The story is about Hollywood director Dixon Greenwood, who has made one highly acclaimed film, “Summer, 1921,” set in Germany. 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.” At 64, he decides to spend a few months in Berlin at a think tank that, like the real American Academy, is located on the Wannsee, the 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 reinspire 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 vanished, is intriguing. But what holds you from start to finish are the elegiac passages that have the rich taste of a full-bodied wine, and the ruminations and conversations that dwell on Dixon’s expat status, the resentment of East Germans of all things American, and the ghosts of Germany’s past. Looking at farmland that conceals the remains of a hundred thousand German and Russian soldiers, Just writes: “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.
