TRANSLATED AMERICAN ORIGINALS and homegrown detective fiction with American-style settings, heroes, and narratives first appeared in Germany during the late Wilhelmine period, grew in popularity during the Weimar Republic, and survived even into the peacetime dictatorship of the 1930s. But it was after 1945 that the homegrown Americanized detective story, written by Germans for Germans, achieved dominance in the mass West German pulp market. This occurred during the compulsory Westorientierung of politics, state, and much of public life in the occupation and Adenauer eras.

However, the Americanized detective story’s postwar ascendancy proceeded alongside an absence of reflection in the broader culture on the troubling evolution of the real, supposedly detoxified organs of West German policing and criminal investigation. We can see this problematic juxtaposition in the success of the thousands of pulp novels featuring the American FBI agent “G-Man Jerry Cotton,” which the Cologne-based Bastei Verlag started publishing in 1954. Three years previously, the Federal Criminal Police Office (the BKA/Bundeskriminalamt)—the reallife West German counterpart to the American FBI—had begun operations in nearby Wiesbaden. The massive extent to which the leadership cadre of the BKA during its first two or three decades had been previously involved in the middle echelons of the Nazi police system has only begun to be documented by research finally undertaken in the early twenty-first century. Until the 1980s the BKA received almost no attention, realistic or unrealistic, in German pulp fiction; its Nazi roots were certainly never addressed in what few popular depictions emerged.

Instead, as a capstone to a long prewar tradition of American-style detectives in German pulps, the postwar Jerry Cotton series has enjoyed great popularity until today—ironically, by fetishizing a narrow and deceptively technical “authenticity” in its portrayal of an ideal liberaldemocratic security agency in another country. These hugely popular weekly stories have cemented into two or three generations of German postwar consciousness a kind of mythic, transatlantic-mimetic template for imagining the work of the plainclothes guardians of an open society. Independently of the Bonn government’s propaganda for political reeducation, Jerry Cotton rose to prominence as a kind of commercial counterpoint to these official programs of politische Bildung, at a point in the young Federal Republic’s history when it was busily defining itself as a state committed to a suitably liberal-democratic relationship between society and police.