with my family I lived in Germany and my children attended schools there. Following the extraordinary linguistic talent of my wife, they mastered the German language. Such consummate skills would have been useful to me when I lived in communist East Germany and learned something of the social adroitness required in a country where careless talk can bring infinite suffering. We all saw Germans at their best and at their worst. And the same amazing contrast is to be seen in German history. I do not overlook the millions who died at the orders of the Moscow communists when I say of Germany: how can a nation go from the highest of high achievements and then to the murderous barbarism of the Nazi period, and then produce the repressive inhumanity of the communist regime of which I write in the Bernard Samson stories? I don’t know the answer.
The year 1913 marked the highest time of Germany’s success. On January 27th Emperor Wilhelm II conveniently celebrated both the centenary of the Battle of Leipzig (at which Germany had played a major part in defeating Napoleon Bonaparte) and his 54th birthday. During his 25 years on the throne Germany had undergone an astonishing change. It now had the best railways in the world. It surpassed Britain in iron and steel manufacture and was not far behind Britain in merchant shipping. In applied science, such as chemistry and electricity, Germany led the world. It is true that sophisticated visitors from the glamour of Paris or the wealth of London laughed at Berliners and called them awkward country bumpkins, but Berlin’s population had far more than doubled since Wilhelm II inherited the throne. Manpower, money and growing coal production was expanding the economy, and precision engineering brought wealth and gave the Emperor a formidable army and navy. Germany was fast becoming a superpower to rival Britain. Its lead in aviation was to be seen at the Vienna Air Week in June 1914 when German aircraft won distance, duration and altitude records by large margins. And the Mercedes six-cylinder, water-cooled engine format set the pattern for many years to come.
Kaiser Wilhelm II was a dictator in all but name. Wilhelmine Germany was prosperous but its repression of political discussion and the discouragement of any intellectual exchange ensured that only shallow emotional ideas prevailed in art and literature. Compared to other European cities – such as Vienna and Paris – Berlin was a cultural backwater. Belligerent political misjudgments by Kaiser Wilhelm led to a bloody war on two fronts and to the chaos of Germany’s defeat in 1918. The Kaiser fled to Holland. Germany – now a precarious Republic – saw a series of violent revolutions and counter-revolutions. As the turmoil subsided there was a loosening of cultural restrictions. Extremes of politics, writing, painting, theatre, dance and fashion exploited sensuality. What was at first extreme soon became the general fashion. This shift is often labelled ‘Expressionism’.
Berlin has always been a military city where soldiers were respected and Prussian officers enjoyed high social prestige. At one time, everyone passing either way through the city gates paid a toll called the Akzise, which went directly to the army. Berlin never had the international financial power that London enjoyed; heavy industry and electrical plants dominated it. And it has always been a city of foreigners drawing the talented, the ambitious and the fugitives from the Eastern hinterland. A census in 1910 calculated that only forty per cent of Berliners were born there. Many of the foreigners gave Berlin its distinction as a city of art and experimentation but Germans dominated the theatre. Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera with Kurt Weill’s haunting music and Lotte Lenya’s ‘Pirate Jenny’ made the little ‘Theatre on the Schiffbauerdamm’ world famous. Max Reinhardt created unsurpassed drama. So did the man who was, to my mind, the greatest of all: Erwin Piscator, who created electrifying experimental plays. Josef von Sternberg, one of the period’s most famous film directors, was rumoured to have arrived in Berlin from London as a penniless and undistinguished film editor named Joe Stern, but Berlin provided its own magic. Von or no von, berg or no berg, his film The Blue Angel started Marlene Dietrich on the road to Hollywood and riches. Film directors such as Fritz Lang and GW Pabst were ahead of Hollywood in most respects.
The extraordinary culture of Berlin in the first three decades of the twentieth century doesn’t end there. The modern architecture of men such as Walter Gropius and Erich Mendelsohn startled their contemporaries, and their clients too. As for photojournalism: it was invented in Berlin. Erich Salomon used an Ermanox, a tiny camera with huge 85mm f/1.8 lens to shoot verboten photos in ‘existing light’. He used this facility to get scoops on private political meetings and murder trials where light was low and flash bulbs would have attracted attention to his illicit activities. Salomon’s photos were sensational and photo-reportage became a profitable profession as illustrated periodicals were created to exploit photographic stories. Felix Mann and Alfred Eisenstaedt were among the masters of this new pictorial storytelling. The unique ferocity of Berlin’s creativity was fanned by the small numbers of artists. The Romanisches Café, sited alongside the Memorial Church, was a meeting place where ideas, insults, arguments and blows were exchanged. Here, politics met art, and intellectuals met actors. Zeppelins cruised overhead and just down the street, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, Albert Einstein was preparing to turn the world inside out.
The coming to power of Hitler and his Nazi Party in 1933 brought a new and twisted version of the strict Wilhelmine dictates and abruptly ended Berlin’s free-wheeling culture. The Nazis despised art and considered drama, films and journalism of any sort to be potential and dangerous enemies. Media were placed under the direct control of Josef Goebbels, the propaganda minister. Many creative people fled, and those who didn’t were apt to have their lives abruptly ended in the gas chambers of an extermination camp. Erich Salomon died in Auschwitz. Some of the star actors and actresses escaped to find new careers in New York, Hollywood and London. Photo magazines such as Life in America and Picture Post in Britain benefited from this German exodus.
The centre of Berlin is indisputably the Brandenburg Gate. It has always been more important than any of the other contenders, including the Royal Palace. Yet it was only by chance (in a wartime decision by Allied bureaucrats in London) that in 1945 the Gate became the barrier between the two postwar worlds. Surmounting the arch there is the ‘quadriga’ Viktoria, the goddess of victory, in a chariot drawn by four horses. This great copper icon was stolen by Napoleon, subsequently recovered after Bonaparte’s defeat (by combined German and British armies) only to be destroyed in a World War Two bombing raid. The joy of all Berliners when the moulds were discovered in a Berlin cellar, and the quadriga re-cast and returned to the arch, can be imagined. But Viktoria now looked down upon the sector of Berlin where communists, backed by their Russian masters, inflicted upon the inhabitants of the East Germany the rule of the so-called German Democratic Republic.
Berlin is like an ever-present character in all my Bernard Samson books. It hovers over the action like a storm cloud even when the action moves to a different locale. But Berlin has no speaking part. It is the action and inter-action that must always dominate stories of the sort that I write. Berlin is the backdrop but the people who strut and posture on the stage together create a mood of drama, farce, horror or knockabout comedy that must be maintained throughout all the stories. When I wrote Winter, a story of Berlin in the first half of the twentieth century, and the prelude to the Bernard Samson stories, the ghosts danced in my head.
The critics of Britain and the USA (I can’t effectively read the others) have been generous to me and I offer them a belated thank you for the confidence that an experienced critic can provide to a working author. But I have always been a little puzzled by the way the critics have categorized the stories. Now, let me say immediately, that few, if any, writers can evaluate their work with any semblance of accuracy. I suspect that Proust intended to write a family saga and Tolstoy thought War and Peace was a travel guide, but surely the Bernard Samson stories are comedy thrillers – boardroom dramas perhaps – about a man in love with two women. Bernard’s emotional dilemma and the effect it has on both Fiona and Gloria was the driving force behind writing this continuing drama. But neither the love nor the comedy has, over the years, provoked the sort of comment I expected.
When writing just one book, a handful of notes and a good memory is all that is required to monitor your characters. But when planning ten books one becomes a personnel manager. Right from Berlin Game, the first book in the
