The Lost Europeans by Emanuel Litvinoff

(Apollo, £10)

Reviewed by Malcolm Forbes

APOLLO, the newly launched imprint of independent publisher Head Of Zeus, will dig up and dust down forgotten works of fiction and make them available to a new generation of readers. Among its first eight titles – all selected by former Professor of Poetry at Glasgow University, Michael Schmidt – is The Lost Europeans by Emanuel Litvinoff. Born in London in 1915 to Russian-Jewish parents, Litvinoff went on to write novels, poetry and plays but is best known for his memoir about growing up in an East End slum, Journey Through A Small Planet (1972).

Originally published in 1958, The Lost Europeans was Litvinoff’s first novel. It is the story of two Jewish men haunted by their pasts and seeking answers and closure in 1950s Berlin. Martin Stone – previously Silberstein – leaves his London exile to revisit Berlin, the city of his birth, with a view to securing restitution for his father, whose bank was appropriated by the Nazis. He meets his friend, Hugo Krantz, who after a successful stint as a writer of satirical revues in the Weimar era also fled Berlin for London in the 1930s. Hugo has since returned and resettled, but he cannot relax until he has found out if the lover who betrayed him to the Nazis and then became an SS officer is dead or alive.

As Litvinoff’s two protagonists pursue their separate agendas, one for compensation, the other for confirmation, they come into contact with some colourful individuals, many of whom have unhealed scars. Martin stays at the pension of former cabaret artiste Frau Goetz, who hid Jews during the Third Reich and paid for it with three years in Buchenwald. He later falls for Karin, a seamstress from East Berlin who was raped by marauding Russian soldiers. The characters that revolve around or collide with Hugo are altogether shadier. Do the playboy antics of Hugo’s secretary-valet Heinz Dieter mask darker exploits, and is the inquisitive American Mel Kane a journalist with good intentions or a spy who poses a threat?

Litvinoff’s novel is as much about place as people, and he excels with his portrait of post-war, pre-Wall Berlin. We tour a shabby East and a “glittering, night-loving” West. Martin explores the ruins of his family home and roams streets which revive memories and awaken demons. Hugo admires the view from his Kurfürstendamm penthouse and revels in bars and clubs. For Martin, Berlin is “the sick heart of Europe”; for Hugo it is “the great European Sodom”. As Martin comes to learn who to trust and love, and Hugo tracks down his treacherous quarry, the novel expands from a thrilling quest for justice into a probing and enlightening study of guilt and reconciliation.

Hugo tells Martin on his arrival that “Berlin is a form of insanity – and it’s contagious”. We willingly succumb to that madness as we accompany them through a city of victims and survivors, perpetrators and ghosts – all the time wondering why so fine a book could languish so long in obscurity. Now this overlooked gem can sparkle again.