Blog I: The New Berlin

Thinking about my next book, I am pretty certain that the private detective Frank Harris will have to go to Berlin, where a major challenge will be waiting for him. What kind of challenge it will be, I have not yet decided since my ideas about the plot line are still in their infancy. Why Berlin? In the imaginary landscape of crime fiction, Berlin has played a prominent role. Just think of John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. His Berlin is a divided city, where the West confronts the Stalinist East, it‘s a dangerous place where agents from both sides meet, confront each other, and perish if they are careless. It is a city where the traces of World War II are still visible, especially in the East. It is a place that politicians and statesmen, among them John F. Kennedy, like to visit to demonstrate their commitment to freedom. The city is defined by the wall, by the attempts of thousands of people to escape the prison house of East Germany. But it is also the city of the student movement and their confrontations with the militarized police of West Berlin. And it is a city that depends on the US for its safety and on the economic support of the Federal Republic, a permanent reliance that sometimes ends up in corruption.

However, this is not the Berlin I have in mind when I imagine Frank Harris as a visitor with an urgent agenda. My Berlin emerged after the fall of the wall in 1989, with the unexpected unification of East and West Berlin, the completion of which took a generation. The slow process of rebuilding the Eastern part, beginning with the old center around Friedrichstraße and Unter den Linden, later expanding to the Eastern parts of the city. During the 1990s, the center of the city was marked by the sight of construction cranes. It is a united city where the old checkpoints have disappeared, and the American and the Russian army went home but where the population remains divided for a generation. The wall is still in their heads, those in the East, after a brief period of enthusiasm, became skeptical and sometimes resentful of the ”intrusion” from the West.

The government of the united Germany returned to Berlin from its provincial location in Bonn, encouraging migration and investments.  But compared with Paris and London, in some respects, Berlin is still a frontier town, far to the East of Western Europe, and also a less expensive city where young artists find affordable housing and opportunities to develop their projects. The new Berlin is still “poor” compared with Munich or Hamburg since the big companies that once had their headquarters in Berlin do not return. To flourish, the city of Berlin, which is now a Land, i.e. a state of the new Federal Republic, depends on the support by the Federal government. With this support, the city has slowly rebuilt its theaters, opera houses, and museums. Thirty years after reunification, there can be no doubt about the cultural predominance of Berlin. The city has taken back its former place as an international cultural center that attracts visitors from the West and the East. There are more tourists in Berlin than in Rome. Sometimes the Berliners feel crowded by the stream of visitors, although they need these visitors to make a living. Like other German cities, the new Berlin has attracted immigrants, among them the Turks beginning before the fall of the Wall. During the 1990s and the first decade of the new century, large numbers of migrants from Poland and Russia changed the mix. Their presence has transformed the atmosphere. While Berlin is the seat of the Federal government, its population speaks many languages. This mix generates both cultural energy and tensions, but the city appears to be able to deal with them, better than small towns where anti-migration resentment is common.

I can see Frank Harris in this city. As a New Yorker, he can easily deal with the international mix. He is used to the tensions and contradictions of a metropolis. Compared with New York, Berlin will strike him as more relaxed and relatively slow. Hanging out in a café among students and retired people will be something he will appreciate while in pursuit of his own agenda. What will this agenda be and what parts of the city will he visit? Possibly, it will be the old center of the city, for instance, Humboldt University where an international conference could become the cover for dangerous activities that call for his attention. He might get himself a room in one of the many new glitzy hotels around the railway station Friedrichstraße. He may be looking for a missing valuable object, but he is competing with other parties. There could be secret meetings in the nearby Historical Museum, a majestic old building, or in the new central railway station, which has five floors and looks more like a large retail store than a traditional railway station. Another possibility would be a cruise ship on the Spree, the river that flows through the center of the city.

But is Berlin still a dangerous town where foreign agents operate and eliminate each other? While the days of the Wall are by now a faint memory, the new Berlin still appears to be a meeting ground between East and West. The fact that a couple of years ago a visitor could be murdered by a Russian agent in a public park suggests that international political tensions impact the local scene again. There are sudden deadly ruptures like the killing of several people by a young Muslim who drove his truck into a crowd at a Christmas market in front of a church in the center of Berlin. While the tense atmosphere of postwar Berlin is definitely gone, the likelihood of a violent international incident is probably greater than in Frankfurt or Munich. In short, Berlin is still a good place for crime fiction, and there are good reasons to expose Frank Harris to Germany’s capital.