A spectacular cold case from 1930s Berlin – the new book by the bestselling author.

DAS VERSCHWINDEN DES DR. MÜHE
(Dr Mühe’s Disappearance)
by Oliver Hilmes
Penguin Random House Germany, August 2020 (voir catalogue)

During the final months of the Weimar Republic, a highly regarded doctor disappears. His sports car is found abandoned on the shores of a lake near Berlin. The homicide division investigates and discovers that the respectable medic’s carefully cultivated façade has been hiding a shady double life, whose trail leads from Berlin all the way to Barcelona. Oliver Hilmes has reconstructed this sensational and puzzling case from files discovered in Berlin’s regional archive. Enriched with fictional touches, Dr Mühe’s Disappearance is the gripping and ingenious story of the search for truth, and of the dark side of middle-class life on the eve of dictatorship.

Oliver Hilmes, born in 1971, studied history, politics and psychology in Marburg, Paris and Potsdam. He is the author of bestselling biographies of Alma Mahler-Werfel, Cosima Wagner, Franz Liszt and Ludwig II. His award-winning bestseller Berlin 1936: Sixteen Days in August was translated into several languages.