Smiert
spionam*
I looked up from my book
to see three East German Grenztruppen
with slavering German Shepherd dogs entering the carriage. As they moved toward
us the dogs seemed to be taking a disturbing interest in my ankle. Next to me
Robin suddenly pointed to the enormous machine pistol on the waistband of one
of the troops. In no time this was drawn from its holster, pointed to the
ceiling with a guttural exclamation from its owner of “Eine Wasserpistole”.
There was a faint and ironic twist to the corner of his mouth. He moved on.
This was our confrontation in stark reality with spies, a divided (political and
geographical) Berlin landscape and the Cold War in April 1967. We were eighteen
schoolboys on an educational trip behind the Iron Curtain to East Germany,
Poland and Soviet Russia.
The backcloth to my
childhood in the fifties is black and white (evidenced by monochrome
photographs in a family album). Colour filled my teens in the sixties. Britain
became open, free and full of optimism; there were jobs, opportunities for all.
It was wonderful. I discovered books in a big way. If the literary landscape of
the fifties for an eight year old was sparse (Enid Blyton, The Rev. W. Awdry,
T.H. White and Mary Norton were as good as it got), then in 1962 the literary
landscape for thirteen year olds began to blossom. That summer exciting new
authors suddenly broke into the mountains and valleys of our senses. Titles
from Dennis Wheatley, although writing since 1930, hit the bookshelves in
garish yellow paperbacks from the publisher Hutchinson. Many a lazy Sunday was
spent in the exciting company of Gregory Sallust and the Duke de Richleau. The
writing is of dubious quality but teenage boys thrilled at descriptions of
espionage and the occult. The racy covers of the Angélique books, by Sergeanne Golon, were kept
hidden from a mother who recommended Nevil Shute, whose compelling stories I
came to love; they introduced me to Australia, a far off country to which I
believed I would never go. I was
immersed in books that excited me about Berlin and other exotic locations.
Helen MacInnes, Eric Ambler, Gavin Lyall, Somerset Maugham, Georges Simenon,
Alastair Maclean, Desmond Bagley, Ian Fleming and Sebastian Japrisot are some
of the authors for whom the landscape in which they set their stories was as
important and crucial to the plot as the principle protagonists.
From 1960 I began to
explore these thrilling cities and strange, secretive landscapes for real. This
was not without some looking over a shoulder. The Cold War between Europe and
the United States on the one hand and Soviet Russia and the eastern bloc on the
other, together with post-Suez Crisis France, formed an uncertain stage on
which to travel in continental Europe. Visitors like us from Britain could
enjoy increasing access to French, German and Dutch cities but armed police
were everywhere.
The first
James Bond novel from Ian Fleming, Casino
Royale, had been published back in 1953 but drew attention mostly from the
London literati only. There followed ten more, (all published by the most
exciting publisher of the era, Jonathan Cape), clad in iconic and beautiful
dust jackets by Richard Chopping. 1962 saw the first James Bond film, Dr. No. The Beatles and James Bond
epitomised Britain escaping the shackles of 1950s austerity. New directions of
travel, music, cinema, clothes and food all introduced us to landscapes that
hitherto were unknown.
In 1966 I
travelled with a dozen schoolmates to Istanbul via Marseille, Genoa, Naples,
Athens and Haifa. Istanbul was like nothing I had seen. Here the Galata Bridge
over the Golden Horn defines the joining of Europe and Asia. One evening four
unfledged and immature seventeen-year olds went in search of the real backdrop
of From Russia With Love. We crept
into a nightclub, looking nonchalant and cool, smoking Peter Stuyvesant
cigarettes and ordering raki. Would we run into Kronsteen, or Darko Kerim? Or
best of all would Tatiana Romanova (portrayed in a film by the best ever Bond
girl – Daniela Bianchi) magically appear before our goggly eyes? This sensuous
city of mosques, minarets and busy Bosporus was a proper taste of exotic
places. I wanted more.
So to the
fractured landscape of Berlin I travelled next in 1967. Confronted for the
first time in my life with real life-threatening danger, (as well as death,
spies and being tailed by Soviet operatives), I had already become familiar
with the fictional George Smiley, Alec Leamas and Harry Palmer. By now the
grittier espionage fiction of John Le Carre and Len Deighton was blowing my
mind, all to a soundtrack by the great John Barry. The war-ravaged streets and bombed
out buildings of Berlin in 1967 were a type of eyesore previously only seen by
me in parts of Birmingham then being rebuilt. We were allowed no closer than
three hundred yards to The Brandenburg Gate. Friedrichstrasse and Checkpoint
Charlie were off limits to tourists that day – there had been an ‘incident’ the
night before. Some poor sod from East Germany had likely lost their life,
gunned down as they vainly attempted to cross the Wall.
On a later
visit we discovered, like Bernie Samson in Len Deighton’s Berlin Game, that “Checkpoint Charlie had not changed. There never
was much there; just one small hut and some signs warning you about leaving the
Western Sector. But the East German side had grown far more elaborate. Walls
and fences, gates and barriers, endless white lines to mark out the traffic
lanes. Most recently they’d built a huge walled compound where the tourist
buses were searched and tapped, and scrutinised by gloomy men who pushed
wheeled mirrors under every vehicle lest one of their fellow-countrymen was
clinging there.”
 |
| The Berlin Wall - what's left |
In 1989 the
Berlin Wall started to come down. In the ensuing decades two U.S. presidents
visited and spoke about peace and prosperity for post-Cold War Europe. Returning to Berlin in 2014 for my first time
after German re-unification the huge changes to the cityscape were instantly
palpable. After strolling along Unter Den Linden, heavy with tourists, we could
walk between the columns of the Brandenburg Gate and under the Quadriga,
Berlin’s landmark horse-drawn chariot atop the gate. The old east/west Berlin
border is now just a line etched in the roads. Elsewhere construction site
cranes proliferated; reminding us that Berlin is a city still undergoing
landscape and cultural change. It further distances itself from the Nazi and
Soviet era. It hosts in defiance the amazing Holocaust Memorial constructed of
2,711 oblong pillars.
As I write
this piece it is General Election day in the United Kingdom, our country raw in
the aftermath of ISIS atrocities in Paris, Manchester and London. These remind
us that city landscapes can still be dangerous places. Political and religious
ideology in Europe from the 1930s to the 1980s led to death and suspicion on
the streets of Berlin. We thought terror had gone away. It returned to Berlin
in December 2016 when an IS militant drove a lorry into a Christmas market,
leaving twelve people dead. The EU offers to many citizens of Europe hopes of
peace, jobs and prosperity. More strident politicians, amongst them a new U.S.
president, are calling once again for smiert spionam*. I only hope that the newly elected British
Prime Minister will take us down a calmer road.
* Death
to spies – to discover more about SMERSH (a real organization), read From Russia With Love, (a fiction).
If you would like to share your experiences of the places
discussed in this blog please record them in the Comments section.
Publications: -
Fiction. There is a massive body of work by writers of spy, crime and
thriller novels published in the 1950s & 1960s. I have only listed some of
those that I read at the time and in the decade that followed; these are in
list A. Interestingly, the landscapes of Berlin and other European cities in
the 50s, 60s and 70s have provided the inspiration for more contemporary
writers, just a few of which I have enjoyed. These are in list B.
A.
·
The Spy Who Came in From The
Cold; John le Carré; 1963
·
The Looking Glass War; John
le Carré; 1965
·
From Russia, With Love;
Ian Fleming; 1957 (plus all the other Bond novels, must be read in the spirit
of the time)
·
The Ipcress File; Len
Deighton; 1962
·
Funeral in Berlin; Len
Deighton; 1964
·
Billion Dollar Brain, Len
Deighton; 1966
·
The Venetian Affair; Helen
MacInnes; 1963
·
The Devil Rides Out;
Dennis Wheatley; 1934 (filmed in 1968)
·
They Used Dark Forces;
Dennis Wheatley; 1964
·
The Light of Day; Eric
Ambler; 1962
·
The Lady in a Car with
Glasses and a Gun; Sebastien Japrisot; 1966
·
The Wrong Side of the Sky;
Gavin Lyall; 1961 (plus all Lyall’s later suspense novels)
B.
·
Goodbye to an Old Friend;
Brian Freemantle; 1973
·
Face Me When You Walk
Away; Brian Freemantle; 1974
·
The Bernard Samson series
(set in the 80s); Len Deighton; 1983 – 1987
·
Tinker Tailor Soldier
Spy; John le Carré; 1974
·
The Honourable Schoolboy;
John le
Carré; 1977
·
Smiley’s People; John le Carré; 1979
·
Running Blind; Desmond Bagley; 1970 (actually set
in Iceland, but a great spy novel)
·
March Violets & the Bernie Gunther novels;
Philip Kerr; 1989 – (series starts in 1930s Berlin)
Non-fiction:-
·
Germany; Amity Schlaes; 1991
·
Climate of Treason; Andrew Boyle; 1979
·
Berlin Diaries; Marie Vassiltchikov; 1985
·
Germany and the Germans: the united Germany in
the mid-1990s; John Ardagh; 1991
·
The Berlin Raids: The Bomber Battle, winter 1943/44;
Martin Middlebrook; 1988
·
A Spy Among Friends; Ben Mcintyre; 2014
Berlin
