The Divided City

by Luke McCallin

  Millions are you—and hosts, yea hosts, are we,

  And we shall fight if war you want, take heed.

  Yes, we are Scythians—leafs of the Asian tree,

  Our slanted eyes are bright aglow with greed.

  Some words, Reinhardt thought, were prophetic. He had thought it then, the first time he had heard the poem in 1919, still largely bedridden after the war with his injury, and he thought it now. They had thought they had the Russians bested at the end of the first war, thought they had the measure of a brave but fragile enemy, but Reinhardt remembered . . . He remembered the sense of vastness that loomed beyond the Russian front lines. He remembered nights of moonlit clarity, pushing his eyes as far as he could out and over snow-clad hills lined and rumpled across a far gray horizon. He remembered marching, marching over landscapes of devastating emptiness, through forests of pillared darkness that, despite the teeming multitudes that passed beneath and between their cathedral gloom, seemed never to have known the touch or sound of men. How could they have done it again, he wondered, thinking back to that expanse, that endless frontier that had almost swallowed his son, and swallowed so many other men. Swallowed nations and whole peoples. How could they have stirred that far horizon to anger?

  How could they now regret what they had called down upon themselves?

  People began filtering out from the platform where the train sat wreathed in steam. Men, women, children, farmers, the poor, the not-so-poor, more refugees from the east, Red Army men. The station filled with noise that was curiously empty, the cacophony of steps and sounds and words a crowd produced sucked up through the open roof, not reverberating back down and around. He rose to his feet to check on Mrs. Meissner, seeing her still with her friends, and he moved slightly to keep her in view, leaning back against the wall and lighting a cigarette.

  “I like trains. Did I ever tell you that?”

  The voice came from behind him. It froze him solid, his cigarette spiraling smoke up into his eye. He swallowed, lifting a hand to it.

  “You did. Once. I presume I should not turn around.”

  “That’s right,” Markworth said. “Best you don’t.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Playing fool’s games, Reinhardt. What else?” There was a light note to his voice. “How’s your head?”

  “Sore. You’re not going to hit me again, are you?”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not here to cause trouble. But I couldn’t leave without knowing. What gave me away? I’m curious.” Markworth asked, as if there were no urgency.

  “The tap,” Reinhardt said, as he drew deeply on his cigarette. “The first time we met, when we argued about whether Carlsen had been in Noell’s rooms. You asked me were his prints in the apartment. You asked, ‘Were his prints on the tap?’ The one tap. How would you know that if you had not seen it, been there yourself?”

  “That’s it?” chuckled Markworth incredulously.

  “The first thing. There were others. Your German kept giving you away. You asked what went wrong with ‘us’ once. You hid it, but I know you meant what went wrong with ‘us Germans.’”

  “There’s more?”

  “You knew idioms. Sayings. Expressions. I reasoned only an Allied agent could move across Germany leaving all those bodies. It all built up. And you didn’t react when I told you Noell had a twin brother, because you knew already. That was why you murdered Theodor Noell with water. You knew who he was.”

  “What else?”

  “The times the accusations of me murdering Stresemann, or having something to do with his murder, were the times I came close. You put Fischer up against me, hoping he would injure me enough to get me off the case. When that didn’t work, you used my baton on Stresemann’s body. When that didn’t work, you arranged for the baton to be found.”

  “I did. I’m sorry. None of it would’ve stuck, you know. And if it had, I’d have done what I could to help.”

  “I know.” And Reinhardt believed it.

  “Anything else?”

  “The Royal Marines. How, I wondered, did a former tanker and now a liaison officer in the occupation know where to find commandos?”

  “When I was captured, the British did not hold me long. A Brandenburger’s skills made a good match for a commando’s.”

  “You took a risk with them, Markworth. They might have talked.”

  “You were a risk worth taking, Reinhardt.”

  Reinhardt said nothing, holding himself still around those simple words.

  “What a curious couple we made, Reinhardt. I wanted to congratulate you on the trap too. Releasing Noell, then making sure he went to where you were waiting so there was no need to tail him. You fooled me. Well done.”

  “Was Carlsen really your friend?” Reinhardt asked suddenly.

  “He really was.”

  “Why did you kill him?”

  There was a long silence, but Reinhardt knew he was still there.

  “I did not mean to. I suspected he was on to me. He worked in the war crimes division, investigating men like Lütjens. He was angry when he died, and then when I killed another of Lütjens’s team, he suspected foul play. Something I said must have put him onto me. We talked a lot, a bit like you and I did. About the past. About justice. About revenge. But I had no idea he had begun following me, or at least keeping track of where I went. He surprised me that night at Noell’s apartment. I . . . I killed him without thinking. It felt . . . almost as if someone else did it.”

  “Maybe someone else did. A man called Leyser.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I make no excuses for you, Markworth. But I knew men in the first war. And afterward. Their experiences . . . divided them . . . from the men they were.”

  “You mean shell shock? You mean all this time it’s a shrink I’ve needed, not revenge?” He was silent, and when he spoke again the levity had faded from his voice. “Maybe you’re right. Sometimes . . . sometimes I felt like two men. But I won’t take that for an excuse. I knew what I was doing.”

  “And now? How does it feel now?”

  “How did it feel when you handed over those Ustaše to the Partisans?”

  “It felt right,” Reinhardt admitted. Markworth said nothing. “So you found Gieb and persuaded her to help in exchange for ridding her of Stresemann.”

  “Carlsen already knew her. I simply convinced her to help, and then got her out of the city once she had done so. Her price was Stresemann.”

  “Your one good deed. May I ask you a question?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Your limp. You limped as Markworth, not as Leyser.”

  “Leyser was wounded when his camp was shot up, and wore a leg brace, my friend. Easier to move around that way. Leyser . . . I . . . removed it when . . .”

  “. . . when Leyser became Markworth,” Reinhardt finished.

  “God, maybe I am as much of a mess as you seem to think I am,” Markworth muttered. “How is your friend?” he asked, after a moment.

  “Brauer is fine. Annoyed you got past him a second time. Annoyed you knocked him out again. There’s not many claim that distinction.”

  “I’m honored then. Give him my best regards.”

  This was becoming ridiculous, Reinhardt thought, and maybe Markworth thought the same. There was another silence, heavier, and Reinhardt felt the distance beginning to sink in. He knew, by rights, he should turn. Turn and confront him. Call for help. It would be the right thing, but the wrong thing. It would be a gesture, nothing more. But then, were not gestures all that were sometimes needed? A man who stood up for a friend. A woman who brought a neighbor help in times of need. Someone who offered a seat on a crowded train to an elderly Jew. Someone who would not follow a law that made no sense. There had been a time and a place for all those gestures, and Reinhardt knew he had not
made them as often as he should have, when the opportunity had presented itself. Was this, then, such a time, and if so, which way to fall . . . ?

  “Lift a drink for me one day, Reinhardt. Yes? Maybe in that bar. A molle, and maybe a toast. To times and men that might have been.”

  He was gone, then. Reinhardt could feel it. He waited a moment, then turned, but saw no one and he knew Markworth could be anyone. He could have been that Red Army soldier tickling a little girl under her chin as he offered her an apple. Or he could have been that man who hunched his shoulders around as if lighting a cigarette. Or perhaps the blind veteran with a stick, sounding his way across the station’s concourse.

  Any of them, and none of them. He had faded away. As he was trained to.

  Up at the barrier, Mrs. Meissner was waving to him. A group of newcomers had gathered around her, people from the train, the commission from Belgrade in black coats and with bags lumped around their feet. Someone was reading a speech, and a little girl held up a bouquet of flowers to one of the visitors. Mrs. Meissner was talking to a woman, and the woman looked across the concourse, searching, until she found Reinhardt. She walked toward him and took off her hat to reveal a spill of white-blonde hair, and Reinhardt’s heart, which had broken on a sunny hillside in Bosnia, seemed to suddenly knit itself back together and began to beat again, to beat and fill all those places within him that he thought had withered and died.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  Whereas I was fortunate enough to have lived in Bosnia for six years, and so was able to use much of what I had seen and learned and done in crafting The Man from Berlin and The Pale House, I was faced with a very different situation for The Divided City. When considering occupied Germany and Berlin and the postwar years, the reader or historian can be overwhelmed by the quantity and quality of information.

  The Divided City does not aim to be a novel about postwar Germany: It is the story of one man’s investigation through Berlin in early 1947. As such, I have related events through Reinhardt’s eyes, resisting the temptation to wrap everything in allegory. There is no shortage of books, many of them excellent, on the situation in postwar Germany. There are so many that I will go into no great depth here on the overall situation, but rather attempt to add historical detail to those elements of the postwar context that Reinhardt was faced with in his investigation.

  —

  In early 1947, the time in which The Divided City is set, the Second World War had been over nearly two years. Although the guns had fallen silent, the war’s effects lingered on, and the peace had thrown up problems all its own.

  Following Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945, and in line with wartime Allied planning, the country was divided up into three zones of military occupation, with the French zone later added to make a fourth. The American zone was centered on Frankfurt, the British on Bad Oeynhausen, the French in Baden-Baden, and the Soviets in Berlin. Divided as it was into four sectors, Berlin was a microcosm of the occupation itself.

  In August 1945 the Potsdam Conference, the last time the leaders of the victorious powers met in person, addressed Germany’s political future. The country would be run by an Allied Control Council in Berlin. This council was to be made up of representatives—mainly military, but some civilian—who would jointly develop and implement policy and issue laws. Various subcommittees were established, including the Public Security Committee, which, in October 1946, reformed Berlin’s police force. Although the council functioned well enough initially, the tension between the Allies quickly began to come to the fore, especially concerning economic policy, denazification, and the devolution of powers back to the Germans. Some of these tensions manifested themselves in October 1946 in the first free and fair elections in Germany since 1933. Across Western Germany, parties of the social democratic type were largely victorious, often led by Germans, such as Konrad Adenauer, who had a history of resistance to the Nazis. In the Soviet zone, the Socialist Unity Party—a Soviet-enforced merger of the Social Democrats and the German Communists—was victorious, largely because it had no opposition. In Berlin, however, it was trounced in a clear rejection of the Soviets by the city’s inhabitants.

  —

  The elections, as well as the relations between the Allies, showed there were very different visions for Germany’s future and the role of Germans in it. The realities of the peace could no longer mask the divisions that the alliance against the Nazis had papered over. The treatment of former Nazis was one such issue.

  Denazification progressed very differently within the four occupation zones, with various degrees of intensity and various methods of application. The British and Americans initially proceeded with vigor and enthusiasm, but the sheer numbers of people potentially involved overwhelmed them, coupled with the need to cut the costs of the occupation by getting Germany back on its feet and diminishing as well the potential for German revanchism. They were the first to hand responsibility for denazification back to German tribunals and panels in the late 1940s, a time when relations with the Soviets were deteriorating seriously and when it seemed likely the Germans would be needed as allies.

  In the French zone, partly because the French made little distinction between Germans and Nazis, and partly because many of the officials appointed to govern it had themselves been officials in the Vichy regime, denazification never became an issue. In the Soviet zone, it took on dimensions of class warfare, with the Prussian aristocracy and officer class—men like von Vollmer—singled out for particular treatment. Their properties were seized and redistributed, and their traditional values of duty, obedience, and patriotism were considered as being coterminous with the Nazis’ values, or at the least had done nothing to inhibit the Nazis’ behavior.

  Tens of millions of Germans were potentially affected by denazification. It would have been impossible to judge them all. Many former Nazis, or men and women who had supported them, thus eventually found their way back into positions of public and private authority and even respectability under all four occupying powers. Over time, the perceived failure of denazification became a convenient, if self-serving, stick with which the Soviets and East Germans would beat the Western Allies and West Germany. The sad fact is that all four of the Allies were complicit in denazification’s qualified successes, such as the Nuremburg trials of the major offenders, and its rather glaring failures, such as the ways in which some major offenders escaped prosecution while greater numbers of lesser offenders, or even people who had barely been complicit in the Nazi regime at all, suffered severe consequences.

  —

  As part of Germany’s surrender, the Allies had access to all that country’s patents and mined its technical expertise and intellectual development to the fullest. The boost this gave to Allied economies and companies was considerable. Of particular note is the race by all the Allies, especially the Americans and Soviets, for German scientists and know-how. Thousands of Germany’s scientists, doctors, technicians, chemists, and physicists were prized and sought-after assets, wooed, cajoled, persuaded, hunted, or kidnapped and exfiltrated to the USA or USSR. The US-led Operation Paperclip, which brought hundreds of German specialists in various spheres to live and work in the US, is perhaps the most infamous example of the lengths the Allies went to, although the Soviets had a similar program. Many of these scientists had been wholly complicit in the Nazi’s terror, or at least fully aware of it, and the Allies knew it. Men like Wernher von Braun, the director of the Peenemünde experimental facility, an expert in rocketry and one of the fathers of America’s future space program, had his membership in the Nazi Party and the SS expunged and his war record altered in order for him to be brought to work in the United States.

  The human cost of German wartime scientific and technical advances was high. More people, mostly slave laborers from concentration camps, were worked to death or killed building the V2 ballistic missile than were actually killed by the weapon itself.
The Germans also used human experimentation during the war. These macabre and revolting trials on living humans such as prisoners of war, Jews, homosexuals, political prisoners, the disabled, and children, were designed to further aims such as Nazi racial theories and medical experiments, or to aid in the military effort by testing the effects of various weapons or experimental surgery techniques. The air force did indeed conduct experiments on freezing and altitude, some of which were led by Dr. Sigmund Rascher at a facility in the Dachau concentration camp. Rascher and his experiments existed, but the squadron to which Andreas Noell was posted, that supposedly tested his findings, did not, although ones similar to it assuredly did.

  Details of these experiments, and much else that the Nazi regime did, survived intact in records captured by the Allies or in the testimonies of survivors of the camps. The cliché of Germans’ mania for paperwork and records has substantial basis in fact. The complete personnel records of the Nazi Party, much of the SS’s records, as well as the records of dozens of Nazi-affiliated organizations were captured by American troops and placed in the Berlin Document Center. The armed forces’ records—the WASt, the Wehrmacht Information Office for War Losses and POWs—were also captured by the Americans and returned to Berlin where they were placed under French control. The WASt remains to this day an amazing repository of personnel information, housing millions of records of servicemen of all three branches of the German armed forces—army, navy, and air force—as well as information on prisoners, casualties, and war graves.

  —

  The divisions between the Allies were unfortunate because the tasks facing them were herculean and demanded cooperation and coordination. Destruction across the length and breadth of Germany was colossal. The Allies, particularly the Soviets, conducted widespread looting, expropriation, and dismantling of industry, indeed of anything of any value. Harvest and livestock were often requisitioned, leaving little for the population. Most of Germany’s cities had been heavily bombed by the British and American air forces. Berlin itself had been shattered by the war and solely occupied by the Red Army from the beginning of May to the beginning of July 1945, when British and American troops entered the city. The city was thoroughly sacked during the Soviet assault, and the population—particularly Berlin’s women—suffered the near-constant depredations of Red Army soldiers in the weeks that followed. Even today, traces of those last battles in April 1945 can be found.