existed in real life) is revealed in all its ghastly detail. A concentration camp masquerading as a haven for Jews away from Germany, it was in fact just a staging post on the way to Auschwitz.

The same hypocrisy is also apparent in Berlin where Nazi officers spend evenings listening to musicians playing “Jewish Jazz” in cabaret clubs, drink champagne in the Hotel Adlon, and receive expert medical care from Jewish doctors and nurses at the Jewish Hospital. “Even after all the roundups and the Sammellager (detention centres), and the paper stars that the Gestapo put on every door where a Jew still dwelled”, Berlin remains a Jewish town.

My overriding emotion whilst reading Cesare was a combination of confusion and a sense that I just wasn’t clever enough to appreciate everything the author was seeking to achieve. Never having seen the 1920 German expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Cagliari, the inspiration for the character Cesare, probably didn’t help. Having said that, Cesare is a highly original blend of historical fact, fiction and fantasy that may appeal to readers prepared, as I did, to venture outside their comfort zone.

After Germany's humiliating defeat in the Great War and the last Kaiser's exile to Holland a darkness descends. Jerome Charyn's novel takes one to the history of those years combining fact and fantasy. This is a dark and disturbing novel that looks at the corruption and the violence of the Nazi regime through the eyes of its central characters. For once those infamous Nazi celebrities - Hitler, Goebbels and Goring - are mere bit players.
Cesare is a somnambulist and a magician. His friendship with Admiral Canaries shapes his destiny. Neither man can stop the holocaust. The tragedy of Nazi Germany has never been more poignant and heart breaking.

'One of the most intriguing fiction writers' says Oprah Winfrey about author Jerome Charyn who has also used his imaginative fiction to cover subjects as wide ranging as Roosevelt to Abraham Lincoln. But here his take on the underbelly of the Nazis in Berlin is combined with a fable of extraordinary creativity mixing dark grotesque figures that themselves lie in wait for the servants of Hitler and his SS above.
There is a lot to learn beyond the basic history of the war as it was affecting Germany for through the main character Erik Holdermann (Cesare) the somnambulist/magician we move from early childhood and orphanage to the cadet training for future Nazis and to the spy and espionage webs working to try at all attempts to undermine any opposition to the Nazi plan to control the country and then the world.
Sometimes the plot is chaotic and a little confusing but the characters are strong with Erik and Lisa the daughter of the Baron figures that weave their very violent and passionate romance against the high echelons of the Nazi party. I liked the use of particular buildings in Berlin - which when I researched the names were actual places that had moved from the wild decadence of Berlin cabaret to the network of closed (supposedly) shunned places to Hitler such as the Adlon Hotel and The White Mouse Cabaret. It seemed the Nazis were at their best when of course seeking out the very elements they themselves so despised.
Of course the position of the Jews plays a vital role in the plot with Cesare trying under threat of death himself to help secure escape for Jews from under the vice like grip of the Nazis circling their homes, businesses, synagogues and clubs. The author leads us into the cruelty of the mechanisms by which the Nazis planned their execution camps 'starting' by picking on children with disabilities (under the Aktion T4 scheme of which I'd never heard).
The fable theme is also expanded with the link to a famous 1919 German film 'Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari' (who also appears as a character. This was seen as one of the first horror films about the magician Caligari and his slave Cesare who sleeps in a coffin. We also come across horror images linked to fairy tales (never as innocent as we believe) with Hansel and Gretel as soldiers taking a guillotine around the countryside and the Berlin Werewolf.
if it's all too much thrown at one plot maybe just stop and think even with the the seemingly unbelievable images being presented to us in this thought provoking book they can never be as horrific as the real world under the Nazi regime.

Jerome Charyn takes an original and imaginative approach to a subject that receives endless attention, WW2, writing a literary noir thriller and a love story set amidst the insanity and madness of Nazi Germany, set in a Berlin where the ghosts of dead Jews walk, amidst Jewish Jazz and the White Mouse, and where even the angels weep at the horror and tragedy. There is a fever and chaos as the story unfolds of the Erik Holdermann removed from a Berlin orphanage by philanthropist Baron Wilfred von Hecht, with a daughter, Lisa, an older girl that Erik falls for, only to find himself being placed with his cruel Uncle Heinrich, who had hated Erik's mother. In 1937, a 17 year old Erik, a voracious reader, is a naval sub-cadet at Kiel, little more than being a slave whilst having to constantly protect himself from the potential sexual abuse from other naval cadets.

On a dark and windy night, Erik takes a walk by the seawall, and spies a group of thugs beating up a tramp whose life he saves, an act that will change the trajectory of his life. The tramp turns out to be the head of German military intelligence, the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, a man not slow in picking up the possibilities that Erik offers. Soon other naval cadets come to revere him and his relationship with an Admiral feared by other Generals. So begins a relationship depicted through the prism of a 1920 silent German film where horror after horror builds up, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, with Canaris as the magician and illusionist Caligari, controlling Erik as Cesare, a sleepwalking Cesare who murders on command. There are numerous references to the grimmest of fairytales and classic children's literature, such as Alice in Wonderland, and the SS executioners, Hansel and Gretel, travelling from castle to castle with their guillotines, to a Berlin where the Abwehr under Canaris try to save as many Jews as they can from the Nazis.

Totally loyal and protective of Canaris, Erik acquires a fierce and fearsome reputation as a somnambulist assassin who sleeps in a coffin as he carries out missions under Commander Helmut Stolz, Berlin's own living golem. Despite Lisa being married to a SS officer, the two embark on an affair. So when she is taken for helping Jews to Theresienstadt, a camp in Czechoslovakia, used as political propaganda by the Nazis, to trick the world into believing Jews were being treated well and happy, Erik is determined to rescue her. Charyn's storytelling is extraordinary, utterly riveting, of a Germany that had lost its soul and any remnants of its humanity, where fair is foul, and foul is fair, a war torn Berlin, of heartbreak, sorrow, grief and death on a epic scale, and amidst this madness, there is the central relationship between Canaris and Erik, and Erik's love for Lisalien. Many thanks to Oldcastle Books for an ARC.