My inspiration for A Berlin Love Song

 

I was aware from a very early age that not all Germans had been Nazis. My father was a clergyman, and one of his closest friends was a German Lutheran Pastor from Darmstadt. They had met in Coventry shortly after the end of the war, as they were both involved in a reconciliation project – The Community of the Cross of Nails.

After Coventry Cathedral was totally destroyed by German bombing in 1940, a cross of three iron nails was made from the collapsed roof truss of the devastated building. The new Coventry Cathedral was built alongside the ruins of the old, and the Cross of Nails stands on the altar of the new building. As a symbol of peace and reconciliation, another cross of three nails, also made from the ruins, was donated to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, which was likewise built alongside the ruins of the church that had been destroyed by Allied bombing. My father was one of the presiding clergy at the opening ceremony of the newly built Coventry Cathedral, and I remember feeling very proud of him, as someone who was working for peace and reconciliation between nations.

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The Cross of Nails in Coventry Cathedral

The Cross of Nails in Coventry Cathedral

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The Cross of Nails in the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, Berlin. Image Credit: By Anagoria – Own work, CC BY

The Cross of Nails in the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, Berlin

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 The ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church next to the newly built church-article-by-sarah-matthias-my-inspiration-for-a-berlin-love-song

The ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church next to the newly built church

The ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church next to the newly built church

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The ruins of the medieval cathedral in Coventry next to the new cathedral-article-by-sarah-matthias-my-inspiration-for-a-berlin-love-song

The ruins of the medieval cathedral in Coventry next to the new cathedral

The ruins of the medieval cathedral in Coventry next to the new cathedral

Read more about the Community of the Cross of Nails at their website: http://www.coventrycathedral.org.uk/ccn2/

As I grew older I learned more about my father’s remarkable German Pastor friend from Darmstadt. He had been a member of Hitler Youth in the 1930s, much against his family’s will. As Hitler rose to power he and his family became increasingly convinced that Nazism was not for them. Appalled by the rising tide of anti-Semitism sweeping Germany, he tried to register as a conscientious objector when war broke out. After many adventures and twists of fortune he ended up spending most of the war in a Prisoner of War camp in England, as chaplain to the German prisoners there. After 1945, he and my father became close friends.

So an interest in the history of the Second World War felt natural to me. Whilst studying at University I became interested in German theologians and chose as my final dissertation topic the work of Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, both fierce opponents of the Nazi regime. I soon discovered that I was more interested in their political thinking than their theological writings, and in how they had found the courage to risk their lives by standing up for what they believed to be right.

After university whilst working for the BBC, I was involved in a documentary called The Nazi Hunter. It focused on the life and work of Simon Wiesenthal, the Austrian holocaust survivor who dedicated a large part of his life to tracking down and gathering information on fugitive Nazi war criminals so that they could be brought to trial. When I was growing up, our next-door neighbours, the Adlers, were German Jewish refugees who had fled Nazi Germany, but not before being persecuted and in the case of Mr Adler, incarcerated for a period. They didn’t talk about their experiences very much, but on occasions when they did, Mr Adler used to shake and cry. This affected me deeply.

My husband shares my interest in Germany and its history. He was in the British Army based in West Germany in the 1970s and for a period was stationed in West Berlin when it was a divided city. His time there left him with a great liking for the country, and when we had our children we spent many family holidays in Germany visiting his old haunts and introducing them to Berlin, which by this time was a re-united city restored to its position as capital of all Germany.

It was on one of my many visits to Berlin that I happened upon an exhibition in February 2011 in the Deutsches Historische Museum on Unter den Linden entitled Hitler and the Germans: Nation and Crime. It was a courageous exhibition – the first time since the war that a major museum had explored the relationship between Hitler and the German Nation. It opened the debate about how Hitler had managed so successfully to seduce a nation. The exhibition was fascinating. I was astonished by the boxes of Christmas baubles depicting Hitler’s face, the jewelled swastika for the top of the Christmas tree, the beer mats and the playing cards, all decorated with Nazi symbols. Nearby there were the striped uniforms worn by prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps and street signs bearing the words ‘Juden Verboten’. The exhibition had a profound effect on me and I felt very strongly that I wanted to write something about this period, drawing on new research but also on my own experience of Germans I had known who had opposed Hitler’s regime.

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Nazi symbols for Christmas decorations and baubles depicting Hitler's face

Nazi symbols for Christmas decorations and baubles depicting Hitler’s face

Nazi symbols for Christmas decorations and baubles depicting Hitler’s face


In one small corner of the exhibition I found a few showcases dedicated to the wartime persecution of the Romani people. I discovered that up to half a million Romanies from Europe had been exterminated by the Nazis and I wondered why relatively little had been written about this. On my return to London I went to the permanent holocaust exhibition in the Imperial War Museum. There I found a small corner dedicated to the Romani story, but not very much. Reading widely about the holocaust, I was surprised to discover that, although there had been a gypsy family camp in Auschwitz where thousands of Romanies were exterminated, there was often little more than a footnote about it in most books. So I set about discovering all I could about the Porrajmos, as the Romanies call their experience at that time – the Great Devouring. Whilst there are very many accounts by Jewish writers of their sufferings during the holocaust, there are very few first hand accounts written by Romanies, but those I did find I read avidly. The germ of an idea for a novel was growing into the beginnings of a plot. I found that many Romanies were entertainers, showmen and circus artists. I already knew that the circus had been extremely popular in Germany in the 19th century, so I began to investigate the history of the German Circus. I read books about Hagenbecks, Sarrasani, Berlin’s Circus Busch, and Blumenfelds and researched how to perform on the flying trapeze and to ride horses bareback.

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A Travelling Menagerie

A Travelling Menagerie

A Travelling Menagerie

And then in October 2012 I read about the long awaited memorial to the Romanies that had just been opened by Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, in the Tiergarten park in Berlin. In her speech at the opening she described the suffering of the Romani people as ‘the forgotten holocaust’ and said that she now hoped that their experiences would now receive the attention they deserved. Situated in the shadow of the Reichstag, the memorial consists of a dark, circular pool of water at the centre of which there is a triangular stone. The triangular shape of the stone is in reference to the badges that were worn by concentration camp prisoners. In bronze letters around the edge of the pool is the poem ‘Auschwitz’ by the Romani poet Santino Spinelli. As I watched one of the Tiergarten’s famous red squirrels lean down and take a drink from the pool, I finally resolved to write a story about the Romani holocaust, based partly in Berlin, a city that I loved, and that also explored the wonderful world of the German circus – a subject that I found fascinating.

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The memorial pool. Part of the memorial to the Roma and Sinti victims with the Reichstag behind

The memorial pool. Part of the memorial to the Roma and Sinti victims with the Reichstag behind

I visited Auschwitz, both the main camp where the holocaust museum is situated and also the death camp two miles away – Auschwitz-Birkenau. By that time I had read everything I could get my hands on about the Zigeunerlager, the gypsy family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The remains of the camp is vast but I didn’t need a map or a guide because I had the layout of the camp so clearly in my mind. My husband was amazed that I knew my way around the vast area without a map. But by this time it had lived with me for so long. I stood with my family on the site of the gypsy family camp, on the very place where I imagined my character Lili Petalo, would have lived.

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Members of the Romani Community in Auschwitz

Members of the Romani Community in Auschwitz

We walked around the remains of the gas chambers where thousands of Jews, gypsies and political prisoners had been gassed and walked down the railway lines where the cattle trucks came in, carrying truckloads of desperate people to be worked to death or gassed as soon as they emerged. It was a very emotional visit, and I was able to buy a wonderful series of books in the museum there called Voices of Memory, containing first hand accounts from hundreds of prisoners and witnesses, gathered together by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. And it was in that museum that I saw the picture of the Romani girl who would come, in my own mind, to be Lili Petalo.

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Voices of Memory-Inspiration for the Character of Lili Petalo-article-by-sarah-matthias-my-inspiration-for-a-berlin-love-song

Voices of Memory – Inspiration for the Character of Lili Petalo

Voices of Memory – Inspiration for the Character of Lili Petalo

Voices of Memory As my story grew in my mind the more research I felt I had to do. I found as many diaries as I could that had been written by Germans at the time. I was anxious that the behaviour of my characters should reflect the way that Germans in the 1940s spoke and thought, and to avoid any gloss put on their feelings by people of other nations. That said however, I did find William Shirer’s contemporary Berlin Diaries an invaluable source of information. At the end of my book when I wanted to take my character, Max, to Normandy as a reluctant member of the 12th Panzer Division fighting in Caen, I undertook further detailed research and read numerous first hand accounts by German soldiers who had fought in that bloody campaign.

Although all my characters in the novel are fictional, many are inspired by real people I have known or researched. Max’s father, the anti-Nazi paediatrician Julius Hartmann, is based on my father’s German Pastor friend. The Jewish painter of portraits in Auschwitz was inspired by Dina Gottliebova, a Czech artist who really was forced to work for Dr. Mengele painting portraits of gypsies for the book he was writing on genetic research. My novel is entirely fiction, but solidly based on fact as I have read and researched it, and I believe that everything I have written could have happened.