I Still Have a Suitcase in Berlin — Stephens Gerard Malone

A delicately nuanced and profoundly resonant novel about a young Canadian caught up in the heart of Germany's mid-century rise to nationalism, war and genocide.

In 1932, Michael Renner arrives in Berlin to care for his elderly grandmother. Entranced by a city that is surging in spirit, buoyed after years of depression by the rising tide of National Socialism, Michael never goes home. He marries and becomes a father, even works for his father-in-law, auctioning the property of persecuted Jews.
While his family and friends reassure Michael that the cruelties of nationalization are a necessity, he strays. Berlin's legendary sexual underworld proves too irresistible an intrigue and solace -- as does his unrequited love for a promiscuous and difficult little man he meets in those mad cabarets, whose masochistic theatre can only mimic the spiralling violence on the streets above.

I Still Have a Suitcase in Berlin is a deceptively subtle story about the way ordinary people slip naively into horror, and how in times of moral chaos, disgrace might be the only place a man of conscience can live with himself.