Harald Gilbers

Harald Gilbers (* 1969 in Moers am Niederrhein ) is a German editor , director and writer of detective novels .

Life

Harald Gilbers grew up in Moers and studied English and history at the universities in Augsburg and Munich. He then worked as a feature editor for television before he became a freelance theater director.

His first historical novel Germania was published in 2013 , a crime thriller in war-torn Berlin in 1944. The series has now grown to four books (mid-2018). Harald Gilbers lives in Northern Germany.

Series of novels about Richard Oppenheimer

The series of novels is in line with the works of Volker Kutscher around Commissioner Gereon Rath . Both series are historically and locally accurate crime novels, the main location of which is Berlin . While in Kutscher the plot represents the final phase of the Weimar Republic and (so far) the beginning of National Socialism , Harald Gilbers' series begins in the final phase of the Third Reich and the initial phase of Allied-occupied Berlin. The fourth novel is set in the hunger winter of 1946/47 .

The protagonist of the series of novels is the former detective inspector Richard Oppenheimer, who, as a Jew , was dismissed from the public service at the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship due to the law to restore the civil service and has since kept himself afloat with odd jobs. He has a privileged position compared to other Jews who stayed in Germany to a certain extent because he had married an Aryan woman before the Nazi dictatorship . Nevertheless, the family had to live in a Jewish house with the smallest of rations and had no access to an air raid shelter .

In the first case, one year before the end of the war, SS-Hauptsturmführer Vogler forced Oppenheimer to collaborate on an unsolved murder case. He stands between the temptation to be offered relief for his existence (e.g. renouncing the Jewish star, pronounced by Joseph Goebbels personally) and the constant danger that after the case has been clarified, the SS will not only be dispensable but also dangerous as a confidante to be. He only escapes the already ordered liquidation after the reconnaissance in a brief moment of the chivalry of the SS officer, who already has his order to march to certain death in his pocket.

The second novel takes place in the spring of 1945, shortly before Hitler's Germany surrendered . A good friend of the family, the doctor Hilde, opponent of the regime, living separately from her husband, who turns out to be a concentration camp doctor, is arrested and threatens to be executed. The attempts of Oppenheimer and his friends to save them are the focus of the book Odin's Sons .

The third novel concerns the period of the last weeks before the fall of Berlin and the beginning of the Soviet occupation until August 1945. Oppenheimer's wife is raped by a Russian soldier and Oppenheimer not only has to prove that he is not a hidden Nazi, but is also looking for his wife's rapist. He is helped by a cooperation with a Russian secret service officer who is supposed to ensure order within the troops in occupied Berlin. The black market and ensuring survival also play a central role.

The fourth book shows the life situation of Oppenheimer and his wife in the hunger winter of 1946/47. Oppenheimer works for the DRK tracing service , but has to investigate several murder cases again and gets caught between the Berlin criminal police , the Russian secret service and the British occupiers. At the end of the book, he decides to return to the police force despite all concerns.

Works

Commissioner Oppenheimer series

• Germania . Knaur, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-426-51370-5 .
• Odin's sons . Knaur, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-426-51643-0 .
• End time . Knaur, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-426-51644-7 .
• List of the dead , Knaur, Munich 2018, ISBN 978-3-426-52182-3 .
• Hungerwinter , Knaur, Munich 2020, ISBN 978-3-426-52183-0 -.

Germania and Odins Söhne were also published as an audiobook by Audio Media Verlag in 2015, under ISBN 978-3868044294 (Germania) and ISBN 978-3956390234 (Odins Söhne).

The filming rights were sold according to the author. However, no projects in this regard had been published by autumn 2018.

Translations

Harald Gilbers' books have been translated into numerous languages, the debut seven times so far (as of mid-2018), including Danish, French, Polish, Italian, Czech and Japanese.

Awards

For his first work he received the Friedrich Glauser Prize in 2014 in the category Debut - Best First Novel . The sequel Odin's Sons was awarded the Prix ​​Historie in 2016 in France as the best historical detective novel.

Web links

• Detailed review of the books at Krimicouch.de