The Latest at Goethe

It is not always easy for Germans to understand Greeks, but it is especially important now in times rife with misunderstandings and moroseness. Those who are willing to try can be helped by crime author, translator and, since Wednesday, bearer of the Goethe Medal, Petros Markaris. By Christiane Schlötzer

A good ten years ago, a Greek friend of mine placed the first detective novel by Petros Markaris in my hands: Hellas Channel. “Read this!” he said. “Then you’ll understand our country better.” That is how I got to know Inspector Costas Haritos, the cantankerous murder investigator with a gentle soul who crumbles in the face of his superiors, then deftly ignores their orders. I surmised that this anti-hero with a love of simple Mediterranean fare must be the author’s alter ego.

Far from it! Petros Markaris doesn’t chug through the Athens traffic jams in a rickety Fiat Mirafiori, now mere legend since the crisis. Markaris doesn’t drive at all. He conquers Athens’ asphalt jungle on foot. Yes, per pedes, me ta podia! The author is a big city flâneur, who, like Karl Kraus, is a professional pedestrian. How un-Greek! But Markaris is also not a bourgeois Greek like his inspector; indeed he is not even Greek, at least not in the usual sense of the word.

The best way to track down this man – who always seems to be in motion – is to follow in his footsteps, for example by reading his city guidebook Quer durch Athen. I doubt that any writer has recently given any European capital a more loving and informative portrait. Markaris explores the centre and suburbs of Athens along the Ilektrikos, the over-100-year-old city railway. He only gets excited about those districts where opposites are more than obvious, where “faux leather jackets and fur coats” stroll side-by-side, where cheap amusement shanties and squat houses of refugees from Asia Minor have survived between bourgeois villas. Markaris is bored when everything is sleek.


City wanderer Markaris may be walking about Athens, where he has lived since the mid-1960s, but he always has another indelible map in his head: that of Istanbul. That is where Petros Markaris, for whom Armenian was the father tongue and Greek the mother tongue, learned his southern-sounding German at the Austrian Sankt-Georgs-Kolleg.

His Istanbul roots gave him an inner distance to his chosen home of Greece, lending Petros Markaris’s books their ironic, sarcastic tone and making the author such a clear-sighted commentator of the crisis years in Greece. The simple patriotic reflex does not work for him. “I stand by Brecht,” he says, “rather than loving my home, I describe its character.” This has made Markaris a mediator between the fronts, an ambassador without portfolio, in times rife with misunderstandings and moroseness. Germans and Greeks have not railed against one another, mutually misunderstood one another like this for more than half a century. Markaris asks himself why for many Greeks Germans have suddenly become Nazis again when they were only recently received with open arms, and why conversely German tabloids so bluntly agitate against the “slackers” in the south.

Anyone who speaks with him knows how painful this is to him. He repeatedly reminds the people of Greece that millions of their fellow citizens were themselves refugees from Asia Minor. And he asks the Germans not to add fuel to the flames. “Both sides would benefit very much,” wrote Markaris, “if the Greeks would add a tad more reason to their passion and Germans a tad more compassion to their reason.”


Petros Markaris’s father, a merchant in the Istanbul of 1948, saw German as the language of the future. His father was “sorely mistaken” says Markaris. But the choice of a school and a language later took him to Vienna where he chose to study Greek literature on the grounds that he could never imitate elegant Viennese German. In Greece many did not discover Markaris until his novels became bestsellers in German translation. It was less well known that he previously wrote very successful plays and TV screenplays and was a congenial co-author with his friend, film director Theo Angelopoulos. Not to mention the translation of Goethe’s Faust I and II, for which Markaris, as he says, “sacrificed five years of his life.”

As a crime thriller writer Markaris cites Georges Simenon and Ed McBain as his role models. They too recognized the genre’s usefulness for social criticism. Even his pre-crisis novels were highly topical and explored recent history from the civil war to the military junta. Reading them will teach one a great deal about Greece.

Petros Markaris never seems to lose hope. He says, “When I look back at my life, I see that I lived in countries that repeatedly stood at a crossroads, meaning that they repeatedly started over again.” Like Markaris himself.

The article is an abridged version of the commemorative speech held for Petros Markaris in Weimar by Christiane Schlötzer, the Istanbul correspondent for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, at the awarding of the Goethe Medal.