AFTERWORD AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin is a city of the imagination. A portrait which hopes to capture this aspect of its nature needs to let invention cohabit with reality, to juxtapose fiction with fact, as on its streets and amongst its inhabitants. To tell Berlin’s story, to reflect its creativity and reveal both its seen and unseen sides, I have used some of the techniques of the novel. I have developed characters from historical sources, selected and tailored personal experience, arranged the action so as to give the narrative shape and momentum. My aim is to make the place and its history more engaging and accessible, to mirror the city’s essence of perpetual reinvention.

History, which used to be written about princes and potentates, has become more personal. Now it’s told from the bottom up. This change – which can be explained by the decline of collective loyalties and the rise of individualism – has made history more subjective. In our less deferential age, and in biographies which use narrative to propel the facts, both writers and readers are challenging the old assertions of objectivity, to the point of suggesting that the notion of non-fiction may itself be a myth.

‘All art is unstable,’ David Bowie once said. ‘Its meaning is not necessarily that implied by the author. There is no authoritive voice. There are only multiple readings.’ Each individual’s experience colours their interpretation, in literature and the other arts, even hesitantly in science, adding secondary and tertiary layers of subjectivity, in a process of interaction which enriches our understanding. After all, it was in Berlin that Einstein set about refining his theory that reality isn’t fixed, that all is relative.

The following selected bibliography is provided to enable interested readers to know the sources and – to an extent – unpick the parts which have been combined to create the whole.

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No records exist of Konrad von Cölln. His story, and that of the Berliner Unwille or citizens’ defiance, was assembled from the fourteenth-century Codex Manesse, the Berliner Stadtbuch and the Dialogverse zum Totentanz in der Berliner St Marienkirche (translation from Niederdeutsch by Renate Hermann-Winter). Modern texts which enabled me to portray medieval times include Alwin Schulz’s Das höfische Leben zur Zeit der Minnesinger (1889), H.F.M. Prescott’s Jerusalem Journey: Pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the fifteenth century (1954), Margaret Aston’s The Fifteenth Century: The Prospect of Europe (1979), The Medieval German Lyric: The development of its themes and forms in their European context (1982) by Olive Sayce, Bronislaw Geremek’s The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris (1987), Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages (1987) by Christopher Page, Ronald Taylor’s Berlin and its Culture: An Historical Portrait (1997), Alexandra Richie’s superb Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin (1998), The Oral Epic: Performance and music (2000) edited by Karl Reichl and Leoni Hellmayr’s Berlin im Mittelalter – auf den Spuren einer Doppelstadt (2012, in Archäologie in Deutschland).

Colin Albany’s wartime story is based on Simplicius Simplicissimus, the great epic of the Thirty Years’ War, from which I borrowed freely both incident and language in an attempt to give the narrative – as Brian Eno said almost 400 years later – ‘a place in the world … that felt rooted and properly positioned’. I first read of John Spencer and his peripatetic Englische Comödianten in Taylor’s Berlin and its Culture. Also consulted were Gothard Arthusius’s Comet Orientalis (1619), Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Schiller’s History of the Thirty Years’ War (1789) and Ricarda Huch’s Der grosse Krieg in Deutschland (1914).

By the 18th century there was no paucity of written records. In addition I could visit the places which Frederick the Great had known. I could stand in the rooms where he had argued with Voltaire, follow the paths along which he had walked his greyhounds, feel the geography of his world. Frederick’s story springs from his own writings as well as Nathaniel William Wraxall’s Memoirs of the Courts of Berlin, Warsaw and Vienna 1777–79 (1806), Thomas Carlyle’s History of Friedrich II of Prussia (1899), The Scottish Friend of Frederick the Great (1915) by Edith Cuthell and Nancy Mitford’s Frederick the Great (1970). General Hasso Freiherr von Uslar-Gleichen, who in 1990 oversaw the incorporation of the East German Volksarmee into the Bundeswehr, gave me an understanding of Prussian military tradition. I am grateful to him and to the Projektgruppe Friederisiko of the Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg.

Schinkel’s biography and the story of his restless imagination were distilled from the vast body of available literature. In English an accessible work about him is Karl Friedrich Schinkel: A Universal Man (1991) edited by Michael Snodin. Also read was Alfred von Wolzogen’s Aus Schinkels Nachlaß: Reisetagebücher, Briefe und Aphorismen (1862, 1863) and Stephen Spender’s 1992 essay The Significance of Schinkel. Both Prof. Dr Helmut Börsch-Supan and British architect David Chipperfield, who recreated Friedrich August Stüler’s Neues Museum, helped me to understand the practical, political and aesthetic pressures that weighed on Schinkel’s mind and influenced his work.

As with Konrad von Cölln, no records exist of Lilli Neuss. She was one of the hundreds of thousands of migrants whose lives have been totally forgotten and can now only be imagined. Her story was related to me by a friend in Alt-Moabit (during our discussions about her uncle who had worked with Albert Speer). Else Hirsch’s history could not have been told without Jill Suzanne Smith, Bowdoin Professor of German, who shared with me her Reading the Red Light: Literary, Cultural, and Social Discourses on Prostitution in Berlin 1880–1933 (2004) and the then unpublished manuscript of her provocative Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890–1933 (2014). I fleshed out the material by reading between the lines of Margarete Böhme’s Diary of a Lost Girl (1905), for which additional thanks are due to Andrea Claussen and Angelika Zöllmer-Daniel.

Central to my understanding of Emil and Walther Rathenau were Harry Kessler’s Walther Rathenau: Sein Leben und sein Werk (1928), David Felix’s Walther Rathenau and the Weimar Republic (1971), D.G. Williamson’s Walther Rathenau (1971), Zara Steiner’s The Lights That Failed: European International History 1919–1933 (2005) as well as Walther’s own books and official AEG histories. Fritz Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914/18 (1961) and World Power or Decline: Controversy Over Germany’s Aims in the First World War (1974) were my main sources on the economic motivation for war. Details of Otto von Bismarck’s life are from A.J.P. Taylor’s Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman (1955).

The two other First World War biographies are of Fritz Haber and Käthe Kollwitz. For my research on Haber I consulted Charlotte Haber’s Mein Leben mit Fritz Haber (1970), Dietrich Stoltzenberg’s Fritz Haber (1998), Daniel Charles’s Between Genius and Genocide: The Tragedy of Fritz Haber, Father of Chemical Warfare (2005) and G.W. Fraser’s BBC Radio 4 play Bread from the Air, Gold from the Sea (2001) as well as Bretislav Friedrich’s Fritz Haber (2005, in Angewandte Chemie). The Kollwitz narrative was distilled from her diaries and letters (excluding those from her lover Hugo Heller, all of which were burnt before her death) as well as from Käthe Kollwitz: Woman and Artist (1976) by Martha Kearns, Elizabeth Prelinger’s Kollwitz Reconsidered (1992) and Kollwitz in Context (1992) by Alessandra Comini. Also vital for creating a picture of those years was Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) and Hans Gatzke’s Germany’s Drive to the West (1950).

In the 1920s Christopher Isherwood conjured up his own Berlin and parts which went into its creation – along with my portrait of it – were drawn from his Goodbye to Berlin (1937) and related stories, Kathleen and Frank (1971) and Christopher and His Kind (1976). Also read were Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise (1937), Jonathan Fryer’s Isherwood (1977), Edward Upward’s Christopher Isherwood: Notes in Remembrance of a Friendship (1996), Norman Page’s Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years (1998) and Peter Parker’s Isherwood: A Life (2004). I am grateful to the Kinsey Institute for the succinct history of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft.

To many, the 1928 premiere of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera was the greatest night in the greatest decade of twentieth-century theatre. The musical ran for two years at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm and – over the coming decades – was translated into eighteen languages and performed over 10,000 times around the world. Both Berlin’s image (as an anarchic, amoral, free-thinking capital) and Brecht’s fame were further enhanced by his death, after which East Germans elevated him from troublemaker to theatrical genius, and West German intellectuals laid the foundations of the ‘Brecht industry’. As a result almost nothing original can be gleaned from the exhausted facts. To try to imagine him anew I created an earnest, everyman narrator from my readings in Brecht Directs by an anonymous colleague (1952, in Theaterarbeit), Walter Benjamin’s Understanding Brecht (1983) and Ronald Hayman’s Brecht: A Biography (1983). For better or worse, Brecht remains one of the most dominant influences on – or obstacles to – the development of German theatre.

Marlene Dietrich’s portrait emerged from my own diaries from the time of Just a Gigolo (1977/8), Alexander Walker’s Dietrich (1984), Steven Bach’s Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (1992) and her daughter Maria Riva’s biography of the same year. Other sources include Heinrich Mann’s Professor Unrat (1905), Josef von Sternberg’s script of The Blue Angel (1929) and his ‘Acting in Film and Theatre’ from Film Culture (1955), Lotte Eisner’s Fritz Lang (1976) as well as Kenneth Tynan’s Curtains (1961) and Profiles (1989).

Of the some hundred books read and films screened on the National Socialist years, the main titles include:

– for Leni Riefenstahl, Susan Sontag’s Fascinating Fascism (1975), Ray Muller’s documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1994), Clive James’s Splurge of the Swastika (2007), Susan Tegel’s Nazis and the Cinema (2007), Steven Bach’s Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl (2007) as well as Riefenstahl’s autobiography Memoiren (1987) and films Ways to Strength and Beauty (1925), The Holy Mountain (1926), The White Hell of Pitz Palü (1929), The Blue Light (1932), Victory of Faith (1933), Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938).

– for Albert Speer, his memoirs Inside the Third Reich (1970) and Spandau: The Secret Diaries (1976), the biographies of Joachim Fest (1999) and Gitta Sereny (1995) as well as Robert R. Taylor’s The Word in Stone: The Role of Architecture in the National Socialist Ideology (1974), Léon Krier’s Albert Speer: Architecture, 1932–1942 (1985), Hitler’s Berlin: The Speer Plans for Reshaping the Central City (1985) by Stephen D. Helmer and the recollections of the niece of Stefan Schönecker.

– for Joseph Goebbels, extracts from his diaries (1923/45), Andrea Morgenthaler’s NFP/Das Erste documentary Joseph Goebbels (2008), Dietrich’s Ghosts: The Sublime and the Beautiful in Third Reich Film by Erica Carter (2008), Toby Thacker’s Joseph Goebbels: Life and Death (2009) and Georg Bönisch’s Das böse Genie (Der Spiegel 2010).

Other general books on the Third Reich read include Klaus Mann’s Mephisto (1936), The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) by William Shirer, A.J.P. Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War (1961), Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock’s Orte des Erinnerns: Denkmal im Bayerischen Viertel (1993), Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler (1999, 2000), Michael Burleigh’s The Third Reich: A New History (2001), Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler (2002), A Woman in Berlin (1954, 2002) by Marta Hillers, Saul Friedlander’s The Years of Extermination (2007) and Antony Beevor’s Berlin: The Downfall (2007).

The portrait of East Germany, and of Dieter Werner, is based on many journeys to and meetings in that vanished country during the 1970s and 1980s. The uncounted books read since those grey days include Hans Reichhardt’s Raus aus den Trümmern: Vom Beginn des Wiederaufbaus 1945 in Berlin (1987), Anna Funder’s Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall (2003) as well as works by Timothy Garton Ash, Thomas Brussig, Robert Cooper, John Lewis Gaddis, Josef Joffe, Robert Kagan, Don Oberdorfer, Gabriel Partos, Joseph Rothschild, Angus Roxburgh, Bernhard Schlink, Ingo Schulze and Christa Wolf. Dieter Werner is a pseudonym.

In 1984 when I first wrote about Bill Harvey and the tunnel many of the participants were still alive. John Wyke, leader of the British tunnelling team, became a friend and provided introductions in London and Washington. Through them and at the Library of Congress I was given access to declassified documents including NSA reports, CIA Special Evaluations and Clandestine Services Histories (Berlin Tunnel Operation 1952/56). Subsequently I consulted David C. Martin’s Wilderness of Mirrors: Intrigue, Deception and the Secrets that Destroyed Two of the Cold War’s Most Important Agents (1980), David Stafford’s Spies Beneath Berlin (2002), Niko Rollmann and Eberhard Elfert’s Die Stadt unter der Stadt (2006) and Flawed Patriot: The Rise and Fall of CIA Legend Bill Harvey (2006) by Bayard Stockton. Most recently John le Carré generously provided fresh insight into the operation.

JFK’s script is based on research at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston and at the Allied Museum in Berlin as well as on Andreas W. Daum’s Kennedy in Berlin (2003, 2008) in which I learnt the origin of ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’. The template for his crucial, Cold War performance was a short speech given a year earlier in New Orleans. In it Kennedy expressed pride for that city and his country, quoting Cicero, saying, ‘Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was to say, “I am a citizen of Rome”. Today, I believe, in 1962, the proudest boast is to say, “I am a citizen of the United States”.’

My diaries (1977/80) provided the heart of the David Bowie chapter, as did the memories of some of the friends he left behind in Berlin. These were put into context by Kevin Cann’s David Bowie: A Chronology (1983), David Buckley’s Strange Fascination: David Bowie – The Definitive Story (1999), Gimme Danger: The Story of Iggy Pop (2002) by Joe Ambrose, Helden: David Bowie und Berlin (2008) by Tobias Rüther, Thomas Jerome Seabrook’s Bowie in Berlin: A New Career in a New Town (2008) and Peter Doggett’s The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s (2011). Notable among the many articles consulted were William S. Burroughs’s Rolling Stone interview (1974), Steve Turner’s ‘The Great Escape of the Thin White Duke’ (1991) and ‘The Forgotten Hero’ by Torsten Hampel (2009, in Der Tagesspiegel Berlin). Victoria Broackes of the V&A Museum kindly let me read an early draft of her Designing David Bowie and shared a few pages of Bowie’s 1976 diary.

Finally, Lieu Van Ha’s history came to me through members of Berlin’s two Vietnamese communities under the guidance of Kristóf Gosztonyi. The truth of the story – although not its facts – was checked by author and translator Nguyen Ngoc Bich. The portrait of twenty-first-century Berlin is the result of long conversations and nights with Berghain/Ostgut Ton’s Ben Klock, the Balkan Beat Wunderkind Shantel and Dr Oliver Scholz. Thanks to them as well as to Ellen Allien, Bas Böttcher, Martin Dammann, Marianne Faithfull, Heidi Lüdi, Mark Thomson for Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit: Art in the Two-Hearted City (1990), Sasha Waltz & Guests and Milla & Partner Architects. I am grateful also to llse Newton (née Philips), Miriam and Tony Book for letting their story be told.

Libraries used – and not yet mentioned – include the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer, the Bundesarchiv and the British Library.

As essential as historical research and recce trips may be, as ever my real travelling is done at my desk, in the intense distillation of the journey. It is on the page that I am best able to understand the lives of my subjects. And then, by enabling readers to empathise with those lives, I hope we will better know them and ourselves, and to sense the real meaning of things.