Murder in the Weimar Republic (2024)

With her proletarian‐revolutionary Märchen, Zur Mühlen was able to offer a didactic and entertaining form of socialist literature for children that could provide an alternative to traditional bourgeois children's fiction and undermine its dominance during the 1920s. To a similar end, she sought access to an adult readership by means of their preferred reading. As discussed previously, records from Socialist and public libraries show that workers were far more inclined to indulge in the reading of magazines and fiction than of the classics or theory endorsed by the Party. In spite of this, in the years preceding the First World War Socialist theoreticians accorded little attention to prose fiction and novels. They were keen to dismiss the harmful effects of reading trivial literature but were unforthcoming with suggestions for a Socialist alternative. Instead, they preferred to sanction the lyrics of the German freedom poets and the drama of German Classicism as the literary forms most appropriate for their political purpose. As Hans Joachim Schulz argues: ‘The novel was not seen as a form ennobled by classical example but rather as an essentially formless kind of literature’.2 Left theoretically unattended by the movement, early socialist fiction, such as that by Minna Kautsky, Robert Schwiechel, and August Otto‐Walster, seemed to occupy uncomfortable ground between the ‘social novel’ of Naturalism and popular bourgeois fiction. The legacy of this unresolved dualism extended into the Weimar Republic. Franz Schonauer comments that during the early 1920s there was no clearly delineated Socialist or Communist Party line regarding the revolutionary or agitatory function of literature and that Party debates on the subject were somewhat half‐hearted and ‘ohne innere Linie geführt’.3 As a result it was left to individual writers and left‐wing groupings from diverse literary movements to determine the initial character of Socialist literature.

It is well documented that debates within left‐wing literary circles in the 1920s and 30s often revolved around literary movements – most famously the Expressionist/Realist debate. Zur Mühlen's fiction does offer some insight into her opinions on these issues, but she does not enter directly into their discussion. In Reise durch ein Leben (1933), for example, Tante Nadine ridicules Expressionist poetry complaining, ‘Aber könnt ihr das nicht einfacher sagen, damit die gewöhnlichen Sterblichen es auch verstehen können?’ (Reise, p. 345). Zur Mühlen also parodies the differences in style between Romanticism and Neue Sachlichkeit in ‘Literatur’.4 Predominantly though, for Zur Mühlen, Socialism was about action rather than theory and she believed Socialist literature should take the form that was most accessible to its working‐class audience. Zur Mühlen was acutely aware of popular reading trends and recognised that the consumption of trivial literature far outstripped that of ‘high‐brow’ works. Industrialisation and new printing techniques had facilitated the mass production of inexpensive literature at the end of the nineteenth century and since then a proliferation of detective thrillers, modern Groschenromane, melodramatic romances and tales of science fiction, influenced by Anglophone penny dreadfuls and dime novels, had flooded the racks of kiosks in cheap paperback editions. Just as Zur Mühlen had used the contemporary popularity of the Märchen in order to convey her socialist views to children, she now saw a similar opportunity to capitalise on the wide readership of Trivialliteratur amongst adults.

The Krimi proved to be particularly well‐suited vehicle for this purpose. Crime literature had been growing steadily in popularity in Germany prior to the First World War. The Nick Carter stories, for example, first made popular in 1886 by The New York Weekly, had been available in Germany since 1906 and had quickly reached a weekly circulation of over 45,000. However, it was during the Weimar Republic that crime fiction really experienced its boom. Works by Edgar Allan Poe were brought out in new editions alongside translations of established favourites, such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins. Contemporary Anglophone crime fiction was also influential on the market. Modern tales of American gangsters from the US ‘hard‐boiled’ school stood side by side on the bookshelves with ‘classic’ English mystery novels by writers from Britain's ‘Golden Age’. Clearly, their presence had an enormous impact on contemporary German literature. Prominent literary figures such as Brecht and Siegfried Kracauer concerned themselves with the crime novel's form in their theoretical writings, whilst many lesser‐known writers sought to capitalise on the genre's popularity by bringing out their own version of the Krimi.5 Indeed, the success of Erich Kästner's Emil und die Detektive (1928) shows that even the children's market was not unaffected.

For the most part, critics in the Weimar Republic were content to scorn crime fiction for its predictable problems, stereotypical characterisation and undistinguished writing. They dismissed it as a formulaic, sub‐standard form of Trivialliteratur for puzzle addicts and thrill seekers. With regard to its Socialist reception, Bela Balazs's 1922 essay, which discusses the popularity of the Krimi amongst workers and considers the potential of the analytical form as a means of promoting a Marxist understanding of history, represents something of an exception.6 When the KPD began to consider the role of literature in extending and optimising the Party's propaganda apparatus in the mid 1920s, it encouraged workers to participate in the Arbeiterkorrespondenten‐Bewegung by reading and writing reports on factory life for the Party press. The main literary goal, however, was to develop an elevated Socialist form of literature that would rival and eventually succeed the value of bourgeois belles lettres. It was not until the final years of the Weimar Republic that the BPRS, only founded in 1928, finally recognised and addressed the true reading habits of the working classes. In 1930 Otto Biha identified the need for a Socialist Trivialliteratur, to combat ‘das gefährlichste Giftgas an der Kulturfront’ – the popular and entertaining literature produced by bourgeois publishers such as Scherl, Rotbart, and Ullstein.7 In the same year at the second world congress of proletarian‐revolutionary writers in Kharkov, Ukraine, Johannes R. Becher announced the need for a cheap form of literature that would appeal to those workers as yet unconvinced by Marxism. The language of such literature needed to be ‘lebendig und anschaulich, nicht von “oben” herab’.8 As he explained a year later:

In a belated attempt to address the ideological imbalance within Trivialliteratur, the Internationale Arbeiter‐Verlag brought out ‘Der rote eine‐Mark‐Roman’ series in October 1930. ‘Nicht minder fesselnd und unterhaltend, aber durchglüht vom Kampfeswillen der Klasse’, the novel was supposed to combat the might of the bourgeois Trivialroman and win over new support for Communism.10

Zur Mühlen, for her part, had identified this deficit in Socialist literature much earlier during the Weimar Republic and had been trying to remedy it. Since the beginning of the 1920s she had been engaged in formulating an entertaining literature that could secure working‐class support for the Socialist movement and counter the dominance and ideology of bourgeois Trivialliteratur. She recognised that the simple style, uncomplicated form and exciting content of the Krimi, so derided by bourgeois and Socialist critics, were precisely the qualities that made the genre so popular and therefore, potentially, such a powerful medium.

In her opinion the escapism of Krimis did not have to distract readers from their political mission, but could perform a useful function in their lives. In Das Riesenrad (1932) Marieleine's preference for Conan Doyle's Hound of the Baskervilles over Chateaubriand's Génie du Christianisme points to the important role escapism can play in alleviating hopelessness and depression – both of which detract from Socialist engagement.

Nevertheless, Zur Mühlen was well aware that the entertainment offered by traditional Krimis was far from neutral in its ideology. Conservative and nationalistic readers were attracted by the English murder mystery's focus on the lives of the wealthy and frequent vilification of exotic foreigners. Likewise, US fiction tended to champion its straight‐talking, tough private eyes as defenders and avengers of red‐blooded American values against gangsters and the representatives of deviant foreign ideas. Just as children's behaviour and development could be affected by their reading, Zur Mühlen believed adults were subject to the influence of their reading matter. As she notes with regard to one Krimi reader in her humorous novel Eine Flasche Parfüm (1934): ‘Diese Lektüre blieb selbstverständlich nicht ohne Einfluß auf ihr Denken und ihre Folgerung’ (Parfüm, 79). By subverting the ideology of the Krimi Zur Mühlen hoped to counter its conservatism and use its powerful influence over readers to benefit Socialism and the class struggle.

Unlike those Socialist critics who persisted in viewing entertainment and instruction as mutually exclusive, Zur Mühlen saw them as complementary. She had already pointed out that political ideas were often presented in an overly intellectual and inaccessible fashion for children in Was Peterchens Freunde erzählen (1921). To a similar end, the narrator of Der blaue Strahl (1922) points out the appeal of sensationalist stories over serious political debate for many adults:

The danger of such political apathy is a recurring theme throughout Zur Mühlen's Krimis of the 1920s and is an important concern of her anti‐fascist literature of the 1930s. Most notably, in Die weiβe Pest (1926) Ilona Szentiványi's boredom leads her to join the right‐wing terrorist ‘schwarze Reichswehr’ in search of adventure. With regard to her own crime fiction and its politics Zur Mühlen uses the narrator of Eine Flasche Parfüm (1934) to refer ironically to her main pseudonym: ‘den etwas destruktiven, aber furchtbar aufregenden Lawrence H. Desberry’ (Parfüm, 78–9). On the one hand, Zur Mühlen hoped to harness the exciting escapism and popularity of crime fiction to portray the crimes of capitalism and encourage her readers to consider their causes. At the same time, she hoped to encourage typical Krimi readers to use their problem‐solving skills to analyse the underlying inconsistencies in a society which makes possible the crimes portrayed.

Clearly, Zur Mühlen was familiar with the formulaic nature of many detective novels and she took the opportunity to capitalise on their familiar plot devices and motifs to open up a discussion of the injustices perpetrated by the wealthy, property owning classes in an unjust society. With her own socialist version of the crime novel she hoped to combine entertainment and political education in a form that had mass appeal and that might also act as a counterweight to the dominance and influence of conservative crime fiction.

‘Der etwas destruktive, aber furchtbar aufregende Lawrence H. Desberry’

Lawrence H. Desberry, whose novels Zur Mühlen was credited with translating, died at the height of his success as a crime writer. In 1929, German fans who had been eagerly awaiting the latest installment in his detective series, were dismayed to read the headline in Die neue Bücherschau ‘Lawrence H. Desberry gestorben?’.12 Since his debut in 1922 with Der blaue Strahl, Desberry had been growing in popularity. His series of thrilling detective novels, based largely on the investigations of reporter and amateur sleuth Brian O'Keefe, were serialised frequently in left‐wing newspapers, published as individual volumes in different editions and would later be translated for the international market. By the end of the decade Desberry was hailed by one critic as ‘dem Gros der europäischen Detektivschriftsteller überlegen’.13 His five Krimis had been enjoyed by a large readership and were characterised by ‘atemberaubende Handlung, verschlungen mit den neusten Problemen der Technik. Gestalten, die die Erregtheit der Gegenwart haben. Bilder, die wie blanke elektrische Drähte eines Kraftwerkes volle dramatische Spannung besitzen’.14 It was with some surprise and relief, therefore, that readers went on to discover that, far from being dead, ‘Lawrence H. Desberry überhaupt nicht existiert, also die “übersetzerin” in Wahrheit die Autorin ist’.15

Zur Mühlen decided to credit herself initially as the translator, rather than the author of her Krimis for a number of possible reasons. Of course, it was not uncommon for crime writers to adopt a nom de plume. For many, it was a means of avoiding being tainted by association with a genre judged to have a literary worth that is inversely proportionate to its popularity. However, Zur Mühlen's claim to have translated Desberry's works already demonstrates her willingness to be associated with the genre. It seems more likely that she saw her newly established reputation as an author of children's literature as a hindrance to her acceptance as a credible and successful writer of Krimis. Although women such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers were making a name for themselves as crime writers in the 1920s, female authors were still popularly associated with the production of romantic fiction and children's literature. It was still largely felt that the composition of hard‐hitting stories of violent crimes in a corrupt society was an unsuitable job for a woman. Furthermore, the English‐sounding pseudonym enabled Zur Mühlen to exploit the contemporary popularity of the Anglophone crime novel and excite the Krimi market with such claims as: ‘in der Originalsprache noch nicht veröffentlicht’.16

Despite the contemporary popularity of Zur Mühlen's crime fiction, her work has yet to be accorded serious academic attention. Since the 1960s, when formalist and structuralist critics helped to make crime literature a credible object of academic attention, research has been subject to certain trends which have converged to exclude literature such as hers. When faced with the wealth and diversity of crime‐related fiction, researchers, who were keen to rehabilitate the genre according to the values of the bourgeois canon, tended to select and elevate exemplary works by certain famous writers to become the yardstick by which other works would be measured.

As a result, it became common practice to establish a direct line of descent from ‘the father of the crime novel’, Edgar Allan Poe, via Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle, to the British ‘Golden Age’ of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and G. K. Chesterton, and to the American ‘hard‐boiled’ school of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.18 Of course, in practise, the development of crime fiction was never so straightforwardly linear as such an explanation suggests. Such an account suppresses profound differences of emphasis and intention as well as ignoring gaps and variations in the development of the genre. Moreover, the dominance of Anglophone literature within Krimiforschung resulted in the common assumption ‘daß es überhaupt keine Detektiverzählung gibt, daß die wenigen Autoren von Detektiverzählungen Einzelgänger seien, daß die Gattung in Deutschland keine Tradition gebildet habe’.19

However, when contemporary German crime novels by writers such as Hansjörg Martin, and Friedhelm Werremeier flourished in the 1970s, critics began to acknowledge the existence of crime fiction produced outside the Anglophone world and that ‘there is evidently a substantial place for a critique of crime fiction that is neither hidebound or complicit with the politics and certainties of Anglo‐American attitudes’.20 Attempts to redress the bias in Krimiforschung resulted, on the one hand, in studies that highlighted the thriving genre among German authors since the 1970s.21 At the same time, it provoked attempts to investigate the specifically German roots of crime writing and thereby establish an independent German tradition. In such accounts, it became commonplace to trace the development of the German crime novel back to Schiller's Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre via Kleist's Der Zweikampf, Brentano's Geschichte vom braven Kasperl und dem schönen Annerl and E. T. A. Hoffmann's Das Fraulein von Scuderi.22 By concentrating on the canonical ‘greats’ of German literature to invoke respectability for the German tradition of crime writing, academics have reproduced many of the methodological shortcomings of Anglophone research. They have overlooked the literature of lesser‐known authors, such as Zur Mühlen, whose political Krimis do not conform to the genre expectations they have established.

Evidently, the division of research between modern Krimis and their nineteenth‐century predecessors leaves much of the early twentieth century unaccounted for. Recently, attempts have been made to remedy this neglect. Joachim Lindner's study of policing in German crime novels of the 1930s and 40s opens up many avenues for valuable research into this period.23 In addition, Stephen Knight calls into question the primacy of the novel in the study of crime fiction, arguing for work serialised in newspapers and magazines to be taken into consideration.24 Despite these developments, Zur Mühlen's contribution to the genre remains undocumented. In the most recent lexicon of German crime writers her name and pseudonyms go unmentioned.25 Even in specialist studies she receives no attention. Hans Pfeiffer's monograph on the GDR crime novel closes down a potentially fruitful investigation into socialist crime fiction and its origins by restricting its account to the beginning of the 1970s.26 With a more differentiated understanding of crime fiction in the Weimar Republic it is possible to see how Zur Mühlen experiments with typically English and American styles of crime literature in order to convey her political views to contemporary Krimi readers, and how she attempts to secure a loyal readership by means of a detective series. Likewise, by taking into account Die weiβe Pest (1926), published under the pseudonym Traugott Lehmann, it is possible to trace the roots of her emerging anti‐fascist politics and assess the development of recurring themes over the course of her crime writing in the context of contemporary socio‐political events.

From English manors to mean streets

Der blaue Strahl (1922)

Zur Mühlen's first Krimi, Der blaue Strahl, was published in 1922. The story follows Irish reporter Brian O'Keefe as he investigates the mysterious murder of wealthy industrialist Henry Cardiff in the library of his London manor. It is clear from this first novel that Zur Mühlen intended to engage directly with the current proliferation of tense, action‐packed popular literature. Together with other contributions from world literature, such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Der schwarze Pfeil and shorter stories by G. K. Chesterton and Rudyard Kipling, the novel formed part of Walter Jeven's series of exciting stories ‘Die Spannung’. The murder weapon, a powerful electron beam, capable of penetrating walls and killing from miles away, draws on contemporary science fiction, whereas elements such as coded messages, kidnappings and the poisoned cup are borrowed from the adventure story and thriller. Similarly, the puzzle of the ‘locked room’ murder has a tradition within detective fiction that reaches back to Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841). Most obviously, Der blaue Strahl appropriates the plot, structure and characters of the English murder mystery. The opening scenes, which describe a dinner party at Henry Cardiff's London manor, employ the English murder mystery's fundamental device of introducing the reader to a closed circle of interdependent characters, which include the victim, murderer and other suspects. Well‐known murder mystery writers, such as Conan Doyle and Christie, typically situate their novels in the isolated and privileged communities of the country house or rural village in order to gather these characters together. Zur Mühlen's choice of location, Briar Manor, replicates the motif of murder in an English family home. Yet Briar Manor does not quite represent the peaceful idyll which is shattered by the act of murder. The old, grey, stone house with its rattling windows and groaning beams in the violent December storm has its foundations in the haunted castles and decaying mansions of the gothic horror, from which the crime novel is descended. Such a backdrop complements the introduction of the characters with an atmosphere of eerie suspense which foreshadows the appearance of the seemingly supernatural ‘blauer Strahl’.

The big house of the English murder mystery is, according to Dennis Porter, an outward manifestation of wealth and power that can be seen as a symbol of conservatism and enduring social structures in a fast‐changing industrial world, and where the ostentatious luxury of the inhabitants' lifestyles serves to contrast with their moral corruption.27 Certainly, this corruption can be seen in Der blaue Strahl. Just as Zur Mühlen's Märchen are unambiguous in their characterisation of evil figures, so Der blaue Strahl leaves the reader in no doubt about Henry Cardiff's negative qualities. The wealthy businessman with the ‘harter grausamer Mund’ (Strahl, 10) is cruel to his daughter and is rumoured to have tormented his wife to death. He is ruthless and profiteering. Indeed, workers as young as twelve work long hours in his factory for poor wages. ‘Für das Wohl des Betriebes’ (Strahl, 12), he bribes Police Commissioner Lock to arrest his engineer, Allan Cregan, on discovering his activities as Socialist agitator. Thus, Zur Mühlen portrays Cardiff's moral corruption in terms consistent with her criticism of socio‐industrial relations in her Märchen from the same period.

Importantly, Cardiff's vilification is not only consistent with Zur Mühlen's socialist politics. In keeping with the murder mystery, the death of the wealthy, much‐hated factory owner transforms the dinner guests into suspects with motives for murder. At this point, Zur Mühlen is unable to maintain the fairy‐tale black and white depiction of her ‘good’ and ‘bad’ characters. In order to keep the reader guessing the identity of the murderer the suspects' words and behaviour alternately seem to assert and deny their innocence as the story progresses. O'Keefe asks himself of Winifred Cardiff, Henry's seemingly naive and delicate daughter, ‘War das Mädchen wirklich so unschuldig, wie es schien?’ (Strahl, 39). Arguably, Zur Mühlen hoped this ambiguity would encourage readers to consider the capacity of the privileged classes to perpetrate crimes and thus stimulate workers to set aside deference and to subject the wealthy to an analysis that went beyond their surface appearances.

By contrast, the reporter/amateur detective Brian O'Keefe is altogether positively characterised. His heroic introduction as ‘ein geborener Kämpfer, ein Ritter der Feder, ein Rächer alles Unrechtes’ (Strahl, 18) underlines his Socialist credentials as a positive figure of action and identification. Importantly, he is not only a socialist hero, but also the Krimi's protagonist. As such, his characterisation engages with a history of fictional sleuths ranging from brilliant, eccentric amateur to plodding policeman. Like Gaston Leroux's Joseph Rouletabille, Zur Mühlen's detective is a reporter, and, like Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Poe's Auguste Dupin, he displays impressive powers of observation and reasoning. His deconstruction of Johnson's disguise is very reminiscent of Holmes's showy displays of logic and deduction:

Furthermore, O'Keefe demonstrates Holmes's fastidious attention to detail combined with the elements of the plodding policeman's painstaking and methodical approach. Faced with the mysterious death of Henry Cardiff, he is quickly able to rule out suicide and then reconstructs systematically and chronologically the events of the evening, as reported by the various witnesses, to conclude that Allan Cregan could not possibly be the murderer.

Like the traditional detectives of popular crime fiction, O'Keefe, an Irishman in London, is something of an outsider. He is not characterised by his class and mingles as comfortably with the wealthy friends of Henry Cardiff as he does with the shady regulars of the opium den. Yet, whereas Holmes and Dupin are arguably a product of the romantic tradition, O'Keefe is no proud, alienated hero, superior to and isolated from the rest of humanity. Although he does share some of the characteristics of Conan Doyle's detective – a master of disguise and partial to whisky and soda – he shares none of Holmes's pseudo‐aristocratic pretenses and eccentricities. Whereas Holmes loves opera and uses cocaine and morphine to alleviate his boredom, O'Keefe has a zest for life that is fuelled by his commitment to Socialist reporting. In risking his own life in the pursuit of (social) justice, O'Keefe demonstrates a degree of humanity that detectives, such as Holmes, have been found to lack.28 Unlike those detached and objective ‘thinking machines’, O'Keefe is emotionally involved in the case. Demonstrating a sense of loyalty and brotherhood, he refuses to believe that his best friend, Cregan, might be the murderer and then logically proves this to be so. In this way, Zur Mühlen combines the recognisable trademark characteristics of well‐known detective heroes with exemplary Socialist qualities to create her own Socialist detective hero.

Traditionally, the detective is often complemented by a less brilliant companion to act as foil for the detective's genius. His naive questions function to enlighten the reader as to the hero's observations and conclusions. O'Keefe has no such immediately recognisable counterpart, but can rely on his friends and co‐workers to assist him and act as a sounding board for his theories. Indeed, the willingness of Crane and Barton to assist O'Keefe promotes a spirit of generosity, solidarity and mutual trust that contrasts with the interpersonal relations of the murder suspects, which are characterised by suspicion, threats and financial dependency. Surprisingly, the character that lays greatest claim to the role of O'Keefe's Watson is the Scotland Yard detective, Johnson. As an official representative of the repressive state apparatus that defends and perpetuates the bourgeois capitalist order, Johnson seems an unlikely ally and confidant of the Socialist reporter. Unlike O'Keefe, who uses the Socialist newspaper ‘Stern der Freiheit’ to battle for justice and the freedom of an innocent man, the egotistical Johnson seeks to bias public opinion via the conservative and nationalistic‐sounding paper ‘Briton’ and views the case as an opportunity to show off and bolster his ego. Yet Johnson is not like the anti‐Socialist Henry Cardiff, and does not simply exploit the opportunity to arrest a known Socialist agitator as a suspect. Instead he takes the trouble to follow up a lead that casts doubt on Cregan's guilt. Significantly, it is by working together that O'Keefe and Johnson are able to make progress and, ultimately, Johnson is persuaded to suspend his doubts and acquiesces in O'Keefe's theory.

Given the Socialist commitment of Zur Mühlen's contemporaneous Märchen and short stories of the 1920s it is surprising that Johnson and the police force are not presented more negatively. Indeed, in her short propagandistic story Schupomann Karl Müller (1924) Zur Mühlen portrays the protagonist's decision to join the police force as class betrayal. Karl Müller is paid ‘damit du den Besitz und die Ruhe der Kapitalisten schützt’ (Schupomann, 12) and he is expected to arrest his friends and violently repress their strikes. By contrast, the policeman at the station in Der blaue Strahl is a friendly man who regrets the evidence pointing towards Cregan's guilt. With the exception of the corrupt police official Lock, the text offers little criticism of the institution that protects the interests of the powerful rich.

This subdued Socialist criticism is characteristic of much of Der blaue Strahl. The impact of John Hay's socially critical report of child labour and negative comments about Cardiff's employment of children is lessened by the text's image of newspaper boys as ‘eine bunte Menge’ (Strahl, 174) spilling from the press to sell their wares. It is not until John Hay is revealed as the murderer that the text's Socialist politics become more explicit. Here, Der blaue Strahl strays from the conventions of the English murder mystery. Traditionally, crime is portrayed as a deviant, anti‐social act and the discovery the perpetrator and restoration of the social order is celebrated. By contrast, Zur Mühlen's text is sympathetic to the criminal. The reader discovers that Hay and his fellow Irish patriots were betrayed by Cardiff when they were resisting oppression in Ireland many years earlier. With her vague understanding of Ireland as a country oppressed by England Zur Mühlen incorporates a critique of English colonialism similar to that which would later underpin her oriental Märchen. Furthermore, with Cardiff's exploitation of Hay in his factory she returns to the criticism of industrial relations articulated in ‘Der Knecht’. Hay is not allowed to profit from his own work and his scientific discoveries belong to Cardiff. So when he wishes to prevent the abuse of his powerful electron beam by the war‐mongering classes responsible for the First World War, his only recourse is to kill Cardiff.

By allowing Hay to commit suicide rather than be punished by the system which caused him to become a criminal O'Keefe, with whom the reader is encouraged to identify, demonstrates his sympathy for Hay and implicitly questions the existing social order, value system and structures that sustain it. However, the epilogue rather counteracts the impact of Hay's story. In order to replicate the English murder mystery's conservative restoration of order and happiness, the novel's criticism of the prevalent bourgeois capitalist social order is subdued. Even though Hay commits suicide rather than submit to the law, he is still, in effect, punished for his crime and his social battle apparently dies with him. The newspapers all play down Hay's crime and motive, in favour of celebrating his scientific discovery and mourning its loss. Cregan is released from prison into the arms of his fiancée Winifred. Thus, the neatly tied, happy ending, and celebration of personal friendships in Der blaue Strahl detracts from Hay's ideologically shocking story. Instead, the call to action is stifled by the parting image of the characters returning to a civilised form of living that is rooted in a stable and harmonious society where aberrant crime casts but a temporary shadow.

An den Ufern des Hudsons (1925)

Zur Mühlen followed the success of Der blaue Strahl with a second crime novel in 1925, An den Ufern des Hudsons. Set in New York, the story tells of the murder of prominent politician and socialist sympathiser, John Rawley. When the black Socialist activist, Ben Towers, is falsely accused of murder it is left to Rawley's best friend, Harvey Word, to solve the case and clear his name. With the help of Rawley's lover, Grace Mathers, and the Polish‐Jewish immigrant, Samuel Katzenstein, Harvey's investigations reveal a network of corruption within society, where powerful wealthy figures are involved with the Ku Klux Klan in a right‐wing, nationalist conspiracy to rid society of Jews, Blacks, Irish, and Socialists. As well as being published in book form in 1925, the story was serialised in the Graz workers' newspaper, Arbeiterwille. Evidently, An den Ufern des Hudsons discussed issues that remained highly topical throughout the 1920s. In 1929 Zur Mühlen's publisher, Neue Welt, brought out a second edition under the new and more sensational title, Fememord in New York, which was serialised that same year in the Viennese newspaper Das kleine Blatt. In the light of this it can be considered Zur Mühlen's most successful Krimi during the Weimar Republic.

In terms of plot and structure, An den Ufern des Hudsons differs considerably from Der blaue Strahl. From the outset, the beautiful spring morning and lush New York suburbs of the former contrast sharply with the gothic overtones of the storm‐swept winter evening and London manor of the latter. Zur Mühlen was perhaps conscious of the way in which the formula of the English murder mystery restricted and compromised the socialist impact of her first Krimi and was reluctant to repeat these compromises in An den Ufern des Hudsons. In the same way as she explored the possibilities offered by various Märchen traditions in her children's literature, she now looked beyond the conventions of the English murder mystery to the US ‘hard‐boiled’ crime novel as a source of inspiration.

In doing so, Zur Mühlen was able to capitalise on the contemporary trend of Amerikanismus in the Weimar Republic. America was popularly associated with the new and modern way of living that seemed to characterise German life after the First World War. The stabilisation of the economy and rationalisation of industry were modelled on American examples, and jazz and cinema from across the Atlantic were new and influential cultural phenomena. Indeed, Gottfried Benn famously complained that since 1918 all German literature had been trading on slogans such as ‘tempo’, ‘jazz’, ‘overseas’, or ‘technical activity’, whilst ignoring emotional and psychological issues. ‘There is a group of lyric poets, who think they have composed a poem by writing “Manhattan” ’.29 The popular American detective stories, such as Nick Carter, had spawned a number of German imitations and it is tempting to see Zur Mühlen's Krimi in this context.30 The publisher's insistence that the text is translated from the original American manuscript, as opposed to the supposedly English Der blaue Strahl, supports this view. However, to regard Zur Mühlen simply as a popular writer who sought to capitalise opportunistically on the trend for Amerikanismus overlooks how she used the ‘hard‐boiled’ detective novel's trademark mean streets and corrupt institutions to criticise bourgeois capitalist society in a way that the conventions of the English murder mystery did not permit.

Unlike some German intellectuals, who saw the USA as a vigorous, prosperous and youthful country with a healthy, promising future, Zur Mühlen was critical of its capitalist excesses. In a letter to Upton Sinclair she wrote, ‘Besides there is here on one side such a wild adoration and admiration of capitalist America, that it would be good to show people the other side’.31 Accordingly, New York is described unsentimentally as a noisy, alienating and polluted site of unregulated industrial capitalism:

Like the ‘hard‐boiled’ crime novel, An den Ufern des Hudsons draws on American naturalism and the so‐called ‘muckraker’ theme of ‘the shame of the cities’. The mention of prohibition evokes the atmosphere of gangster‐filled American cities of the roaring twenties, and the text's description of poverty‐stricken city slums strongly resembles the living conditions of Upton Sinclair's Eastern European immigrant community in The Jungle (1906).

The portrayal of European immigrants introduces a note of familiarity for contemporary German readers. By such means Zur Mühlen hoped to encourage her readers to identify more strongly with the action and draw parallels with their own situation rather than simply reading a detached criticism of US society.

With her depiction of urban America Zur Mühlen moves far away from the peaceful world of the English murder mystery, where crime is portrayed as an aberration or isolated event. In keeping with the typical ‘mean streets’ of the US crime novel, Zur Mühlen's New York is riddled with crime and corruption and acts of violence appear commonplace. The city is controlled by the nationalistic owners of capital, corrupt officials and the criminals who support them and live off their greed. Clearly the conventions of the contemporary ‘hard‐boiled’ crime novel were well‐suited to conveying Zur Mühlen's socialist politics. The open New York society and indefinite number of suspects, so typical of the American novel, encourage the reader to consider the crimes of bourgeois capitalist society beyond the closed circle of suspects in London's Briar Manor. Like the American novel, Zur Mühlen concentrates on the exciting chase, rather than the puzzling ‘whodunit’, to portray a society in which dangerous, life‐threatening situations abound. The murder of John Rawley, followed by the lynching of Ben Towers and Harvey Word's capture and escape build the tension over a series of action‐packed sequences. This broadens the reader's focus from the single crime of the English murder mystery that climaxes in an unmasking scene. Likewise, the flaw in the master criminal's grand plan that eventually results in his capture detracts from the reassuring role of the detective as restorer and maintainer of the existing social order.

Certainly, the novel leaves the reader in no doubt about the forces of evil behind the crimes portrayed, even if the killer is not revealed until the end. Zur Mühlen targets the traditional ‘baddies’ of many American crime novels, such as the immoral rich and exploitative industrialists, to suit her socialist purpose. Her villain, Henry Word, like his predecessor Henry Cardiff, is a cruel factory owner, who actively conspires to disrupt the representation of workers' interests on his factory floor by employing spies and saboteurs. The fact that the villain and hero share their significant name invites the reader to consider the multiple meanings of words and their truths. Henry Word's similarity to the historical Henry Ford is doubtless no coincidence. Like his near namesake he has made his millions manufacturing cars and is ‘die Verkörperung unbegrenzter Macht’ (Hudson, 8). In keeping with the formula of the American crime novel, Word is not the victim, but the arch‐gangster figure of Zur Mühlen's Krimi. His power is well established and he can afford to direct his clandestine dealings from a cool distance. Symbolically, as a representative of capitalism, his influence extends across the socio‐economic and political spectrum. He even bribes members of the legal system to act in his interests. Sinisterly, he employs Dr Brathford to work together with the Ku Klux Klan to systematically murder the socially disadvantaged Blacks, Jews, Irish, and Socialists who are deceived by his pretence of offering charitable hospital treatment to those unable to afford it. In this way, the text points towards the complicity of seemingly separate social structures in upholding and maintaining the socially unjust capitalist system.

Although An den Ufern des Hudsons features the type of urban metropolis and arch‐criminals that would later characterise the fiction of Chandler and Hammett, Zur Mühlen's detective hero is no Sam Spade. The cynical, wisecracking private eye of the American detective novel is characterised less by intellect and formal education than by physical strength and endurance. By contrast, Henry Word's son, Harvey, studied psychoanalysis in Europe under Freud (no less) and, with his privileged upper‐middle‐class lifestyle, has more in common with the well‐heeled amateur detective typified by Holmes. Certainly Harvey is skilled in the art of disguise and is able to analyse witness statements to establish innocence or guilt. Moreover, he uses his medical skills to assess the validity of the villainous doctor's treatments and to hypnotise the murderer into revealing her role in the death of his friend. Importantly, however, he shares none of Holmes's intellectual brilliance. His value system and somewhat naive belief in the goodness of mankind are constantly challenged in a fashion reminiscent of Zur Mühlen's Märchen ‘Said, der Träumer’. He is shattered to discover the complicity of his wife and father in the murder of his friend. Such human qualities facilitate readers' identification with Harvey. Consequently, they are invited to share his sense of disillusion with the current social order and to be influenced by his decision to support the Socialist movement.

Zur Mühlen did not allow the conventions of the US crime novel to restrict her in the same way as the formula of the English murder mystery had done. As the characterisation of Harvey suggests, where it suits her purpose, she was willing to incorporate popular elements from the English detective novel into her American‐style crime thriller. Since Harvey is not characterised as a lone private eye, he can be assisted by various Watson figures. Zur Mühlen builds on the cooperation and collaborative efforts of O'Keefe's assistants in Der blaue Strahl to portray a constellation of assistants. Symbolically, Grace, the genteel, divorced artist joins forces with Harvey Word and Katzenstein, an elderly Polish‐Jewish peddler to comprise a collective with diverse religious, racial, social and gender interests that is able to stand up to the dominant and corrupt forces in society. In keeping with the socialist intention of Zur Mühlen's Krimi, their spirit of cooperation and unity contrasts with the divisions, interdependencies and in‐fighting that define the rest of capitalist society – an opposition that would become a standard feature of her subsequent work in this genre.

Just as Zur Mühlen's Märchen from the mid 1920s are more explicit in their Socialist commitment than Was Peterchens Freunde erzählen, so the Socialist comment in An den Ufern des Hudsons is more pronounced and defined than in Der blaue Strahl. Like her Märchenbücher from this period Zur Mühlen's second Krimi offers a picture of society that is consistent with a revolutionary, socialist worldview.

She highlights the devices employed by the ruling classes to oppress the exploited and prevent the formation of class consciousness and solidarity. To this end, Zur Mühlen employs a narrator, who comments directly on events and encourages the reader to interpret them in a specific way:

Indeed, the division of the working classes and successful propagation of right‐wing nationalism are shown to have appalling results. Zur Mühlen uses the ‘hard‐boiled’ violence of the US crime novel with biblical, apocalyptic overtones to depict the shocking lynching of the innocent, black Socialist activist Ben Towers:

Ten minutes later the crowd has dispersed leaving only ‘ein verstümmeltes, zerfleischtes, blutendes Etwas, das einmal ein Mensch gewesen war’ (Hudson, 53). The police and the authorities make no investigation into the death and the right‐wing press reports that Towers was responsible for Rawley's death and was justly punished by the people, ‘und damit gaben sich die amerikanischen Bürger zufrieden’ (Hudson, 110). Far from portraying the urban poor as the ‘noble oppressed’, Zur Mühlen shows how easily they are corrupted. Importantly, however, the text does not attribute their wrongdoing to ideological conviction. They are neither irredeemably nor intentionally bad, but simply ‘irregeleitete, verführte arme Narren, die aus der Dumpfheit ihres Lebens die Aufregung, das Abenteuer ersehnen, danach streben…’ (Hudson, 53). Thus, Zur Mühlen returns to her literary intention to provide an instructive form of entertainment that will channel bored workers' escapist spirit in a way that will profit Socialism.

As a contrasting role model who is not so easily corrupted, the text champions Harvey Word. In the face of the shattering news of his father's and wife's complicity in the Ku Klux Klan conspiracy and their respective death and suicide, Harvey does not despair. Instead he resolves to avenge himself on his true enemy by devoting the rest of his life to the Socialist cause and fighting against injustice. However, rather than blame the current social system he apportions blame for the killings to the Ku Klux Klan – a specifically American phenomenon with no readily recognisable parallel for German readers. Since the Klan is not analysed specifically as a symptom of socio‐political or economic contradictions, its demonisation draws the reader's attention away from the ills of bourgeois capitalism and implies that the defeat of the sect will restore the prevailing status quo to the satisfaction of all concerned. Thus, the novel ends optimistically on the promise of an impending battle for justice, but falls short of endorsing the violent revolutionary action championed in Zur Mühlen's contemporaneous Märchen as a means of achieving social justice and permanently changing a flawed society.

Creating a Socialist series

EJUS (1925)

Zur Mühlen's initial success as a Krimi writer paved the way for the publication of a further crime novel in 1925. By the mid 1920s crime novels were enjoying unprecedented popularity amongst German readers and it was noticeable that readers showed a higher degree of loyalty to certain authors over others. Zur Mühlen was aware that ‘the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol’.32 She recognised the popularity of detective series, where fans would return eagerly to read the next case of their chosen detective hero, and decided to establish her own series in the hope of securing a loyal readership for her own novels. Rather than create a series around a new hero, Zur Mühlen sought to capitalise on the popularity of her first two novels. By bringing her two previous heroes, O'Keefe and Word, together in one story, she could market EJUS as the third novel in an already successful running series. Zur Mühlen may have intended EJUS initially as a means of linking her first two novels to form a series, but the heroes' thrilling investigation into the disappearance of Fred Mannister's father, the mystery man in Central Park, and the production of miracle beauty product ‘EJUS’ (Ewige Jugend und Schönheit) on a Caribbean ‘Hölleninsel’ clearly caught the imagination of readers both at home and abroad. EJUS is Zur Mühlen's only Krimi to have been translated for the international market and is arguably her best‐known novel from the Desberry series. Twenty years after its first appearance the story's socialist tendency was considered still relevant for GDR readers. In 1955 it was published under the title Insel der Verdammnis with a second edition in 1961. Interestingly, GDR publisher, Das neue Berlin, did not intend to capitalise on the reputation of the ‘rote Gräfin’. Unaware of Zur Mühlen's Desberry pseudonym, the postscript highlights the continued topicality of Desberry's characterisation of capitalist America and marvels that this penetrating observation should come from the pen of an American author.33

To create a series from her first two Krimis Zur Mühlen had to unite and build on two very different stories. EJUS features both detective heroes from her previous novels and refers to their previous investigations. However, in keeping with the conventions of both the English and American detective novels, their characters are not developed in the light of their earlier experiences. As Sarah Dunant points out, ‘a good crime novel needs to keep a narrative pace, which makes any sustained introspection or reflection a potentially dangerous meander’.34 So, O'Keefe remains reassuringly recognisable as the Irish reporter and master of disguise from the British Socialist newspaper ‘Stern der Freiheit’ and Word, seemingly unaffected by the death of his father and wife, continues to practice psychoanalysis in New York. Traditionally, however, a detective series has only one hero. Arguably, as a roving reporter, O'Keefe has greater potential for credible involvement in exciting crime stories than a psychoanalyst. Moreover, in the light of Zur Mühlen's growing support for Soviet Communism during this time, his Socialist credentials present him as a more favourable hero and figure of identification for her socialist crime series than the son of a wealthy manufacturer. So it is that Harvey Word meets his untimely, but heroic end saving an old man from the arch‐villain's henchmen.

Recognising that the mean streets of An den Ufern des Hudsons afforded greater scope for social criticism than the genteel society of the English murder mystery, Zur Mühlen continued her critical depiction of New York as a modern, alienating city of capitalist excesses. Unlike her second Krimi she broadens her focus to include the social issues that concern the rural poor. The plot line, which describes Fred Mannister's search for his father in South Dakota, allows her to thematise the exploitation of the land, as well as the factories, by capitalists. Just as both Sinclair and Brecht, amongst others, sought to highlight the profit‐driven, socio‐economic policies that so disadvantaged workers in Chicago's meat‐canning factories, so Zur Mühlen describes how exploitative large industrial farmers are lowering the price of wheat to half its production costs and thereby driving small farmers out of business.

By drawing attention to the similarities between the oppression of the rural and urban working classes by their common capitalist enemy Zur Mühlen hopes to bridge the urban‐rural divide and engender a class solidarity that extends beyond the traditional target audience of Socialism. Indeed, it would not be until 1931 that Johannes R. Becher would publicly call for a Socialist literature that could also address the rural working classes, young people and women – the principal addressees of Zur Mühlen's literature throughout the 1920s.35

EJUS also makes more of a concerted attempt to address its female readers than previous Desberry novels. For the most part, Zur Mühlen's earlier female Krimi characters are consistent with the typical femmes fragiles and fatales of contemporary Anglophone crime novels from this period. EJUS breaks with these conventions by depicting the political agency of its female characters. Initially, Ethel Bright, the daughter of ruthless factory owner Henry Bright, appears to follow in the footsteps of previous femmes fragiles, Winifred Cardiff and Grace Mathers. However, unlike these earlier wealthy young heroines, Ethel has a pronounced social conscience. As her mother complains:

With the example of Ethel, Zur Mühlen's text challenges the notion that the appeal and relevance of Socialism is restricted to proletarian men. Nevertheless, it soon becomes apparent that, as a lone individual, she can do little to combat the capitalist system and the institutions that protect it. The reader is invited to contrast Ethel's situation with the positive example of Daisy Smith. Despite her father's dismissive comment that she is ‘nur ein Mädchen’ (EJUS, 89), she has completed her education at agricultural college and become one of the leading figures in the Federated Farmers' Labour Party. That Daisy and her fellow workers are organised reflects Zur Mühlen's growing belief in the power of organised collectives in accordance with the politics of the Communist Party. In a reversal of the traditional gendered plot line of the hero saving the damsel in distress, it is Daisy who saves her fellow workers during the armed confrontation with the right‐wing Minutemen by disabling the enemy motors and driving the getaway car. Likewise, the example of Mariposa, who is instrumental in organising workers' resistance and plays a vital role in the armed uprising to liberate the ‘Hölleninsel’, serves to reinforce this positive female role model.

The motif of the rejuvenating beauty product ‘EJUS’ is intimately connected to Zur Mühlen's discussion of women's issues. The above quotation about Ethel's appearance draws attention to the superficial bourgeois values that dictate that a woman's role is to look beautiful and attract a rich husband. Indeed, Ethel's mother Delia Bright embodies such beliefs and functions as a polar opposite to Daisy, Ethel and Mariposa. Her attempts to conform to the prevailing beauty ethic of youth have rendered Delia shallow and vain and her ritualistic, almost religious use of ‘EJUS’ assumes priority over all other matters. More importantly, the text makes clear that such whimsical luxury is achieved at the cost of the working classes. As the Socialist orator explains in his address to the workers:

Just as John Hay's ‘blauer Strahl’ was intended to benefit mankind, John Mannister's discovery, ‘sollte die Welt reicher an Schönheit und Glück machen’ (EJUS, 152), but has been prevented from doing so by profiteering bourgeois capitalists. Henry Bright is keen to exploit the low production costs and high profit margins for his own personal gain, and is unwilling to wait until the product can be produced safely. The nameless headstones in the island's graveyard symbolise the human cost of such depersonalised and ruthless methods of mass production, and thereby touch on familiar themes from Was Peterchens Freunde erzählen and ‘Der Knecht’. Workers do not benefit from the fruits of their labour, but are exploited to serve the socially conditioned vanity of upper‐middle‐class women.

Clearly, socialist comment in EJUS is integral to the plot and far more pronounced than in her previous Krimis. On the one hand, Zur Mühlen uses elements of science fiction and fantasy to present ‘EJUS’ and its production as a generalised metaphor for private ownership and capitalist exploitation. On the other, she returns to realistic depictions of the gangster‐ruled mean streets to portray the ills of a society firmly in the grasp of an oppressive, corrupt, right‐wing bourgeoisie. Her arch‐villain Henry Bright builds on the previous negative characterisation of anti‐Socialist factory‐owners Cardiff and Word. As an exemplary representative of capitalism his power is not restricted to the economic sphere. His political influence in determining education policy (EJUS, 19) and his ability to persuade religious movements to endorse and market his beauty product (EJUS, 19–20) highlight the extent to which seemingly neutral and independent institutions function to uphold and perpetuate the capitalist system. Within this system corruption and oppression abound. Society's criminality no longer consists of autonomous acts. Rather, as Tommy points out, crime, as a direct outgrowth of capitalism, is institutionalised:

Moreover, the police serve to defend the interests of these criminals rather than to protect the masses. In EJUS, unlike Der blaue Strahl, the policemen are depicted as class enemies as they were in Schupomann Karl Müller. Their anti‐Socialist, anti‐Semitic taunts build on the völkisch extremism portrayed in An den Ufern des Hudsons. In EJUS too, those elements of society considered disruptive or undesirable are removed – in this case by transportation to the ‘Hölleninsel’, where work in the factory will render them infertile and insane. Evidently, Zur Mühlen was concerned about the threat from the Right. Unlike many contemporary Communist intellectuals, who were more concerned with competition for working‐class support with the Social Democrats on the Left, Zur Mühlen identifies a primary enemy of Socialism in the right‐wing proponents of nationalism and racist theories of eugenics.

In order to overcome their subjugation Zur Mühlen's text proposes that the workers learn to question, rather than wearily accept the seemingly natural state of affairs. Fred Mannister's angry outburst functions in the same way as Paul's innocent questions in the Märchen ‘Warum?’

As a learning narrative, Zur Mühlen's text functions as a means to educate her readers politically. She offers specific examples of Socialist success. For example, Daisy learns to overcome the climate of mistrust created by the state's network of spies and secret police, which makes her initially wary of Fred Mannister. In exemplary Socialist fashion, they find common ground in their shared experience of work and successfully collaborate to prevent the kidnapping of Socialist agitator Jack Benson by right‐wing thugs. Zur Mühlen goes on to show how raising class awareness and solidarity is important on a broader scale. Functioning as a crude model of society, the ‘Hölleninsel’ demonstrates how workers can be made aware of their oppression and the possibility of change. By portraying mass rallies and revolutionary singing as the means by which these workers are galvanised into revolt, the text invites readers to draw parallels between the revolutionary uprising and the practices of the Communist Party. In keeping with the politics of her contemporaneous Märchen collections, which endorsed a specifically Soviet form of Socialism, Zur Mühlen endorses violent revolt as a means of achieving wide‐reaching social change. The Socialist orator's address to the island workers (and to readers) is laden with Communist symbolism and offers a Marxist vision for the future that reflects Zur Mühlen's faith in the Soviet model at that time.

Although the struggle may appear costly and lives will be lost, the text assures the reader that this sacrifice will be justified. With this form of happy ending the text deviates from the conventions of the crime novel, whereby the crime is solved and the status quo restored. Instead the destruction of the factory and liberation of prisoners on the ‘Hölleninsel’ results in social change. Like the mutiny in ‘Die Söhne der Aischa’ this change is restricted to a small exemplary model. However, in the same internationalist spirit, it promises to be the first step towards world liberation and, in a self‐reflexive comment on the role Zur Mühlen hopes her own socialist writing will play, Brian O'Keefe promises to report these events to the rest of the world.

Anti‐fascist Krimis

Die weiße Pest (1926)

With An den Ufern des Hudsons and EJUS Zur Mühlen had been able to exploit the contemporary fascination for America in Germany and, at the same time, express her criticism of the world's fastest growing capitalist power. One critic commented on her unsympathetic portrayal of the United States: ‘Kein amerikanischer Autor traf besser die Intensität und Brutalität des amerikanischen Alltags’.36 In the Weimar Republic America was often projected, both positively and negatively, as an image of where Europe was heading. Conversely, it could also be presented as an exotic gangster land that had no relevance to Europe. Zur Mühlen seems to have been conscious that by concentrating on American phenomena and politics, such as the Ku Klux Klan, Better America Foundation, Minutemen, and the American Legion, she risked compromising the relevance of her politics to a German audience, who might not recognise the intended parallels between these American, right‐wing, nationalist socio‐political groups and their German equivalents. Certainly, the American setting of her novels made it difficult for her to discuss in more depth the specifically German social and political issues that concerned her. Zur Mühlen had always been scathing of right‐wing politics and an integral part of her promotion of Socialism in the Weimar Republic was the condemnation of Germany's chauvinist, militarist, nationalist, and völkisch ideologies. Whereas most of her fellow Communist intellectuals tended to focus their criticism on the Social Democratic Party, Zur Mühlen demonstrates a continued concern with the danger from the Right. Right‐wing terrorism had been rife during the immediate post‐revolutionary years and many Socialist politicians and Communist leaders had been assassinated.37 Although by 1926 it seemed as though the Republic had recovered from the right‐wing Kapp‐Lüttwitz and Hitler putsches, Zur Mühlen was convinced that the threat from the Right had not been neutralised. Anti‐Semitic, anti‐Marxist, anti‐republican, and extreme nationalistic sentiments were increasingly evident in diverse sections of society. Moreover, Adolf Hitler, having recently been released from prison, was devoting his energies to re‐vitalising and re‐organising the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. Using different genres Zur Mühlen had consistently expressed her concern about the prevalence of such right‐wing sympathies since the early 1920s.38 Certainly, Germany's recent turbulent history provided material that might easily feature in Krimis and political thrillers. In her new Krimi, Die weiβe Pest, Zur Mühlen was determined to highlight the continued threat from the Right and underlined her crime novel's topicality for German readers with the sub‐heading Ein Roman aus Deutschlands Gegenwart.

Zur Mühlen published Die weiβe Pest in 1926 under the pseudonym Traugott Lehmann. This pseudonym perhaps ironises the apolitical stance of increasing numbers of people in the Republic. More importantly, it opens up the novel to a new audience outside the loyal Desberry readership. Writing under a changed pseudonym meant that Zur Mühlen could approach new material in a different way that would not frustrate the expectations of readers who were more familiar with the figures and style that had characterised her Anglo‐American Desberry novels. Elements such as the mysterious and eerie black car, cloak‐and‐dagger murders, disguises, and tense action scenes draw heavily on the trademark devices and heritage of the English and American crime novels. However, they are incorporated into an adventurous and suspenseful story about the clandestine criminal activities of a terrorist organisation that arguably conforms more to the political thriller. Die weiβe Pest is set in Berlin and revolves around the investigations of Socialist, Jewish solicitor Bernhard Birnbaum and Anna Karsten into the disappearance of her former fiancé Georg Dresde. Their search soon uncovers evidence of a series of brutal political murders carried out by the shadowy, völkisch ‘schwarze Reichswehr’, and they must recover these documents first if they are to save the lives of Dresde and the wrongfully‐arrested Communist worker Ignaz Schmidt.

Zur Mühlen's publisher, Viva, was positive about the novel's reception. It had already been serialised in left‐wing newspapers in Hamburg and Berlin which promised good sales. As Viva noted, ‘Er ist sehr spannend geschrieben, so daß ein Massenumsatz durch Hauskolportage sehr gut möglich ist’.39 Certainly the novel seems to have been influential. Zur Mühlen's thematisation of the ‘schwarze Reichswehr’ and its murderous activities prefigures novels such as ödön von Horváth's Sladek, der schwarze Reichswehrmann (1929) and Hans Fallada's Wolf unter Wölfen (1937). Die weiβe Pest is arguably the best known of Zur Mühlen's Krimis. In 1987 Manfred Altner ‘rediscovered’ it and published it with an afterword. In the light of the rising number of skinheads and increased hostility to foreigners at this time the novel was still considered topical, and in 1990 it was filmed for East German television.40

The German setting of Die weiβe Pest allowed Zur Mühlen to analyse Germany's right‐wing sympathisers in far greater depth than her previous novels. Proto‐fascism is no longer the preserve of the wealthy factory owner and his corrupt cronies and dependants. The ‘schwarze Reichswehr’ has a diverse membership that ranges across gender, class and nationality, from Hungarian Baronesses to anti‐Semitic military officers, pampered monarchists, psychologically damaged war veterans and opportunistic workers. Rather than simply vilify them, as she had with her previous right‐wing ‘baddies’, Zur Mühlen discusses the appeal of right‐wing politics to the diverse sections of society represented by these people, and explores their motivations for supporting the ‘schwarze Reichswehr’. Von Sanden, for example, represents the many Wilhelmine officers who felt humiliated by the Versailles Treaty and attributed defeat in the First World War to the ‘Novemberverbrecher’ and ‘Verrätergesindel’ (Pest, 21) who supposedly stabbed the German army in the back. His involvement in the leadership of the ‘schwarze Reichswehr’ encourages readers to draw parallels with contemporary figures such as General Hans von Seeckt, commander in chief of the Reichswehr, who encouraged commanders on a regional level to maintain close contact with various nationalist associations including the ‘schwarze Reichswehr’. More broadly, von Sanden points towards the military's nostalgia for an idealised past under the Kaiser and its resentment of the Republic.

With the example of Franz Bosching, Zur Mühlen analyses the appeal of right‐wing movements for the working classes. Although she aligns him with the forces of evil, Zur Mühlen continues to characterise workers in opposition to the upper classes and highlights his natural feeling of resentment towards the wealthy and privileged. Bosching is principally attracted to the ‘schwarze Reichswehr’ by the lifestyle it affords.

Whereas previously Zur Mühlen's criticism of factory working conditions was intended to engender class consciousness and promote Socialism, here she shows how the capitalist system's oppression of workers results in increased support for right‐wing extremism. Far from supporting the ‘schwarze Reichswehr’ out of ideological conviction, Bosching, like many of the ‘hysterische Kleinbürger’ (Pest, 80) who also support the movement, subscribes to those aspects of the right‐wing ideology that suit his own purpose. Thus, he falls foul of what Zur Mühlen had described in 1919 as the ‘bourgeois within’:

The text makes clear that Bosching's natural political home is with Communism. However, as Zur Mühlen points out, the ‘schwarze Reichswehr’ is able to capitalise on the individual's element of bourgeois greed and vanity by promising to satisfy the different and sometimes conflicting demands of its members. In doing so, it hinders the formation of proletarian class consciousness and solidarity, and lures potential supporters away from Communism. As ringleader Ilona Szentiványi comments: ‘Gesegnet sei der Hochmut des Kleinbürgers, der zwischen ihm und seinem natürlichen Verbündeten, dem Proletariat, eine Schranke errichtet’ (Pest, 76).

Having shown how the ‘schwarze Reichswehr’ attracts members with its ‘catch‐all’ promises, Zur Mühlen goes on to suggest how, on a broader public scale, the political Right exploits widespread dissatisfaction with the Republic in diverse sectors of German society and unites these disparate supporters by presenting Jews and Communists as their common enemy.

Whereas many of Zur Mühlen's earlier Märchen and Krimis had pointed towards the complicity of supposedly neutral institutions in supporting and protecting the bourgeois capitalist system, Die weiβe Pest now showed their more extreme right‐wing bias. The police turn a blind eye to the Republic's enemies on the Right, but brutally beat and arrest Communist demonstrators. The Church actively foments anti‐Marxist sentiment and the judiciary ignore the high‐ranking officials named as members of the ‘schwarze Reichswehr’. Instead, Kramowsky, the mentally disturbed worker and war veteran, whose only crime was to drive the black car, is sentenced to death. By showing the collusion of these social structures Zur Mühlen not only draws readers' attention to contemporary bias in the Weimar Republic, she also underlines the link between bourgeois capitalism and right‐wing extremism and points towards its institutionalisation.

Zur Mühlen's portrayal of political right‐wing support extends far beyond the depiction of corrupt members of parliament, such as Bulle. Her Krimis, like her Märchen, reflect the fact that her position during the mid 1920s had become very close to the KPD. Accordingly, Die weiβe Pest echoes contemporary Communist hostility towards the Social Democrats. Although Zur Mühlen is keen to point out the danger on the Right, she also portrays the Social Democratic Party's defence of the Republic, particularly against its enemies on the Left, as a betrayal of its Marxist roots. Already in 1921 she had written a satirical piece about the SPD misleading and then abandoning the workers in favour of an alliance with the Vereinigte Deutschnationale Partei and Deutsche Volkspartei.42 In 1926, she described the principal occupation of the SPD as attacking Russia and the Communists.43 Die weiβe Pest upholds the KPD's condemnation of the SPD and their supporters as Social Fascists, and criticises Social Democrat Gustav Noske, whose use of the right‐wing Freikorps to quash leftist uprisings during the early years of the Republic was well known. According to Kramowsky he has ‘seine eigenen Leute auf dem Gewissen’ (Pest, 160). Indeed, the complicity of the SPD with the aims of the ‘schwarze Reichswehr’ is such that the novel's right‐wing conspirators scoff:

This image of Social Democrats is upheld by the newspaper editor, Dampfer. He belittles and underestimates the danger of right‐wing activities as ‘ein paar verrückte junge Burschen, die schreien und brüllen, aber zu keiner Tat fähig sind’, whilst maintaining, ‘mit den Rechten sind wir fertig geworden; der Feind steht links’ (Pest, 19). In the light of so much evidence to the contrary the reader is encouraged to conclude that Dampfer is, as his name suggests, full of hot air. The text shows how easily the Right is able to exploit such fears to suit their own ends, making him effectively an accomplice to their crimes.

Despite superficial appearances, unity on the Right is shown ultimately to be brittle. The diverse and conflicting interests of selfish members whose opportunistic support and hidden agendas are motivated by personal gain soon create an atmosphere of mistrust. As Ilona notices: ‘Hier traute ja keiner dem anderen – vielleicht mit Recht’ (Pest, 81). When fellow member Lerner is arrested with false passports, individual ‘schwarze Reichswehr’ members are immediately concerned with their own alibis and safety. Rather than discuss his release, they immediately plan to betray and sacrifice him according to the principle, ‘bei uns wird nur das eigene Leben geschätzt, das der anderen ist wertlos’ (Pest, 170). Such selfish individualism and lack of principles mean that the movement quickly breaks down when it encounters difficulties.

By revealing the fragmented nature of right‐wing support behind its semblance of unity Zur Mühlen hopes to persuade readers that this enemy, although dangerous, can be defeated. Unsurprisingly, she presents Communism as the means by which this should be achieved. In contrast to the abandonment of Lerner, the Communists rally around comrade Ignaz Schmidt when he is wrongfully arrested and quickly enlist the help of left‐wing Jewish solicitor Birnbaum to fight his cause. Using familiar symbolism from her literature of this period, Zur Mühlen shows how Schmidt's feelings of panic and loneliness are relieved on hearing the ‘Internationale’ being sung outside his prison cell. Moreover, she highlights the fact that Communism is able to satisfy the escapist desires of those seeking to overcome the boredom of their daily lives in a way that the ‘schwarze Reichswehr’ cannot. Ilona, who yearns for excitement, adventure and interesting men, is bored immeasurably by ‘das gleiche Geschwätz, immer dieselben Phrasen’ of the ‘schwarze Reichswehr’. By contrast, Anna Karsten leads an exciting, action‐filled life working for the Communists. Likewise, the elderly lady Comrade Kramer finds a sense of purpose and excitement in her Communist activities. Her kindness and selflessness humble Georg Dresde who begins to doubt the anti‐Communist, völkisch propaganda that he had believed. Georg is ultimately won over by the old woman's simple account of Communist politics.

So, despite her endorsem*nt of Communist Party politics, Zur Mühlen remains consistent in the criticism of complicated Party literature and rhetoric that she articulated in Was Peterchens Freunde erzählen. She demonstrates that exemplary behaviour and basic, straightforward explanations can be far more persuasive and effective.

With this comment Zur Mühlen once again thematises the nature and purpose of her own work. Her literature should offer the escapist excitement that Ilona seeks and, at the same time, educate readers about the dangers of the Right and the positive values of Socialism in a manner that can be easily understood. The narrator alludes to this intention in a comment on Birnbaum's report at the Communist rally: ‘Mit knappen, dürren Worten schilderte er die Tatsachen, die wie ein wildes Räubermärchen anmuteten und dennoch der Wahrheit entsprachen’ (Pest, 192). Birnbaum's speech is similar to the closing moral of a fairy tale. Like Zur Mühlen's Märchen from this period it champions the example set by Soviet Russia. Using familiar revolutionary symbolism of disease and remedy, he likens the international threat of right‐wing extremism and völkisch ideology to a plague that is sweeping across Europe. Birnbaum asserts that this ‘white plague’ can only be destroyed by the flames of action, and these will be ignited from across the border by the Eastern sun's ‘mächtigen Sonnenstrahlen, die jede Krankheit zu besiegen vermögen’ (Pest, 195).

Abenteuer in Florenz (1926)

As the 1920s progressed, Zur Mühlen was aware that Europe was increasingly at risk from right‐wing extremism. By 1926 Hungary had been under the control of Miklós Horthy for six years and Italy had been under Mussolini's dictatorship for four years. In addition, increasing numbers of right‐wing, nationalist parties were active in countries across Europe. She had discussed in depth many of the specifically German aspects of this problem in Die weiβe Pest, and was likewise keen to alert her Desberry readership to the international fascist threat. Zur Mühlen's fourth Desberry novel, Abenteuer in Florenz, was first serialised in Die rote Fahne and then published in the same year as Die weiβe Pest, and shares many of the latter's political concerns. Set in Italy, the plot revolves around O'Keefe's investigation into the murder of Antonio Termetta, a leading figure in the Italian workers' movement. Just as the hero of ‘Der Muezzin’ continued to proclaim his Socialist call to arms from the beyond the grave, so it appears that Termetta's ghost continues to lead the workers in their struggle for social justice – much to his killers' unease. In the course of solving the mystery O'Keefe and his collaborators reveal an international network of fascism. By infiltrating their conference they expose the fascists' plans to continue the oppression of the workers and maintain and extend their grasp on power at all costs.

With Abenteuer in Florenz, Zur Mühlen was keen to consolidate the series she had established one year earlier with EJUS and her novel conforms to many of the expectations she had begun to create for her loyal Desberry fans. With its dark, renaissance Florentine palaces and supernatural ghosts, on the one hand, and corrupt institutions and street fighting, on the other, Abenteuer in Florenz continues to draw on and combine elements from the English and American schools of crime writing. Familiar characters from previous novels return to assist O'Keefe in his investigations and reference is made to earlier cases. Moreover, the novel reinforces many of Zur Mühlen's pro‐Socialist arguments using motifs and types that are, by now, recognisable from earlier novels. Maria Termetta and Diana Desford, for example, are characterised in the tradition of Daisy Smith and draw attention to the political agency and participation of women. Termetta's mother further highlights the cross‐generational appeal of Socialism. In turn, the continued involvement from previous novels of O'Keefe's collaborators in Britain and America functions as a small but exemplary model of left‐wing international cooperation and solidarity.

Zur Mühlen's anti‐fascist intention is far more pronounced in Abenteuer in Florenz than in her previous Desberry Krimis, which is reflected in her decision to locate the action in Italy rather than the previously favoured Anglo‐American locations. Three years before Thomas Mann's Mario und der Zauberer (1929) would address Germany's fascist tendencies with its fictionalised account of his family holiday in Forte dei Marmi, Zur Mühlen sought to alert German readers by portraying life in Italy under a firmly entrenched Fascist dictatorship. The right‐wing threat is no longer represented by terrorist organisations and dangerous splinter groups that penetrate important social structures. Rather, Fascism has already assumed an overt position of power and control over society and its institutions. Zur Mühlen revisits her criticism of the corrupt elements of the Catholic Church drawing attention to the local priest's involvement in the oppressive Fascist state. His complicity means the Fascists have access to the church‐going public and are able to use their confessions as a means of surveillance. The police and legal system persecute and harshly punish leftist sympathisers, but ignore criminals such as Dia, who has never been brought to justice for his multiple killings of left‐wing supporters. By contrast, the state is willing to invoke the death penalty for Maria ‘allen Gesetzen zum Trotz’ (Florenz, 178). Unlike the ‘hard boiled’, corrupt societies of Zur Mühlen's earlier Krimis, which are a result of the bourgeois capitalist system, in Abenteuer in Florenz they are a part of the Fascist state that has arisen directly from capitalism.

The trademark brutality of the American crime novel is used to highlight the physical violence and intimidation tactics used by the Fascists to maintain their grasp on power. When important documents are stolen from the German fascist delegate, the directorate proclaims ‘eine durchgreifende, entschiedene, und notwendige Strafaktion’ (Florenz, 87) and launches a brutal, heavy‐handed attack on the city's working quarter: ‘Friedliche Passanten wurden überfallen, blau und grün geschlagen; Schüsse knallten, Wehrlose stürtzten verwundet zu Boden’ (Florenz, 87). The involvement of the German delegate once again points towards an international fascist conspiracy and, more importantly underlines the relevance of events portrayed to the German situation. The militaristic, marching Blackshirts should also strike a chord with German readers, who are invited to recognise that the dirty fighting and indiscriminate violence of right‐wing thugs is not purely an Italian phenomenon.

Certainly, the reader is left in no doubt as to the villains of this Krimi. The Fascists are depersonalised as ‘Raubtiere’ (Florenz, 136), who are ‘gegen alle freiheitlich gesinnten Elemente’ (Florenz, 30). Unlike Die weiβe Pest, which explores the diverse social groupings that support the ‘schwarze Reichswehr’, Abenteuer in Florenz characterises the leading Fascists as abhorrent, wealthy men of status. Germany's Graf von Seckingen is egotistical, vain and self important and Hungary's reactionary Herr Ferenc von Ullain has a ‘geistloses, vulgäres Krautjunkergesicht’ (Florenz, 135). On the one hand, their status points towards the position of power that fascism is supposed to have attained in the delegates' respective countries. At the same time, it enables the text to incorporate and develop Socialist arguments about the class struggle to encourage anti‐fascism. Indeed, when Tommy disguises himself as Britain's Fascist delegate, ‘der ehrenwerte James Cartwright’, the privilege and arrogance of the upper classes is described in familiar, negative terms:

By having a former pickpocket pose successfully as a nobleman, Zur Mühlen undermines the vertical hierarchy in class structures by asserting a form of equality or even superiority on the part of Tommy. The imposing status of these men is further deflated by ridicule. The text invites the reader to laugh scornfully at the Fascist delegates who believe in ghosts and allow themselves to be threatened with an unloaded gun – in particular von Ullain, who continues to cower in the corner long after the threat has passed. By portraying the Fascists in this light, Zur Mühlen hopes to encourage a sense of empowerment in her working‐class readers and a belief that fascism can be defeated.

Nevertheless, she is careful not to dismiss the fascist threat simply as localised bullying perpetrated by cowardly, superstitious aristocrats and their brutal, thuggish henchmen. She insists that fascism is organised on an international scale and has designs on worldwide power. When Tommy and O'Keefe infiltrate the conference they, together with the reader, gain insight into strategies, ranging from calculated anti‐Semitism to war with Russia, that are designed to oppress the workers and broaden the right‐wing international power base. As Tommy comments:

Since readers are encouraged to identify strongly with Tommy, they should share his sense of outrage and likewise feel provoked to take action.

Abenteuer in Florenz makes clear that Socialism is the force that will defeat fascism and usher in a new era. Despite the appearance of international unity, the above quotation underlines the fact that the individual delegates have differing national agendas. This stands in sharp contrast to the international solidarity of the workers' movement, where supporters are willing to subordinate their own personal needs for the greater political good – notably, without the specifically German context the differences between KPD and SPD are no longer highlighted. The ideological difference between left and right‐wing supporters is thrown into relief by the actions of Termetta's mother and Fascist contact Mozzino. Whereas the old woman stands firm and refuses to divulge the whereabouts of her son when threatened by Fascist thugs, Mozzino is all too ready to betray his cause when threatened with arrest by O'Keefe. So the text reinforces the idea that persisting loyalty, courage and class solidarity, symbolised by Antonio Termetta's ‘immortality’, will ultimately overcome the temporary setbacks and validate the sacrifices. Certainly, in the short term, the international cooperation of the Irish reporter and his American protégé with the Italian workers' movement results in the successful sabotage of the Fascist conference. The fact that the movement has not been defeated, however, should linger in the reader's mind. Nevertheless, the text ends on a familiarly optimistic and self‐reflexive note, describing O'Keefe's article on the events in Florence as a ‘Fanfarenruf durch alle Länder’:

Lawrence H. Desberry gestorben?

Im Schatten des elektrischen Stuhls (1929)

It would be three years before Zur Mühlen returned to writing Krimis. During this interim period she devoted the majority of her time to her work as a translator. Since the end of the First World War she had been responsible for translating and promoting the works of Upton Sinclair in Germany and, of the seven novels she translated and published between 1926 and 1929, five were his. By the late 1920s Sinclair was renowned as the American Socialist writer and publishing his books had become a profitable business for the Malik house. Zur Mühlen's translation of his novel Oil! [Petroleum] became a bestseller in 1927 but, by this time, her relationship with Malik was far from harmonious. Tension was caused by differences in opinion between Wieland Herzfelde and Zur Mühlen over the political and artistic content of Sinclair's work, and when Sinclair questioned the quality of the German translations, Herzfelde was only too keen to sideline Zur Mühlen from the business.44

Although by 1929 Zur Mühlen no longer worked as Sinclair's translator, she nevertheless continued to value his work as a weapon in the class struggle and continued to correspond with him. She had always maintained an avid interest in his writing and his influence is particularly evident in her crime writing. Zur Mühlen repeatedly reworked the specifically American issues that Sinclair had thematised in his work, such as prohibition and immigrant working conditions in city slums, into her US‐situated Krimis to lend them a credible and reassuringly recognisable backdrop. Certainly, she was not the only writer in Germany to do so. For example, Brecht's Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe owes much of its American colour to Sinclair's The Jungle (1906). Of Zur Mühlen's work Im Schatten des elektrischen Stuhls (1929) bears the most evidence of Sinclair's influence. In the light of her time spent translating his work in the years immediately preceding its publication it might not seem surprising that Zur Mühlen's fifth Desberry Krimi should have been coloured in some way by Sinclair's work. Yet it is also possible that Zur Mühlen refers to Sinclair's work more consciously. By incorporating familiar motifs and elements from his work she perhaps hoped to capitalise on his status and popularity in Germany in order to further broaden the appeal of her own work.

Im Schatten des elektrischen Stuhls is set in Miami and revolves around the relations between the factory‐owning family, Fuller, and their workers. The family's youngest son, Jack, has befriended the local workers and Socialists and his father and brother have reason to fear that when he is old enough to inherit the money left to him by his mother he will finance the workers' movement and support their strike. However, when Jack is shot dead shortly after his 21st birthday the finger of suspicion points at the Socialist worker David Gordon and it is up to the combined efforts of Brian O'Keefe, Tommy Anderson, and their friends to find the real killer before Gordon is sentenced to the electric chair. Although Im Schatten des elektrischen Stuhls seems to feature many of the customary plot devices from earlier Desberry Krimis, it does not begin to resemble a crime novel until Jack's murder and Brian O'Keefe's entrance halfway through the story. Far more, the opening chapters of the novel, which tell of the history of the Fullers and their factory in America from the 1870s to the contemporary present, draw on Sinclair's depictions of late nineteenth‐century labour relations, when workers had to fight for the right to organise, to strike and to picket for shorter working hours and higher wages. King Coal (1914), in particular, seems to have been a rich source of inspiration. Sinclair's story of mining life as experienced by Hal, the son of a capitalist mine owner, finds a parallel in Zur Mühlen's account of Jack, the son of a capitalist factory owner, who befriends the workers of his father's factory and experiences their life in the slums of Fullersville. Zur Mühlen's central motif, the workers' strike, recalls the 1914 Colorado coalminers' strikes, on which King Coal is based. Both novels describe how the workers, like the historical miners of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, are evicted from their homes and establish a tent colony, which is ultimately burned down by company representatives. With her description of the workers' funerals Zur Mühlen even refers to the silent demonstration led by Sinclair past John D. Rockefeller's house in protest at the historical events. In the novel the route of the silent funeral march leads to Fuller's house, where the coffins of those killed are laid down in accusation.

Under the influence of Sinclair, Zur Mühlen's attention returns from its focus on right‐wing, völkisch, political threats in Die weiβe Pest and Abenteuer in Florenz, to social injustice and the capitalist system, where the greed of the unscrupulous bourgeoisie is responsible for the suffering and misery of the working classes. Like his literary predecessors in the Desberry series, factory owner Daniel Fuller is a powerful and ruthless figure with allies in politics, the police and the courts. As an anti‐unionist, he is willing to use these institutions to oppress dissenting workers who challenge his authority.

He is further vilified by his rejection of his weaker son Jack in accordance with a kind of fascist Social Darwinism: ‘Krüppel kann man überhaupt nirgends brauchen’ (Stuhl, 10). This rejection functions to push Jack towards the workers, whose generosity and warmth stand in stark contrast to the behaviour of his own family. His childish, naive surprise at the contrast between his own lifestyle and that of the overworked, poverty‐stricken workers is reminiscent of Paul's questions in the fairy tale ‘Warum?’ and highlights many of the problems of working life thematised in Zur Mühlen's earlier Märchen and short stories. Thus, Im Schatten des elektrischen Stuhls offers a critique of capitalism that is coloured by Sinclair and consistent with her established conception of social injustices.

As in previous novels, Zur Mühlen's remedy for the ills of capitalism is found in Socialism. Yet, whereas novels such as EJUS advocate violent revolutionary activity, under the influence of Sinclair Im Schatten des elektrischen Stuhls portrays the strike as the workers' most powerful weapon. Despite the American setting German readers would have been able to identify significant parallels between industrial relations in the Weimar Republic and those depicted in the novel. Calvin Fuller's re‐introduction of the eleven‐hour working day mirrors the revocation of the eight‐hour working day by German employers shortly after the revolution. Likewise, when returning soldiers from the First World War flood the labour market, Calvin Fuller is able to lower wages despite rising inflation and fire those workers who object. As in Sinclair's novel, organising the workers to resist their exploitation proves difficult. Drawing on The Jungle and her own Märchen ‘Der Droschkengaul’, Zur Mühlen shows how impoverished immigrant workers are exploited as strike breakers by the profit‐orientated industrialists – a move which sabotages attempts to raise class awareness and solidarity. The text does not seek to romanticise the strike. Conditions in winter are harsh and when the strike kitchens are shut and electricity to their houses is cut off by the factory owner the workers have to ration their food and huddle together, teeth chattering, in the unheated rooms. However, the decision to strike is shown to transform dramatically their bleak and desperate lives.

Importantly, this solidarity is not restricted to industrial workers and the typical targets of Communist propaganda. The Socialism proposed by Zur Mühlen in Im Schatten des elektrischen Stuhls no longer adheres so strictly to Communist Party politics and the Soviet model. Perhaps in reference to her own relationship with the Party there is a hint of criticism in her depiction of Jack's reception in the workers' movement. Whereas previous works had stressed the importance of the collective above individual worth, Im Schatten des elektrischen Stuhls begins to call into question this principle. As Jack complains:

Unlike earlier texts, there is no comment from the narrator to encourage the reader to sympathise exclusively with Jack or David and the issue is left unresolved. In this sense, the text points towards later developments in Zur Mühlen's politics and to her later move away from Communism and towards a left‐wing Catholicism.

In relation to this slight shift in perspective, it is interesting to note the text's treatment of religion and the Church. On the one hand, the priests are still accused of being an integral part of the capitalist network and the well‐meaning Quakers detract from the Socialist mission by preaching forgiveness. On the other hand, Quaker, Fräulein Crack, acts as a vital, undetected messenger between Jack and the workers and her testimony in court underlines the common teaching of Catholicism and Socialism:

At a time when Communism was becoming increasingly inflexible and was competing vigorously with Social Democrats for left‐wing voters, Zur Mühlen seems to be advocating a more flexible Socialism with a wider appeal. As the Jewish worker comments: ‘Goj oder Jud ist einerlei, es gibt nur zweierlei: Ausbeuter und Ausgebeutete’ (Stuhl, 57). So she abandons the Communist practice of condemning Social Democrats as class traitors and Social Fascists and shows how the Workers' Party and Socialist Party unite to distribute together the flyers that announce the general strike. Thus, she moves away from the politics of Die weiβe Pest and begins to formulate ideas that prefigure the early Volksfront arguments of later anti‐fascist texts such as Unsere Töchter, die Nazinen (1935).

It is only when Jack is murdered shortly before he is due to inherit his fortune on his 21st birthday that the text becomes recognisable as a Krimi. The chiming of the church tower, falling snow, gunshots in the night and the unreliable witness statement all challenge the reader to solve the puzzle of Jack's death in the tradition of the English murder mystery. Importantly, the element of suspenseful courtroom drama, where the fate of an innocent man is decided, presents the opportunity for the defence lawyer to air the grievances of the working‐classes and argue an emotional case against private property and ‘die Ungerechtigkeit des kapitalistischen Systems’ (Stuhl, 171). The failure of the defence not only throws into sharp relief the bias against the workers in fundamental social institutions, such as the judiciary, but it also enables Zur Mühlen to further appropriate elements of Sinclair's work. By likening David Gordon's trial to the historical Sacco‐Vanzetti case she refers to the subject matter of Sinclair's Boston (1928). Popular belief in the impartiality of the US judicial system had been shattered by the arrest and execution, in spite of evidence to the contrary, of the Italian radicals during the ‘Red Scare’ in 1920 and there had been international demonstrations of protest. Sinclair had used the case to highlight the greed, corruption, pettiness and inhumanity of Boston's upper classes, which controlled the capitalist economic system, and Zur Mühlen sought to do similar. The case was certainly topical in Germany. In 1927 Malik had already declared its intention to publish books about it and urged Sinclair to consider writing one.45 Doubtless, Zur Mühlen wished to add her voice to those protesting against the Sacco‐Vanzetti verdict. It is possible that she also hoped to capitalise on the case's high profile and public outrage with the aim of persuading liberal, well‐meaning people to join the protests of the more radical political leftists and thus create foundations for future sympathetic collaboration. Certainly, when the workers movements engage the support of the general public in the novel, the result is ‘ein durchgreifender Sieg’ (Stuhl, 235). Not only do they achieve their demands but they also upset the brittle unity of the town's selfish businessmen, who, upset at the strike's disruption of their business, turn on Fuller. Ultimately Fuller is defeated by the exemplary combined forces of O'Keefe, Tommy, Diana Langtrey, and a united proletariat. Although this victory is achieved within a democratic framework rather than by revolutionary means, the novel ends with the familiar Socialist reiteration of international brotherhood and the promise of a dawning new era.

Conclusion

By the end of the 1920s Lawrence H. Desberry was celebrated in Germany as one of the best contemporary European crime writers and enjoyed a reputation for exciting, tension‐filled stories. His success was such that Zur Mühlen could confidently reveal her true identity without alienating those readers who believed crime writing was the preserve of Anglophone male writers. In spite of this, Im Schatten des elektrischen Stuhls would prove to be the last in the O'Keefe series. Although subsequent novels, such as Die Jagd nach Welle X … (1933), Vierzehn Nothelfer (1933), and Zwölf Gäste (1939) feature many elements and plot devices of crime fiction, none are so consciously modelled on the popular English and American crime novels that flourished in Germany in the 1920s. At a time when the Communist Party was promoting the Arbeiterkorrespondenten‐Bewegung and considering ways to develop a proletarian ‘high literature’, Zur Mühlen's specific focus on Trivialliteratur appeared controversial. In 1927 Johannes R. Becher accused her of making unnecessary admissions and compromises in her work in order to sugar the bitter pill of Socialism with petty bourgeois sweeteners. Although he would radically revise his opinions towards the end of the Weimar Republic, he spoke scathingly of the value of Trivialliteratur: ‘Solche, wenn auch massenhaft geschriebenen und verbreiteten Werke verschwinden bestenfalls gänzlich unbemerkt, mit einem wertlosen oberflächlichen Einfluß, der nicht länger anhält, als der Vorgang des Lesens dauert’.46 Whilst Becher's judgement may have informed later critics, who have dismissed her crime novels simply as revenue‐generating ‘potboilers’,47 it by no means represented the opinions of the reading public nor those of other left‐wing critics. Ludwig Foerster praised her socialist reworking of the crime novel as refreshing and effective in terms of propaganda. ‘Es ist bitter nötig, auch den Klassenkampf auf “Sensationen” hin zu untersuchen. Dabei kommt oft, wie im vorliegenden Fall, nicht nur ein interessanter Roman heraus, sondern auch – beste und eindringlichste politische Propaganda’.48 Indeed, in the light of the BPRS's later attempt to address workers' ‘trivial’ reading tastes by introducing ‘Der rote eine‐Mark‐Roman’ it can be argued that Zur Mühlen was something of a pioneer in Socialist Unterhaltungsliteratur.

Of course, artistic excellence according to bourgeois canonical standards was never Zur Mühlen's aim when writing her Krimis. She had already targeted a young readership with her socialist Märchen and now sought a similarly popular and readable genre that she could appropriate to convey her socialist worldview to adults. The crime novel was particularly well suited for this purpose. Such a formulaic, plot‐driven form of literature did not require deep psychological characterisation of its protagonists nor long descriptive paragraphs, and it was immensely popular and readable. Moreover, the influx of crime stories from Britain and America lent the genre a degree of exoticism and, in the case of the ‘hard‐boiled’ American story, an air of fashionable modernity associated with ‘Americanisms’ such as jazz.

The very subject of the crime novel opened up opportunities for Zur Mühlen to discuss the ‘crimes’ of capitalism. She experimented with the different styles and conventions of English and American crime novels to convey her belief that capitalist society was the precondition for the crimes perpetrated in her stories. By adhering quite strictly to the model of the English murder mystery, Zur Mühlen was obliged to compromise Der blaue Strahl's socialist comment. As a result she turned to the American ‘hard‐boiled’ crime novel, which seemed to afford a broader criticism of society – as Raymond Chandler later put it: ‘A world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities […] a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money‐making’.49 Murder in her later American‐style Krimis is no longer the anti‐social impulse of the wronged worker seeking revenge for his exploitation, nor is it the preserve of the isolated, villain concocting his diabolical plots in the privacy of his own study. Rather it is portrayed as the direct outgrowth of life in a modern capitalist society. The fundamental structures that support the fabric of society are corrupted by wealth and greed, which renders them pawns in the hands of the capitalist owners of property and the means of production.

This critique of capitalist society forms a familiar backdrop to Zur Mühlen's Krimis, whose focus and politics are modified according to contemporary socio‐political developments. Like Zur Mühlen's early Märchen, her early Krimis highlight social injustice and stress the need for change but fall short of championing armed revolutionary struggle as a means of transforming society. EJUS, by contrast, demonstrates Zur Mühlen's growing belief in the Soviet model of Socialist success and offers to its readers the positive example of a successful workers' uprising. Her adherence to KPD politics is likewise evident in Die weiβe Pest, where she condemns Social Democrats as class traitors. However, this does not mean that she slavishly promotes the Communist Party line. Indeed, her choice of genre is itself evidence of this. Unlike many of her intellectual comrades she does not underestimate the threat from the Right and is keen to warn her readers of its chauvinistic, nationalistic, völkisch ideologies. In Die weiβe Pest she offers a penetrating analysis of the fragmented and tense political situation in the Weimar Republic, which she would later use to great effect in Unsere Töchter, die Nazinen (1935). Interestingly, in Zur Mühlen's final Krimi her enthusiasm for Communist revolutionary politics appears to have waned. It is possible that Im Schatten des elektrischen Stuhls was heavily influenced by Sinclair and therefore endorses his view that social change could be effected from within the existing democratic system. However, her questioning of mass and individual identity and the treatment of non‐proletarian members contrasts with her previous black and white depictions and is perhaps an early hint of her later disillusionment with Communism.

Despite Foerster's positive comments about her Krimis' effectiveness as propaganda there are certain fundamental tensions that arise from her attempts to appropriate the genre for a socialist purpose. Dennis Porter argues that the genre is, in principle, ideologically reversible: ‘There is no structural impediment preventing a detective novel from choosing as its investigator an agent of either the KGB or CIA since, once the principle of heroic male action against an enemy is conceded, such identifications occur at the level of surface ideological variables’.50 However, Zur Mühlen does not attempt to reverse the ideology in this fashion. Far more, she was concerned to raise class awareness by highlighting the ills of capitalism and to reassure the reader that the forces of good, in the form of Socialism, will prevail. As she points out in ‘Wohltäter der Menschheit’:

Certainly, Zur Mühlen does effectively call into question the forces of order in state and society, and she offers a positive image of Socialist solidarity. However, with the exception of EJUS, where the islanders overthrow their oppressors, in most of the novels the reassuring restoration of justice is achieved within the existing social framework and the preservation of law and order is championed. O'Keefe does not fight for the release of Maria Termetta, for example, who avenged the death of her brother. Rather he demands life imprisonment. Of course, Zur Mühlen's later works do thematise corruption in the judiciary and police and question the ability of the capitalist system to deal satisfactorily with crime. However, there still remains a tension between the revolutionary rhetoric and reformist action which suggests that victories can be achieved from within the current social order. Thus the closing revolutionary and moralising speeches at the end of her novels risk being compromised by the feeling of relief and reassurance that she aims to engender in her readers when the elimination of a threat results in the victory of good and the restoration of well being. It is perhaps for reasons such as these that Zur Mühlen turned away from the Krimi at the end of the 1920s in search of new genres and new audiences.