Although the bulk of the action takes place outside Berlin, the key opening and closing scenes of John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) take place around the Wall.
The tragic hero of the story, Alec Leamas, on his fateful mission into East Germany passes through one of the checkpoints in the Wall, under the watchful eyes of the ‘Vopos’ (Volkspolizei); the Mercedes he is riding in already being followed by a DKW.13 The crossing is suspiciously incident-free.
As they crossed the fifty yards which separated the two checkpoints, Leamas was dimly aware of the new fortifications on the eastern side of the wall – dragon’s teeth, observation towers and double aprons of barbed wire. Things had tightened up.
The Mercedes didn’t stop at the second checkpoint; the booms were already lifted and they drove straight through, the Vopos just watching them through binoculars. The DKW had disappeared, and when Leamas sighted it ten minutes later it was behind them again. They were driving fast now – Leamas had thought they would stop in East Berlin, change cars perhaps, and congratulate one another on a successful operation, but they drove on eastwards through the city.
Getting in to East Berlin might have been easy for Alec Leamas, but leaving it, along with the girl he is rescuing, forms the excruciatingly tense and ultimately doomed finale to the novel. Leamas and Liz, the girl, are forced down the only escape route open to them: going over the Wall in the middle of the night, at a place swept by a searchlight where the guards have orders to shoot on sight. The last briefing from their contact arranging the escape is suitably grim.
‘Drive at thirty kilometres,’ the man said. His voice was taut, frightened. ‘I’ll tell you the way. When we reach the place you must get out and run to the wall. The searchlight will be shining at the point where you must climb. Stand in the beam of the searchlight. When the beam moves away begin to climb. You will have ninety seconds to get over. You go first,’ he said to Leamas; ‘and the girl follows. There are iron rungs in the lower part – after that you must pull yourself up as best you can. You’ll have to sit on the top and pull the girl up. Do you understand?’
‘We understand,’ said Leamas. ‘How long have we got?’
‘If you drive at thirty kilometres we shall be there in about nine minutes. The searchlight will be on the wall at five past one exactly. They can give you ninety seconds. Not more.’
‘What happens after ninety seconds?’ Leamas asked.
‘They can only give you ninety seconds,’ the man repeated.
In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John Le Carré was brilliantly describing the bleak topography of Cold War espionage, not a particular city. It was left to Len Deighton to give us the spy’s-eye view as his anonymous hero (‘Harry Palmer’ in the films) arrives for a Funeral in Berlin in 1964.
The parade ground of Europe has always been that vast area of scrub and lonely villages that stretches eastward from the Elbe – some say as far as the Urals. But halfway between the Elbe and the Oder, sitting at attention upon Brandenburg, is Prussia’s major town – Berlin.
From two thousand feet the Soviet Army War Memorial in Treptower Park is the first thing you notice. It’s in the Russian sector. In a space like a dozen football pitches a cast of a Red Army soldier makes the Statue of Liberty look like it’s standing in a hole. Over Marx-Engels Platz the plane banked steeply south towards Tempelhof and the thin veins of water shone in the bright sunshine. The Spree flows through Berlin as a spilt pail of water flows through a building site. The river and its canals are lean and hungry and they slink furtively under roads that do not acknowledge them by even the smallest hump. Nowhere does a grand bridge and a wide flow of water divide the city into two halves. Instead it is bricked-up buildings and sections of breeze block that bisect the city, ending suddenly and unpredictably like the lava flow of a cold-war Pompeii.
If there was ever a need for a tourist audio-guide to coming in to land at Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport (in 1964, that is), then surely Harry Palmer’s is the streetwise voice one would like to hear through the headphones. Over half-way through negotiating a labyrinthine plot of double- and triple-cross, our laid-back and very observant narrator still has time to add flashes of local colour, proving to the reader, thirsty for detail, that Palmer (and Deighton) had been there and seen that.
Funeral in Berlin, Penguin, 1966
The Quiller Memorandum, Fontana, 1967
Oddly enough, Berlin is one of the most relaxed big cities of the world and people were smiling and making ponderous Teutonic jokes about soldiers and weather and bowels and soldiers; for Berlin is the only city still officially living under the martial command of foreign armies and if they can’t make jokes about foreign soldiers no one can. Just ahead of me four English girls were adding up their holiday expenses, and deciding whether the budget would let them have lunch in a restaurant or if it was to be a Bockwurst sausage from a kiosk on the Ku-damm and eat it in the park. Beyond them were two nurses, dressed in a grey conventual uniform which made them look like extras from All Quiet on the Western Front.
Deighton was clearly at home in Berlin and it was to be a happy hunting ground for him – if not his characters – in the following decade.
For Adam Hall’s finely-tuned secret agent Quiller, who made his debut in The Berlin Memorandum (retitled The Quiller Memorandum when the film came out), the city was a very dangerous place, from its wintry streets, smoky bars, and seedy hotels and cafes to its lock-up garages (especially its lock-up garages!). Almost as soon as the super-tough Quiller arrives in Berlin to hunt neo-Nazis, he finds himself being hunted, on foot and by car. At one point he decides to give his pursuers a run for their money indulging, as Quiller himself puts it, in ‘a bit of healthy-schoolboy action’.
Slush was coming on to the windscreen and the wipers knocked it away. We made a straight run through Steglitz and Sudende because I wanted to know if they’d now make any attempt to close up and ram. They didn’t. They just wanted to know where I was going. I’d have to think of somewhere. Their sidelamps were steady in the mirror, a pair of pale fireflies floating along the perspective of the streets. We crossed the Attila-strasse and I made a dive into Ring-strasse going south-east, then braked to bring them right up behind me and make them slow. As soon as they had I whipped through the gears and increased the gap to half a block before swinging sharp left into the Mariendorfdamm and heading north-east towards Tempelhof. Then a series of dives through back streets that got them going in earnest. The speeds were high now and I had the advantage because I could go where I liked, whereas they had to think out my moves before I made them, and couldn’t, because I didn’t know them myself until the last second.
Clearly, in those far-off days before cars had sat navs, Quiller was the man to have behind the wheel when being tailed by the bad guys in Berlin.
It could be a pretty hostile place even if you were a Soviet double-agent trying to escape from the Western half to find sanctuary in the East, a clever inversion of the usual plot-line but exactly the scenario facing the character Alexander Eberlin in Derek Marlowe’s A Dandy in Aspic.
Eberlin got out with the other few tourists and curiosity seekers, and stood on the platform a moment taking stock. The blue-coated railway guards checked the compartments, and glancing up Eberlin could see, framed high on the metal catwalks of the roof, the silhouettes of two Vopos, immobile, machine guns resting on their hips. He had known of an East German youth who had tried to escape by clutching onto the roof of a train, and of another who had hid in the engine of a locomotive. Both had died on the