The Stasi headquarters out in Normanenstrasse is a good example. But in any case, it provides visual resources to interested visitors-or writers researching a book. It may be that preserving it is a way of dealing with it-once it’s memorialized, it’s really the past.

One of the remarkable things about Berlin is that it doesn’t ignore its often grim history. Although of course we can imagine it, since so much of its physical presence survives. Kanon: The Stasi was really a world unto itself, wasn’t it? It gave the GDR a surreal quality that’s hard to imagine now. In many regards, what drew me to Berlin was its history as a magnet for spies – a ‘swampland of spies’ as Nikita Khrushchev put it – and that history has sustained its identity as a cynical place of betrayal and intrigue. Both sides recruited sources, placed penetration agents, and when necessary, undertook legally sanctioned criminal activity against each other. Berlin was the friction point between the Communist Block and the NATO Alliance, and you had all these spies running around. One in seven East Germans spied on friends, family, or neighbors.Īcross the Berlin Wall, West Berlin was a cosmopolitan home for artists, writers, bohemians, punk rockers who enjoyed their freedoms, and moved back and forth through border checkpoints. By 1990, when the GDR fell, the Stasi ran a comprehensive surveillance organization that employed 91,000 people and managed a network of one million informers. But there is also the Berlin of the Stasi at the end of the Cold War. All have been luminously explored by writers. There is the Berlin of Kristallnacht, the divided Berlin of Allied Occupation, and the Berlin of the Wall. Paul Vidich: I chose Berlin because I was fascinated by the Stasi. Your question made me think of Willy Sutton, who, when asked why he robbed banks, said, ‘Because that’s where the money was.’ Why Berlin? That’s where the spies were. All the major powers had operations there, with everyone rubbing up against each other.

Before that, with people able to go back and forth, espionage was a kind of cottage industry in Berlin.

The Berlin Exchange is set in 1963, after the wall went up and changed everything-including espionage. If you write about Berlin, sooner or later you have to deal with the wall. And that, in turn, led to a fascination with the German Democratic Republic (or East Germany/ GDR) which in retrospect seems an Alice In Wonderland kind of political entity- everything upside down.

That, in turn, led to an interest in how the city finally split and became the epicenter for the Cold War, which I explored in Leaving Berlin. In The Good German, I was really writing about the Allied occupation.

Leaving Berlin by Joseph Kanon