22
Despite its title, London Match is a book largely about Berlin. The Berliners were familiar to me; their general demeanour; their humour closely resembled the cocky Londoners I grew up among. But the physical texture of Berlin is not like London, which is generously ventilated with parks and squares. Berlin is martial and monolithic and always has been. Berlin is like no other town I have ever seen. It fascinates me, and in many ways it became my home but there is no denying its grim grey ugliness. Its wide streets make the unrelenting vista of apartment blocks seem less oppressive. But only slightly so. To cope with overcrowding, the great apartment blocks were built one behind the other. Some tenements were so vast that there were three or four Hinterhöfe – or back courtyards. These were so small that sunlight was lost before it could find its way into the hintermost yard. In the early thirties it was calculated that more than ninety per cent of Berlin’s population were packed tightly into these grim five-storey buildings. Berlin, expanded by reparations of the Franco–Prussian War, was designed to absorb the impoverished agricultural workers who came flooding from the Eastern lands seeking jobs in the factories and sweatshops.
Ugly, dirty and crowded – sweaty in summer and freezing in winter – what is the secret attraction of this town? The population is a part of it. The endless upheavals of the past century have brought a weird mixture of people to a town that has never found its place in history. And like many others regularly brought to the brink of despair, Berliners have learned how to smile. Always from the east, there came to the city a steady stream of people looking for shelter. Persecution drove many, and revolution brought more. Painters and writers such as George Grosz and Alfred Döblin provided a lasting record of a town where skirts were short and pounding jazz was at its most frenetic. Emperor Wilhelm had disappeared into exile and Czarist Dukes were working as nightclub doormen. Sex, psychology and cycle racing were major obsessions, and money was singularly meaningful in a town where the currency had collapsed to zero time and time again.
After the debacle in the summer of 1945 the Red Army occupied the Eastern half of the city while fugitives of every kind sought a hazardous sanctuary in its West. But there was no sanctuary; just new kinds of danger. Only the agile survived. Some were saints and some were despicable but most of them were somewhere in between. I came to know many of Berlin’s dodgers and drifters but I had no right to judge them and didn’t attempt to do so. This was not just because I was a writer. Many years ago, I resolved never to resort to the poison of hatred. I had found that hatred wears and destroys the hater and it erects a barrier to understanding that makes objectivity impossible. This had an effect on my writing. Critics remarked upon the absence of villains and the neutrality of the storyteller. I didn’t mind this verdict. Researching my World War Two history books had already brought me into contact with a wide range of veterans of all ranks and specializations, and from both sides of the fighting. By the time I came to write London Match I was being discreetly approached by jaded warriors of the Cold War. These included people at many different levels, with many different motives; some in no way benign. I learned a new sort of discretion. The anecdotal material built up quickly and I soon had enough material for a hundred Bernard Samson books. But books are not assemblies of anecdotes, no matter how dramatically effective, disgusting, inhuman or deeply moving, the stories proved. The nine Bernard Samson stories would stand or fall on the credibility of the principal characters and ever-changing social situation to which they were exposed. Here was a boardroom drama in which the consequence of being ‘outvoted’ was not losing a job, but losing your life. It was an elderly Silesian building contractor who said that to me. He wasn’t talking about my books; he was talking about the dangerous cross-border life he had survived in his youth. He had been ‘out voted’ without losing his life, but some of the fingernails of his left hand were missing.
The times in which our story is set were times of confusion. Western Europe had been saved by the spilled blood of young Americans, and there was widespread gratitude, admiration and respect for the nation which was now the world’s most powerful and most economically successful. But Eastern Europe was ruled by Stalin; a brutal despot who had at one time befriended Hitler and his criminal regime. The Red Army which had invaded Poland and the Baltic states was now used to snuff out any glimmer of democracy in a vast area stretching from Vladivostok to the edge of West Germany. For most people in the West there was a simple distinction between good and evil, between the free societies and the totalitarian ones. But not for everyone. As the nineteen sixties became the seventies there was a slow shift in loyalties. No one openly disputed the existence of Soviet Russia’s secret police, its gulags and the number of its citizens who disappeared each year. But the communist propaganda machine persuaded many Europeans that America’s military presence, and the weapon technology that discouraged Moscow’s territorial ambitions, was as much of a threat as the armies of the USSR. Such people – many of them academics, writers, intellectuals and politicians – liked to proclaim that the USA was just as bad as the USSR. Some said it was worse. Some said that Marxist theory provided a promise of world order that was inevitable and desirable.
The advanced world was split into two distinct halves. The dividing line was drawn down through the middle of Germany. Grimly determined Marxists of the DDR built a barrier against the Federal Republic and killed any of their compatriots trying to join the exuberant capitalists on the other side of it. For added complexity, the town of Berlin had been created as an island in the middle of the DDR and this island was neatly divided between the two combatants. Berlin became the place where the fate of the world would be decided. What writer could resist such a fateful and bloody forum, or should that be amphitheatre? Not I. This was not old history. This was now. This was happening all around me and it was happening to people I knew well.
The fires of the misnamed Cold War did not burn with consistent fury. There were times when both sides toned down their activities for weeks at a time. Sometimes this was a result of orders due to a relaxing of attitudes between Moscow, London and Washington. But more often it was because the people at the sharp end of the conflict wearied, or needed rehabilitation after some particularly destructive blow. I have tried to reflect the way in which this happened. And while