Excerpts from The One From the Other: A Bernie Gunther Novel (by Philip Kerr)

page 17

My only choice was between the disastrous and the unpalatable. A very German choice. We both knew I had little alternative but to agree to what they wanted.

page 24

“Too much arak,” whispered Eichmann. “It’s the local drink. A sort of aniseed-flavored grape spirit. Avoid it if you can.”

page 25

“Haganah is a Jewish militia group and intelligence service.” “You mean, they’re a terrorist organization.”

page 26

“The Haganah want us to supply them with guns to use against the British here in Palestine,” he said. “If the SD continues to promote Jewish emigration from Germany, they’re also proposing to supply us with information on British troop and naval movements in the eastern Mediterranean.” “The Jews helping their own persecutors?”

page 26

“The SD has already financed several Zionist training camps in Germany. Places where young Jews can learn the agricultural skills they will need to farm this land. Palestinian land. A National Socialist-financed Haganah is just on possible extension of that same policy."

page 26

I know it’s hard to believe, but they dislike the British even more than they seem to dislike us.”

page 27

The British appointed him in 1921. Which makes him the most powerful Arab in the country. He’s also a rabid anti-Semite who makes the Führer seem like a Jew lover. Haj Amin has declared jihad on the Jews. Which is why the Haganah and the Irgun would like to see him dead.

page 27

When a man keeps his jacket buttoned on a hot day, it usually means one thing. After I had explained the situation, Golomb swore in Russian, and in an effort to smooth things over—these men were terrorists, after all—I pointed at the bar and offered to buy them a drink.

page 29

“Eliahu Golomb is on the Command Council of Haganah. He’s in favor of your government’s radical Jewish policy, since it is the belief of Haganah that this will only increase the strength of the Jewish population in Palestine. In time, this can only mean that Jews will outnumber Arabs, after which the country will be ours for the taking.”

page 37

We are not accustomed to European ways. We do not want them. We wish our country to remain just as it was before the Jews started coming here in large numbers. We want no progress. We want no prosperity. Progress and prosperity are the enemies of true Islam. [said Haj Amin]

page 58

They say that insanity is merely the ability to see into the future. And if we knew now what we’ll know then, it would probably be enough to make any of us scream. In life the trick is all about keeping the two separate for as long as possible. THREE I had to get a denazification certificate from the Ministry of the Interior, on Prinzregentenstrasse.

page 59

If there was anyone doing well under the American occupation it was the lawyers. The world might end one day but there will still be lawyers to process the documents.

page 78

German doctors have always regarded themselves as being as important as God. Indeed, it’s probably worse than that. God probably thinks he’s a German doctor.

page 87

Tall women are always better than short ones, especially the kind of tall women that short men seem to favor, who really aren’t that tall, they just seem that way.

page 94

In the future I’ve an idea that everyone will be a lawyer. They’ll have to be.”

page 95

"Five thousand marks buys an awful lot of rosaries. Hell, that’s how the Borgias made their fortune. Everyone knows that.” Frau Warzok seemed shocked. “The Church is not like that anymore,” she said. “No?” “I couldn’t,” she said. “Marriage is a sacrament that is indissoluble.”

page 98

“You’re quite the philosopher, aren’t you?” she said. “For a detective.” “All detectives are philosophers, Frau Warzok. They have to be. That way they can recognize how much of what a client tells them they can swallow safely and how much they can flush. Which of them is as mad as Nietzsche and which of them is only as mad as Marx. The

page 110

They’ve removed the bronze plaque that was placed on the Führer’s cell door, of course. But we all know exactly where it is. In the same way that a Muslim knows the direction of Mecca.