The Berlin Assignment
GALLERY
Research photos
Throughout the novel I tried to capture the many different ways Berlin presented itself over the course of four seasons. Here is a sampling of some of the photos I took while living there. If you are interested in copying or using them, please have a look at the copyright notice.
Gallery 1: Berlin Moods
Every great city has its moods and Berlin is no exception. These photographs capture some of them.
Gallery 2: Friedrichstrasse
Friedrichstrasse, one of Berlin's historically most lively and colourful streets suffered terribly during the Second World War and the punishing decades of socialism afterwards. These photos portray some of the action to try to recover a little of the lost ground.
Poor Friedrichstrasse. The street was a self-contained tumultuous world of robots. Machines with jaws at the end of pheumatic necks — mechanized dinosaurs — were perched high on mountains of rubble. All along Friedrichstrasse the jaws clacked, probed under roofs, punched through walls, pecked at corners, ripped into masonry. Elsewhere, the rubble had been hauled away and power shovels reached down into soft sand ..." (p. 122)
Gallery 3: Potsdamer Platz
From a cityscape perspective, no place in Berlin was as overwhelming after the Wall fell as Potsdamer and Leipzigerplatz. The engineering was spectacular — a haunting, ephemeral beauty of great machines busy building and creating. For some months Potsdamerplatz was made up of the deepest lakes in all of Brandenburg.
"Twelve years of Fascism, a war, forty-five years of Communism. See what it does to physical heritage. East Berlin received a terrible dressing down. We are determined to make it great again."
"What about Potsdamer Platz, a place one filled with throngs of people? Potsdamer Platz, the heart of Berlin before the bombs rained down. After the annihilation it was a collection of ghostly black and burned out shells. The little that remained after the war was dynamited away, the bricks recovered and recycled into utilitarian structures someplace else. Greatness reprocessed into dullness."
Gallery 4: Reichstag
The changing face of the Reichstag, "a place where German history was always ending, never beginning..." throughout the 1990's was fascinating. These photos were taken over a period of five years.
"The Reichstag was filling fast. The galleries were were loaded with TV cameras. In one corner, members of the Berlin Philharmonic were taking their positions. The section reserved for diplomats, close to the front, was just behind the political elite. The Berlin diplomatic corps, with its morbid desire to spend time in the democratic vault of horrors, always turned out in numbers for Reichstag functions."
Gallery 5: Berlin Walks
Walking through Berlin's many different neighbourhoods requires stamina, but brings huge rewards. This very small sprinkling of photos provides a glimpse of what can be seen.
"On a high-tech cushion of air, the consul roamed through fascinating places - Prenzlauerberg, the Scheunenviertel, Pankow - all of them moody, all of them stuck between a desire for transition and a deep reluctance to change."
"Trekking through cemeteries he studied names on Jewish gravestones in one, and of Huguenots in another. He discovered the places of eternal rest of famous personalities ..."
Gallery 6: Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall fascinated and horrified the world from 1961 to 1989, both as a symbol and as a terrifying and dangerous barrier. Have there ever been other "walls" in history which had its purpose — running through the centre and around part of a historically vibrant city so as to lock people out?
Sabine described the day the Wall went up, not far from where she lived. Through barbed wire they watched the torment of neighbours on the other side. Then came concrete blocks and the view - and sense of neighbour - disappeared. The sinister permancence of the Wall made everyone feel violated. The communists, Sabine said bitterly to Tony, had sealed her in. "Maybe not sealed in, " he replied, pointing a bright side. "Maybe the other side got sealed out." Sabine didn't argue. "Sealed in. Sealed out," she said with resignation. "Sealed off."
"The Wall ran into the river here and continued on the opposite side. At first, Easterners tried to swim out through the watery opening. Good shooting practice for Communist border patrols: a decent distance, a target that moves, though not too fast. On the south bank by the Reichstag the West kept score. Dozens of white crosses sprouted up."
Gallery 7: Berlin Political
The Berlin Wall fascinated and horrified the world from 1961 to 1989, both as a symbol and as a terrifying and dangerous barrier. Have there ever been other "walls" in history which had its purpose — running through the centre and around part of a historically vibrant city so as to lock people out?
"It's incredible what the East Germans destroyed. Take one example: they destroyed the Kaiser's Palace because they couldn't separate architecture from politics. The East Germans blew the palace up. A country that dynamites its heritage dynamites its people. It could have been saved. It could have been restored. Had Stalin slept there once they would have kept it."
"The Russians are beginning to depart. Six hundred thousand of them. Imagine the logistics." "One of the all-time great military retreats."
Gallery 8: Foreign Ministry Demolition and Stasi Headquarters
The opening up of East German government buildings, and their dismantling, was another dimension of Berlin which was powerfully symbolic of a political philosphy which failed miserably and was simply swept away. The demolition of the East German foreign ministry, a sad piece of socialist architecture, was carried out in a typically orderly and well-planned way. One could see irony in the fact that the DDR's foreign ministry still exists, but as recycled filler material underneath Germany's numerous fast, new autobahn's on which Porsches, Mercedes and BMWs easily exceed speeds of 200 km/h.
"For years Günther Rauch cleaned the streets near Stasi headquarters. After the Wall opened he knew something was going on ...(the files were being burned)... At the gate, Günther Rauch in a reverberating voice demanded to see a ranking officer. As the smoke continued to rise, so did the indignation of the citizens. The Stasi had been stealing pieces of their lives for as long as they remembered and, watching the chimney emissions, they knew it was their files, their lives going up in smoke..."
Gallery 9: Pierre Trudeau in Berlin
Pierre Trudeau does not figure in the novel, but he came to Berlin in 1994 and spent four days. It was a great privilege for me to spend the weekend showing him around.
Gallery 10: Reception at the residence of the German Ambassador to Canada
June 28 reading and reception at the Ottawa residence of His Excellency, Matthias Hoepfner, Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to Canada. These are photos taken at the event by Wolfgang Grambert.
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The Berlin Assignment
Not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, with a new order in full swing, Canada’s new consul Anthony Hanbury arrives to assume his diplomatic duties. He quickly develops contacts, makes friends, and rises in Berlin society. But is his progress as innocent as it seems? Cold War spies still active in the city assemble a dossier, and the suspicions which accumulate soon threaten to destroy the consul.
