The Arbogast Case
A Novel
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
A compelling international thriller that explores the terrain between erotic love and death
On a warm September evening in 1953 Hans Arbogast, a young travelling salesman, picks up a hitchhiker, a refugee from East Germany. As dusk falls they make passionate love in a meadow. And then she is dead, her body found nestled against blackberry brambles. Even though the evidence is inconclusive, Arbogast is tried for murder, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment, all the while protesting his innocence. But Germany during the postwar years has no tolerance for scandal; all appeals are denied. For the next fourteen years he grows to inhabit his cell like a second skin, until finally a journalist, lawyer, and forensic pathologist from East Berlin set out to reexamine the evidence and have the case reopened.
Inspired by an actual criminal case that caused a furor at the time, The Arbogast Case elegantly weaves dramatic courtroom scenes with detailed forensic descriptions and authentic details of the grim postwar era. The result is a compelling legal thriller in which erotic love and death are intimately intertwined, by a young German writer whose lyrical style and utter originality have brought him renown throughout Europe and is now being published in English for the first time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
German novelist Hettche's first book to be translated into English is a suspenseful, serious crime story set in postwar West Germany. Based on an infamous actual case, this legal thriller tells how Hans Arbogast, a young traveling salesman, spent almost 15 years in prison for the inexplicable death of Marie Gurst, an East German refugee, during a casual, if somewhat mutually violent, sexual romp. In Gaffney's crisp translation, Hettche's story traces the quiet ups and downs of Arbogast's long imprisonment: "After his hopes of imminent release had faded, he found that the world within him shrank. Like a suffocating man desperate for larger lungs and more oxygen, he wished for more memories, more of a past." The political atmosphere is equally stifling in a stern postwar West Germany intolerant of both Arbogast's sexual impropriety and any questioning of its leading forensic pathologists. Only after an East German expert, a crusading Swiss novelist and a tough West German lawyer delve into the mystery of Gurst's death does anybody begin to rethink Arbogast's case. Readers craving action and thrills might find Hettche's novel slightly slow going, but its psychological depth and sociological heft make it a solid achievement.
