The story is about a Hollywood movie director in his 60s who has lost his audience. Dixon Greenwood made one highly acclaimed film, “Summer, 1921,” set in Germany, but his career has sputtered out in the 30 years since then. “L.A. is a bad town when you’re not working,” he tells his wife. “It’s like being a stowaway on shipboard, but everyone knows you’re there, hiding in the lifeboat.” He decides to take up an offer to spend a few months in Berlin at a think tank that, like the real American Academy, is located on the Wannsee, the placid lake where Hitler’s lieutenants planned the “final solution.” Dixon hopes a return to the scene of his earlier success–and escape from an America that overwhelms him–might re-inspire him.
It does. How this happens, along with the reappearance of Jana, the young woman who emerged from nowhere to star in “Summer, 1921” and then mysteriously vanished, is intriguing. But as Just admits, “Plotting is not my long suit.” What holds the reader from start to finish are the precisely etched scenes, the elegiac passages that have the taste of a full-bodied wine and the ruminations and conversations that are more in keeping with early-20th-century American literary tradition than with the staccato style of most contemporary novels.
That’s hardly an accident; Just is an unabashedly old-fashioned writer. When he abandoned a successful journalism career for fiction as a young man, he first went to Spain and thought that “Hemingway was permanently perched on my shoulder.” He continues to write his novels on a 40-year-old Smith Corona typewriter, smoking a couple of packs of unfiltered Camels a day and sipping his Bordeaux. Little wonder that he has an expatriate gene, which prompted him to live in Paris from 1986 to 1992, and to keep returning as often as he can. “I loved the way of life over there, the two-hour lunches, the whole thing,” he muses, pointing out that he produced four books during his Paris sojourn. “I’ve never been so productive. It’s something in the air.”
For all his Francophile tendencies, Just’s preoccupation with Germany is nothing new. Earlier books like “The Translator” and “The American Ambassador” were also set in Germany and grappled with German themes, from terrorism to guilt. He has distant German roots. “Although I don’t hold with ancestral memories, I have a weird affinity for the place,” he says.
So does Dixon, who is fascinated by the eastern Germans in particular, with their disdain for America and capitalism, and the way they live with the ghosts of their recent past. Oblivious of how he sounds to an outsider, a retired schoolteacher describes how he and other soldiers tried to fight off the Red Army but were “overwhelmed by the Dark Ages.” As he explains, “Some of them looked like animals, mixed Slav and Asian blood.” Unlike with western Germans, there’s little in the way of political correctness. Quite the contrary. Just has captured the voices that many visitors rarely hear.
In “The Weather in Berlin,” Dixon’s creativity is a product of advice from his father, a legendary raconteur, who tells him to always listen to the stories people tell. “Listen to the words and the music, too, the cadence,” he insists. “That was the way you came to know people, by the stories they told and the manner of their telling.” It happens to be good advice for readers of Just’s novels, especially this one.
Looking at frozen farmland that conceals the remains of 100,000 German and Russian soldiers, Just has Dixon thinking: “Eyesight only yielded so much. All the rest was imagination if you were a stranger, memory if you were not.” Just’s imagination guides us on this journey, but it’s the stops along the way that count as much as the destination.
