Review of The Firehand File, Bob van Laerhoven

 

(Next Chapter, 2026). ASIN: B0GGXYZVRD

Over the years, I have come to expect a lot from Bob van Laerhoven’s novels and this one not only doesn’t disappoint—it might just be the best one yet.

The prologue begins in Munich in April 1920 with an evocative diary entry by an unidentified author, written to a dead brother about his murdered dog; it’s barely a page. The novel repeatedly returns to excerpts from the diary, identifying the author only as a rabid antisemite who identifies with Parcival, the Grail Quests, Lohengrin, and the Spear of Destiny and who twists the words of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas to suit his warped, weaponized Weltanschauung.

Chapter one opens in April 1921, when antisemitism was already ubiquitous, with lyrics from a cabaret song about cocaine. It’s a time when the “People’s Court” in the Berlin-Plötzensee prison still dispenses “justice” by beheading. A German psychiatrist eyes an exotic, “half-Chinese” woman in the sweltering heat with obvious addiction pangs at a racecourse. After admonishing her companion, a literary translator, for wanting to translate the partly Jewish Marcel Proust into German, he plays on the woman’s need with offers of heroin and cocaine. She readily, salaciously succumbs…

A police inspector in Berlin, whose sister was slaughtered in the 1905 Odesa Pogrom, readies himself for a second interrogation of a confessed Armenian murderer who was motivated by the Turkish genocide of Armenians. A complicator for the inspector: Germany and Turkey are allies, and the professed motive has made the papers. The inspector is already smarting from a missed opportunity to arrest a serial killer called The Skinner.

The intermingled traumas of the Pogrom and the Armenian genocide are potent pistons for driving the novel’s narrative engine. Their descriptions are not for the faint of heart.

From here, we learn that the psychiatrist is a member of the antisemitic, Aryan, occultist Thule Society (which, with their macabre sense of humor, meets near a synagogue).

Moving back and forth between this pair of stories, while lacing in several others, van Laerhoven once again delivers hard-to-read (and fathom), exquisitely rendered accounts of the physical, emotional, and psychological horrors of early 20th-century Europe with efficiently executed, deeply affecting prose (extended through diary entries, letters, poems, and short fiction). This network of stories unfolds through the lives of a cast of sharply drawn characters from a wide array of sociopolitical (e.g., communist vs. Nazi) factions who tout nationalism, intellectual bait-and-switch, mythology, and multigenerational trauma as the motivations and rationalizations for their abhorrent behavior.

Through a meeting of the Thule Society, we meet the real-life, self-titled racial theorist Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, publisher of the antisemitic Ostara (its writings were voraciously ingested by Hitler), spewing on and on about Hyperborea, Vril, Götter-Elektron, and Aryan supremacy (the Übermensch) before announcing the start of an Aryan beauty pageant (blonde hair, blue eyes only) organized by the psychiatrist and his conniving addict accomplice. Others will later push the preposterous “science” of phrenology to show that Jews are less than human (the Untermensch).

As the plot expands and seemingly disparate characters are revealed to be closely connected (at times through overlapping vignettes, like in a play by A.R. Gurney), van Laerhoven deepens our immersion with detailed descriptions of architecture, interesting tidbits such as the inspector wanting to arrest the later-to-be-infamous Hermann Göring for “shady dealings,” mentions of Thomas Mann and of Albert Einstein’s lectures at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics, a violent encounter between a Nazi brownshirt and the Jewish stage director Max Reinhardt, and an appearance by Marxist writer–director Bertolt Brecht, who’s intensely interested in the reading list of the up-and-coming demagogue, Hitler (whose rise to power through the backing of antisemites such as industrialist Hermann Blohm is deftly woven throughout the novel from multiple perspectives). The novel’s chock full of childhood trauma (and its effect on memory), subterfuge, secret identities, acts of survival, and split alliances. Wars, genocides, and uprisings like the Boxer Rebellion leave scars through damaged psyches and echoed acts of violence.

Although van Laerhoven populates his novels with poets and painters, philosophers and physicists (and the prevalent artworks, books, and theories with which they engage), he does not place them above the fray. They’re very much like all the rest—the policemen, politicians, soldiers, and industrialists (one of whom, Isaac Ochberg, a counterbalance to Blohm, is shipping Jewish orphans to Africa for their protection at his own expense). It’s all degrees of degrees. A poet, for instance, writes a grotesque about the serial killer. He leans into artistic challenge as his reason, but, like the modern Ripper tours in East End London, the victims get short shrift, because the profit derives from the primary draw, which is the killer. Not so with the novel’s author—although the oppressors and oppressed get equal space, there is a subtle weighting regarding where van Laerhoven’s sympathies lie, although, crucially, every character is rendered fully human, including one undergoing gender reassignment surgery at the hands of a surgeon known as Aunt Ambrosia. We’re also introduced to the sinister underground of child exploitation and the dominatrix culture of Berlin, with services encoded in the different colors of their thigh-high boots and laces.

The Firehand of the title provides a massive mystery box throughout the novel, involving no less than Hitler’s deputy, Rudolph Hess, and clues delivered through diary entries and a psychiatrist’s notes.

If you have not already read van Laerhoven’s recent novel of World War II, which I have also reviewed, The Long Farewell, I highly suggest reading them in temporal order, back-to-back.