March Violets
March violets (German: Märzveilchen) were late joiners to the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) who enrolled primarily after the party's seizure of power on 30 January 1933 and the subsequent Reichstag election of 5 March 1933, driven by careerist motives rather than prior ideological allegiance.[1][2] The term, evoking the early-spring blooming of violet flowers, was employed derogatorily by longtime Nazi members to disparage these newcomers as opportunistic "blooms" who attached themselves to the movement only when its dominance appeared assured, thereby diluting the party's revolutionary purity.[1][3] This influx strained party resources and prompted internal resentments, with early adherents viewing March violets as unreliable careerists who sought advantages in employment, promotions, or social standing under the new regime.[2][4] While the NSDAP initially welcomed such growth to consolidate power, the phenomenon highlighted tensions between genuine converts and self-interested entrants, influencing later membership restrictions to curb further dilution.[2]Publication and Background
Authorship and Writing Process
Philip Kerr, born in Edinburgh in 1956, initially pursued studies in law before entering the advertising industry as a copywriter, working for prominent agencies such as Saatchi & Saatchi.[5] By the late 1980s, Kerr shifted to full-time fiction writing, leaving advertising in 1989 to focus on his debut novel, March Violets, the first in what became the Bernie Gunther series.[6] This transition marked his deliberate pivot from commercial copywriting to historical thrillers, driven by a long-germinating idea for a story centered on a detective navigating 1930s Berlin.[7] While still employed in advertising, Kerr devoted significant time to preliminary research for the novel, conceptualizing a Berlin-based policeman operating amid the 1936 political landscape.[7] His writing process emphasized grounding the narrative in verifiable historical details, drawing on accounts of Nazi-era bureaucracy, urban life, and institutional corruption to construct an authentic setting rather than relying on generalized depictions.[8] This approach involved synthesizing contemporary histories and eyewitness-derived materials to reflect the causal mechanics of totalitarian control, avoiding romanticized or sanitized views of the period.[9] Kerr's authorship blended the hardboiled detective tradition—evident in stylistic nods to Raymond Chandler's archetypal private eyes—with historical fiction, adapting the noir genre's cynicism to illuminate opportunism and moral compromise under National Socialism.[10] His intent was to expose the regime's pervasive ethical decay through a protagonist's investigations, prioritizing realism over ideological endorsement or evasion, as evidenced by the novel's unsparing portrayal of power structures that rewarded late adherents to the movement for personal gain.[11] This fusion allowed Kerr to critique totalitarian dynamics causally, linking individual actions to systemic incentives without moral equivocation.[12]Publication History
March Violets, the debut novel in Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther series, was first published in the United Kingdom in 1989 by Viking.[13] The book appeared in the United States in 1990 under Penguin Books.[14] In 1994, Penguin issued an omnibus edition titled Berlin Noir, repackaging March Violets alongside Kerr's subsequent novels The Pale Criminal (1990) and A German Requiem (1992) as a trilogy.[15] This collection totaled 848 pages and highlighted the interconnected early entries in the series.[16] The novel has seen numerous reprints, including paperback editions by Penguin UK in 2016 and Penguin Random House in various formats.[17] March Violets has been translated into multiple languages, including French as part of La Trilogie berlinoise and Modern Greek.[18] As of 2025, no major film or television adaptations of the novel itself have been produced, though a broader Bernie Gunther series adaptation is in development by Apple TV+ focusing on later books.[19]