Author Leslie Wilson's account of Berlin

Read about her relationship with the city and how it has changed over the years.

On the corkboard in front of me when I write, I’ve got a photograph of the Lehrterstrasse Station in Berlin after the war. Four small children and a dog are walking up the weed-grown platform and behind them a cat is sitting washing itself. Six weeks ago my husband and I took a train to Dresden from Berlin Hauptbahnhof (Main Station).  It’s built on the site of that same station, an enormously busy place with platforms and lines stacked above each other.

Every time I go to Berlin something has changed, and I see the city differently, but it was the first time, in the seventies, that really changed me. I’m half German and was brought up going to and from Germany, but that was to my grandfather’s house on the Rhine, and later on I went on an exchange to stay with a family in Bavaria. That was economic-miracle Germany, a place where I tasted apple juice and yoghurt for the first time, a place of tidy, attractive houses, beautiful countryside (though the Rhine smelt very bad in those days) and friendly people. People in England talked a lot about the war, but it wasn’t easy to associate it with the Germany I visited.

Then, when I was just twenty, I went to Berlin on an organised tour for English-language assistants working in North-Rhine-Westphalia. I stayed, for the first time, in a hotel that occupied one of the spacious apartments in Charlottenburg, off the Kurfürstendamm. We were taken to the Olympic Stadium and to the repaired Reichstag, which was an exhibition centre in those days. We were taken to see the Wall itself and the guards who drove back and forth in armoured cars stared at us through binoculars when we climbed onto one of the viewing platforms that were built on the Western side. It was a scary thing, a double wall, actually, enclosing a wide strip lined with sensors, regularly patrolled, floodlit at night. A place that was almost certain death to enter.

We were taken on an official tour of the Eastern sector, but we all went there independently too, through the border controls at Friedrichstrasse station. Six weeks ago my husband and I bought cakes and Easter eggs in a shop there. All those years ago that had been the waiting room where my twenty-year-old self sat, my heart racing because they’d taken my passport off me and given me a grubby piece of paper with a number on it, and you had to listen for them to call your number so you could go and be inspected. The tannoy crackled, you could hardly make anything out. I could imagine myself stranded in that crowded waiting room forever. (Of course that was part of it, they set the system up to scare people.) I remember walking along streets that seemed to be deserted apart from the occasional queue outside a food shop, with the constant feeling that someone was watching me.

But what made an even greater impression on me was the prison at Plötzensee, where the men who’d tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944 were hanged, slowly, with piano wire. The air still seemed to hold the echo of their horrible suffering. Also, there were bullet holes still in the buildings, especially in the Eastern part, where we went too. Spatters of holes everywhere, like a silent echo of the hellish battles of spring 1945. Actually, you can still see the bullet holes now, but many of them have been patched.

I’ve still got the scrapbook I made from that first visit. I had no idea then that I’d find myself going back there again and again, and though I already knew I wanted to be a writer I had no idea then that I’d set novels there. But the place riveted me, and it broke down a barrier between me and the past that till then had always seemed to belong to my mother and grandmother. It made me begin to understand what that past had been like – and why they were both still so traumatised.

I went back again four years later with my toddler daughter, then there was a long gap, but I read a lot of books set in the city, and when I started to write Last Train from Kummersdorf I knew that my heroine, Effi, was going to be a Berliner. So I had to go back, and I’ve been going ever since.  Once I sat in the Federal Archive reading the story of my grandfather’s persecution by the Nazis in 1933 – another of the things, apart from the war, that scarred my German family. I felt as if I was there, sitting reading the yellowed pages that had been typed at the time – his desperation and fear came up at me out of them the way the racket of the battle came at me off the pitted walls of Berlin’s buildings.

It’s not a beautiful place, though it has some lovely buildings. Berlin doesn’t need to be beautiful. It’s got something even better. You feel free there, as if you can be yourself and people will accept you. There are art galleries full of great classic art, but also open studios where you can just wander in and see what people are doing now, trying things out. There are funky bars, there are good restaurants, there are wonderful kids’ playgrounds. There are wonderful sandy beaches along the city’s lakes. There’s a great zoo. There are fantastic shops. There’s something for everyone, actually. I’ve had a lot of fun in Berlin, as well as understanding the past.

And it doesn’t shun the dark past, it puts it on display so that modern Germans – and anyone else – can learn from it. I love it, and I love visiting its past so I can write about it.