Then We Take Berlin (61 page)

George Clare was born Georg Klaar in Vienna. He escaped to England, was interned, allowed to serve (like so many Austrian and German refugees) in the Pioneer Corps—the regiment of ditch-digging lawyers—transferred to the Royal Artillery, and, when the victorious Allies finally needed German-speakers, posted to Berlin where he interrogated Germans as part of the denazification process. Perhaps because he wrote his books forty years later, they have a much racier, more contemporary feel than Mrs. Henrey’s, but George Clare wrote history like a novelist, detail floats down off him like autumn leaves, anecdote rolls out as vivid as yesterday. Who else would bother to record that the Army badge of the British occupying forces (black disc in a red ring) was known as a “septic arsehole”?

He too is out of print.

Every trip back in time yields new discoveries . . . in this case . . .

Aftermath
by Francesca M. Wilson (Penguin, 1947), a Newnham bluestocking who worked with UNRRA in Bavaria in 1945-46 among refugees and former POWs, and seems to have had the most wonderful ear and memory.

Hamburg 1947: A Place for the Heart to Kip
(iUniverse, 2011) by Harry Leslie Smith, a working-class lad from Yorkshire who found himself posted to Hamburg as an RAF wireless operator in the immediate aftermath of the war. Again a wonderful ear and memory at work. I came across the book rather late in the writing of this one, but it answered questions about Hamburg that had been dogging me for ages. And whilst Miss Wilson’s remarkable career is documented in minute print on the back of her sixty-five-year-old Penguin book, I know next to nothing about Mr. Smith as yet.

The Answers of Ernst von Salomon.
A former Freikorps soldier whose approach to the 131 questions on his
Fragebogen
is close to complete anarchy. He survived the war, avoided conscription, avoided becoming a Nazi and left a memoir of untold riches for the delving historian. It was translated into English in 1954 and, as with
Aftermath
, I don’t think it ever had a second run.

The treatise I ascribe to Peter Camenzind
, Über den Nachweis
. . ., in chapter 78 was written by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman and published in
Naturwissenschaften
in 1939. Almost needless to say I have not read it.

There’s a mixed bag of fiction dealing with Germany after the war by both Germans and occupiers. If pressed to recommend just one—and no one is pressing—my choice would be Kay Boyle’s
The Smoking Mountain
(Knopf, 1950).

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