The War in the Dark by Nick Setchfield

Author:Nick Setchfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan

20

The night gave ghosts to Potsdamer Platz.

Once, Winter knew, this had been Europe’s busiest, liveliest plaza, a bright throng of shops and theatres, raucous beer palaces and stately dance halls. The Nazis had rallied here in torchlit swarms, hoisting swastikas, spellbound by Hitler. The Führer’s speeches had echoed among its streets, loud and mad and violent. Napoleon, too, had marched through the majestic boulevard of Unter den Linden, less than half a mile to the north, parading beneath the chariot of the goddess of victory, claiming it for his own.

It was a place of weeds and wire now, barren in the moonlight.

This was a no-man’s-land, a desolate expanse, blasted to the ground by war. The great churches of the Französischer Dom and Deutscher Dom still stood in the Gendarmenmarkt but they were shells, bombed-out husks. The Reichstag, once the seat of the German parliament, a baroque symbol of permanence and power, had been gutted by fire. The shattered building was ringed by wild grass and sickly trees, abandoned now, like a thing left to die.

The Wall separated the ruins of the Reichstag from the Brandenburg Gate, halting the grand sweep of the road. The great slab of whitewashed concrete rose against the sky, crowned by guard towers and gun emplacements. It wasn’t quite as tall as Winter had always imagined – fifteen foot at most – but its unrelenting monotony was every bit as oppressive.

The Wall wasn’t the only barrier to freedom, just the most obvious one. A quarrel of barbed wire marked the approach to the Todesstreifen – the death strip, they called it – while angular tusks of steel had been hammered into the ground, acting as tank traps. They looked like a graveyard of toppled crosses. Landmines waited beyond.

This was the city’s greatest scar and it was still raw. It scored through the very heart of Berlin, marked by the red and white stripes of the checkpoints, the black and white stripes of the crossings. Winter could just about read the propaganda posters on the other side. He couldn’t translate every word but they were clearly exhortations to the glory and the purity of communist rule. Die Einheit macht stark. Die Macht des Volkes.

The eastern side of the divide was conspicuously emptier than the western half. Many of the buildings ravaged by war had recently been razed, allowing the sentries in the watchtowers a cleaner line of fire – handy when you were shooting potential escapees. The buildings that remained were husks, their windows vacant frames. They shared the Soviet half of the city with newly erected blocks of housing, drably functional in design. There were washing lines strung between the towers, the cords glinting as they caught the searchlights.

The western side of Berlin had suffered just as much damage but it had chosen to preserve its survivors. A defiant corner of the Hotel Esplanade still stood on the wasteland. There were a handful of shops, too, incongruous among the rubble. But Winter knew there was no illusion of normal life in this place.

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