Then We Take Berlin

by Lawton, John

  The most readable factual account of Berlin after the war I found to be David Clay Large’s Berlin (Basic Books, 2000).

  And, probably last, there are also some interesting films made among the ruins: The Big Lift, A Foreign Affair (both in English), Germany Year Zero (in Italian), and The Murderers Are Among Us (in German).

  Paradies Verlassen: This is fiction. The Femina Club was probably the most famous Weimar nightclub—it survived the war but by 1948 it was a cinema—closely followed by Resi’s on the Alexanderplatz, which I first came across in Emanuel Litvinoff’s novel The Lost Europeans (Heinemann, 1960). Resi’s had telephones at every table for the obvious reason, and until I double-checked I had assumed Litvinoff had made up the pneumatic tubes (Rohrpoststationen), but it seems Berlin was at the cutting edge of pneumatic technology and had a city-wide tube network. Alas, Resi’s closed in 1939 so I invented Paradies, and kept the tubes. With my skool O-level German (grade 9, i.e., total failure, but then the teacher loathed me and me him—miserable bastard that he was), I render verlassen as “forsaken” rather than “lost,” implying a wilful departure.

  Ernie Bevin: I don’t think he visited Berlin at all during the autumn of 1948, but it doesn’t matter. I needed him there so . . . what is real, however, is his utter refusal to meet with any representative of the USSR until the blockade had been lifted.

  The Tunnel: Also fictional. Berlin may well have been a swamp at one time, but I made up the tunnel and the geology that enabled it. As to geography . . . weeeeell . . . the S-bahn still clips one corner of Monbijou Park. After the war Monbijou was a ruin, today it’s highly if dully developed around and under the S-bahn tracks. God knows what it was like in 1963, two years after the wall went up; now it’s a row of concrete arches leading to the Monbijou Bridge, out of one of which sticks a steel leg much as I describe. Are there more buried in the concrete? Dunno. I suspect from talking to Berliners that the S-bahn, at this point, was always a series of arches and what I describe as a “steel lattice” was more the norm for the U-bahn surface tracks than for the S-bahn . . . but I stick with it, because it’s “moodier” and it fits the plot. Concrete sheds no sparks.

  The opposite end of my tunnel would have been somewhere near the pre-war Sportpalast, which was turned into the Tiergarten barracks during the war—I assume to house the flak tower crew. Today, predictably, it’s part of the zoo, and a wooden hut stands on roughly the spot I assign to the tunnel shaft, and in said hut lives a rather large pink-headed crane, usually to be found poised on one leg . . . thus . . .

  Consider the tunnel to be the historical equivalent of Hitchcock’s MacGuffin.

  Ernst Reuter, the Reichstag, the street battles, et cetera: I’ve conflated several incidents and at least three of Reuter’s speeches in the summer of 1948 into one. The main protest at the Reichstag, and the speech for which Reuter is best known, happened on September 9.

  ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’: I think the only one of the Kennedy team who laid claim to this phrase was McGeorge Bundy. The historian Andreas W. Daum disputes the claim, but agrees that the president was looking for a phrase equivalent to Cicero’s “civis romanus sum.” Both phrases, however, are to be found written phonetically on JFK’s cue cards for June 26, 1963—and I think any argument that he was drawing upon a classical education is specious as JFK clearly had no more idea how to pronounce the Latin phrase than he had the German—“kiwis romanus sum.” As the park-bench philosopher, the late, great E. L. Wisty used to say, “I didn’t have the Latin.”

  I’ve no idea who suggested either phrase and the Latin may well have been JFK’s own idea—but the most likely way it made it into German is by the intervention of either one of the two interpreters Kennedy had that day, both of whom, in this novel, are displaced by my fictional one. The Americans did indeed request a German as interpreter for the speech at Schöneburg. It may be cheeky to have my interpreter help JFK structure the speech—but what politician since Lincoln has written their own speeches?—cheekier still to think that a woman might have been allowed stand up in front of half a million Berliners and translate for Kennedy.

  Acknowledgements aplenty . . .

  Gordon Chaplin

  Sue Kennington

  Elizabeth Graham-Yooll

  Sarah Teale

  Linda Shockley

  Sam Redman

  Clare Alexander

  Frances Owen

  Cassie Metcalf-Slovo

  Morgan Entrekin

  Peter Blackstock

  Briony Everroad

  Joaquim Fernandez

  Robert Etherington

  E.L. Wisty

  Ryan Law

  Deb Seager

  Sarah Burkinshaw

  Ulrich Bochum

  Jeff Harrison

  Cosima Dannoritzer

  Claus Litterscheid

  Nick Lockett

  Aunt Dolly

  Marcia Gamble Hadley

  David Sinclair

  John Sinclair

  Bruce Kennedy

  Ion Trewin

  Jess Atwood Gibson

  Sue Freathy

  Mrs. Wisby

  Anna-Riikka Santapukki

  &

  Tony Broadbent