The first two
books in the Reinhardt series—The Man From Berlin and The Pale House—were set
in Sarajevo, a city I knew well from living six years in Bosnia. Writing The
Ashes of Berlin was an entirely different challenge. I only knew that the first
trilogy ended there, and it involved Reinhardt pursuing a man who believed
justice needed to be served, no matter where and when. And I felt that, insofar
as Reinhardt was coming there from far off the beaten track—from the Balkans,
which most people take as a by-word for treachery and intrigue—he had better
have something interesting to tell us about this place…!
I settled on
1947 as a year that seems to pass between the end of the war in 1945, and the
Berlin Airlift in 1948. I look at 1946 and 1947 as ‘quiet’ years. But what was
going on…?
I read and
researched.
I found avenues
of interest, like the fact the Allies outlawed the German armed forces and, at
a stroke, made destitute millions of men and their families. No pensions,
nothing. What would that have been like, I wondered? How would people have
survived that? Many didn’t, I discovered. Suicide rates soared, especially
among men. What happened to the families they left behind, I wondered, knowing
from my humanitarian work that men and women often faced such existential
trials in very different ways…?
I read and
researched.
I read about
rations, and ration cards. I read about how families were crammed into damaged
and insalubrious accommodation. Children went to school hungry, and came home
famished. I rediscovered the stories of the millions of refugees—Poles, Balts,
Ukrainians and Jews—who lived in shabby camps, cherishing memories of the homes
they had lost and dreaming of the homes they might one day find somewhere else.
I wondered how to weave those stories into a future Reinhardt novel, one that
might bring those stories closer to the work I do now with the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees. I wondered how close those stories might be to those
I had heard from refugees in Chad, in Chechnya, in Mali, in Pakistan.
I went into the
National Archives in Kew, and felt like a proper writer. I walked Berlin’s
streets, and felt a bit awkward with my maps and camera, and with my pencil
stuck between my lips!
Coming up
against this veritable tidal wave of facts, this avalanche of materials,
clambering over the shoulders of the writers and historians that had come
before me, that was when I realised that in writing the Reinhardt novels, I had
never really wanted to be taken for a historian of those times, particularly
not a historian of Germany and the Germans.
Of course, I
wanted to be right about what I wrote about. Of course I wanted to transport
you as a reader. Of course I wanted to give you suspense and adventure in
far-off, long-ago places like the Balkans.
But it was in
deciding how to get my head around the challenge of writing a novel set in
Berlin that could be read as a novel that was as true as it could be to the
realities of an occupied and devastated city, that I realised I was channeling
something else. That with Reinhardt I was trying to get to the human aspects of
one man caught between choices. And that with war, and its aftermath, it is too
easy to be stunned by the glare of violence, the shatter of ruins, and to
forget that most people do no harm but they do receive it, and somehow they
carry on.
-->
Fleetingly,
haltingly, painfully, in silence, in dignity, in anguish, in as many ways as
there are people, they carry on.
Ashes of Berlin by Luke McCallin
1947 and Gregor
Reinhardt has been hired back onto Berlin's civilian police force. The city is
divided among the victorious allied powers, tensions are growing, and the
police are riven by internal rivalries as factions within it jockey for power
and influence with Berlin's new masters.
When a man is found slain in a broken-down tenement, Reinhardt embarks
on a gruesome investigation. It seems a serial killer is on the loose, and
matters only escalate when it's discovered that one of the victims was the brother
of a Nazi scientist. Reinhardt's search
for the truth takes him across the divided city and soon embroils him in a plot
involving the Western Allies and the Soviets. And as he comes under the
scrutiny of a group of Germans who want to continue the war – and faces an
unwanted reminder from his own past – Reinhardt realizes that this
investigation could cost him everything as he pursues a killer who believes
that all wrongs must be avenged...
Buy it from the SHOTS A-Store.
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