The particular joy of researching this final book in a cycle of three novels set in Berlin’s Windscheidstraße 53 was that I was dealing with living history. Many German friends and family members offered countless small insights that I’ve incorporated into the book, with my friend Michael Ammann providing a particularly rich seam of 1980s snacks, TV programmes, songs and cultural touchstones. And I would also like to thank Naciye O’Reilly for helping me with the Turkish details in the novel.
I was also able to talk to many people who had lived in the city during the 1980s and who were generous enough to give up their time for in-depth interviews about their experience of East and West Berlin. When I set out to research the book, I was hoping to get small cultural details to bring the narrative to life, but in each interview I also heard incredible stories that showed me again how the strands of European twentieth-century history always lead back to this very special city. For sharing their time and their stories with me, I would particularly like to thank Carola Adam, Jimmy Adam, Dr Frank Getzuhn, Fanny Melle, Linda Greenwood and David Greenwood.
As mentioned in my previous two novels, I am generally disapproving of detailed research bibliographies in fictional books, but at the same time want to acknowledge a few sources that were either particularly useful or that come highly recommended. Among the books, TV programmes and films from 1980s West Berlin that I was able to lay my hands on, I found Peter Schneider’s book The Wall Jumper particularly valuable and pilfered a number of sights, sounds and smells from its pages. Of the photographic books on West Berlin, Christian Schulz’s Die wilden Achtziger (The Wild Eighties), Herbert Maschke’s Wirtschaftswunder West-Berlin and Günther Wessel’s Leben in West-Berlin (Life in West Berlin) all had a profound influence on my descriptions of the city at that time. I also got a wonderful sense of West Berlin’s countercultural scene from Mark Reeder’s B-Movie: Lust & Sound in West-Berlin 1979 – 1989, which is available to buy and stream in most territories.
Anna Funder’s excellent Stasiland gave me a great grounding in the complex psychology of the hundreds of thousands of men and women who informed on their friends and families, and I would highly recommend it if you haven’t yet read it. I am also indebted to Marianne Quoirin’s Agentinnen aus Liebe: Warum Frauen für den Osten Spionierten (Agents of Love: Why Women Spied for the East) for her detailed account of the women in the West who wittingly married East German spies and colluded in their work. The book is sadly out of print and hasn’t been translated into English, but can be found at research libraries. While finishing my book, I also serendipitously caught Peter Wensierski’s excellent documentary on the Stasi informant Monika Haeger for Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg, and I used a number of details from her background in the German Democratic Republic for the background of my Stasi spy.
And finally, among the environmental and geological books and texts I read I feel particularly fortunate to have unearthed Natürlich Berlin! Naturschutz- und NATURA 2000-Gebiete in Berlin (Naturally Berlin: Nature and NATURA 2000 Reserves in Berlin), an unbelievably detailed summation of Berlin’s nature reserves and the creatures that inhabit them. If you ever need to find a diving-bell spider in West Berlin, this is the book for you.
If you are visiting Berlin and are interested in finding out more about this period, there is a series of displays about the fall of the Wall in the German Historical Museum’s permanent display. The Berlin Wall Memorial at Bernauer Straße also has a very accessible new visitor centre and real sections of the Berlin Wall that you can visit. I would encourage you, however, to go a little further afield and visit the Tränenpalast (The Palace of Tears) at Friedrichstraße, the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Prison for GDR political prisoners, and the Stasi Museum, both in Lichtenberg, as well as the Marienfelde Refugee Centre Museum. All offer excellent tours and displays and give you a real sense of the human impact of the Cold War in Berlin from both sides of the divide.
Much of my reading for the book was done at Berlin State Library on both Potsdamer Platz and Under den Linden, as well as the Jacob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm-Zentrum at Humboldt University, and I would like to thank the staff at both institutions for their help whenever I needed it.
An Honest Man Page 32