The Butchers of Berlin (53 page)

And the following works proved especially useful:
The Last Jews in Berlin
by Leonard Gross (Simon & Schuster, 1982) for reasons stated;
Berlin at War
by Roger
Moorhouse (Vintage, 2011) has good detail (the filthiness of the food), plus Nöthling, Horcher’s and Rosenstrasse;
The
SS Dirlewanger Brigade: The History of the Black
Hunters
by Christian Ingrao (transl. Phoebe Green, Skyhorse, 2011) has much on the psychology of atrocity and terror, referred to by Morgen in Chapter 52;
Aimée and Jaguar
by
Erica Fischer (Bloomsbury, 1996) cf. p.107: ‘girls were having pornographic pictures taken by Schmidt the photographer’;
A Social History of the Third Reich
by Richard Grunberger
(Penguin, 1974) especially chapters on corruption, consumption, women and youth;
Swing Under the Nazis: Jazz as a Metaphor for Freedom
by Mike Zwerin (Cooper Square, 2000) and
Different
Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany
by Michael H. Kater (OUP, 1992) have fascinating material on jazz as a dissident but absorbed culture, with mention of a nightclub with telephones
for calling between tables, as well as names (Mike Hidalgo, Kurt Widmann) featured in the book; Francis Alwynd’s jazz ramblings in Chapter 10 would have come from these sources;
The Berlin
Diaries 1940
–
1945
by Marie ‘Missie’ Vassiltchikov (Pimlico, 1999) offers a most detailed and impressive account of cosmopolitan life in wartime, the more fascinating
for being from a woman’s perspective, albeit elevated, as she was a white Russian
émigrée
. Vassiltchikov notes once the bombing started women took to wearing scarves
instead of hats. She has a tiny cameo, appearing in Chapter 34 (‘Schlegel had met her; a princess, no less, achingly beautiful’);
Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals in the
Holocaust
by Charles Patterson (Lantern, 2002);
The Taste of War
by Lizzie Collingham (Penguin Press, 2012): lots on pigs, and see especially the chapters ‘Autarky and
Lebensraum’, ‘Herbert Backe and the Hunger Plan’ and ‘Genocide in the East’;
Animals in the Third Reich
by Boria Sax (Yogh & Thorn, 2013 reprint) cf. p.54:
‘The Sacrificial Pig’;
Jews in Nazi Berlin
by Meyer, Simon and Schütz (Chicago Press, 2009) includes a thorough chapter on ‘Snatchers’, the Berlin
Gestapo’s Jewish informants, pp.249–267, with photographs of Kübler, who survived the war. She was sentenced to ten years of imprisonment by a Soviet military tribunal, then went
to West Berlin where she was convicted for serving as accessory to murder but did not serve her term. She committed suicide at the age of 72 in 1994.
The Forger
by Cioma Schönhaus,
(transl. Alan Bance, Granta, 2007) has much detail on the life and business of underground forgers.

In terms of fiction, Alfred Doblin’s
Berlin Alexanderplatz
(transl. Eugene Jolas, Penguin, 1978 edition) presents the slaughterhouse on a plate, in an astonishing
documentary sequence (in an astonishing book) that spares no detail: ‘hot steaming blackness, black red’. The slaughterhouse complex still exists, much knocked about, partly flattened,
with some of the remaining buildings renovated into the usual retail parks and apartments. What that does to their feng shui one cannot imagine. Shed 27 is still there, derelict, with a relief
carving of the head of a stone pig in the wall. Nobody nails Berlin better than Döblin, in terms of actual mapping and psychogeography, and if
The Butchers of Berlin
introduces any new
readers to him then the exercise will have been worthwhile. The debt is (grudgingly) acknowledged by having Sybil read the book, which remains unnamed, although its hero Franz Biberkopf is in
Chapter 23. Francis Stuart’s
Black List Section H
(Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), as mentioned, formed the basis of Francis Alwynd’s story, although the encounters
with Sybil and Lore have no factual base. It was more the details and observations of Stuart’s life in Berlin that were appropriated (the ‘non-crease, unsoilable, turtleneck
jersey’ that gave him an un-Central-European air) and the fact he spoke English in Berlin throughout the war, almost without comment. Although, in retrospect, there was no reason for an
Irishman not to be there at that time, as a neutral, Stuart’s presence remained startling, and, for the purposes of this story, he seemed to belong with other real-life conundrums, such as an
SS man in Internal Affairs and a woman who cruised the city looking to betray her own people. For the before and after of the period dealt with, and on Germany and Germanness, I reread Sybil
Bedford’s
A Legacy
(Penguin Classics edition, 2005) and Walter Abish’s
How German Is It
(New Directions, 1979).

The following should be thanked for their help and/or hospitality during the writing of this book: Christopher Roth, Jeanne Tremsal, Georg Diez, Gabriele Mattner, Arno
Brandlhuber, David Pirie, Liz Jobey, Lynda Myles, Richard Williams, Jennifer Potter, Iain Sinclair, Stanley Schtinter, and especially my agent Clare Alexander, for setting up and driving the
project on, publisher Ian Chapman for having me back, Jo Dickinson for her clear advice and editing, and particularly Emma Matthews, for having to live with it.