Don Ricardo

Previously known as A Good ManDON RICARDOBerlin, 1938. Reinhardt Voss hosts a barbecue. The bratwurst is excellent. The neighbors adore him. His daughter sits on his shoulders. His roses are in bloom.Reinhardt is also an SS officer who has just designed the filing system that will catalogue six thousand Jewish families for deportation.He doesn't see a contradiction. That's the problem.Told entirely in Reinhardt's voice — charming, erudite, meticulous, monstrous — Don Ricardo traces one man's journey from a Heidelberg philosophy doctorate to the architecture of the Holocaust. He optimizes transport schedules the way he prunes roses: with care, with precision, with pride. He plays Bach in rooms where the smoke from crematoria drifts through the open window. He places a fresh flower on the desk of the Jewish translator whose deportation order he will sign.He is never cruel. He is always polite. He washes his hands ten thousand times and they are never clean.From the offices of the Reich to the gas chambers of Birkenau to the ruin of Berlin to a quiet garden in Buenos Aires, Don Ricardo is a novel about the most dangerous kind of evil — the kind that holds the door open for you, remembers your name, and never raises its voice."He chose instead to replace my rose." Read more