Brandenburg (63 page)

The GDR may have disappeared along with the Berlin Wall, the institutionalized vindictiveness and the slogans calling for ever greater sacrifice, yet East Germany is still very much in evidence today. You can walk around the soulless housing complexes in Dresden and Leipzig, visit Hohenschönhausen and Erich Mielke’s office in Berlin - now both museums - or in the forests of the south happen upon the huge secret installations of the Cold War, long ago abandoned by the Soviet army. The fabric of East Germany is still pretty much intact and, naturally, the people are there with their memories of one of the most efficient dictatorships of modern times.

I have tried as far as possible to thread my story through the actual timeline of events that occurred between the beginning of September and the weekend of 11-12 November 1989. The dates for the closing of borders with Czechoslovakia, the transport of Eastern refugees to West Germany, the time and routes of demonstrations in Leipzig, and the sequence of events in Berlin on 9 November are all, I hope, accurate. I have also taken care to use the exact words spoken by Gorbachev on 6 October, by the priests officiating at the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig and by the people who took part in the crucial press conference held by Gunther Schabowski in East Berlin on 9 November. Extracts from broadcasts on both sides of the Wall that night are also word for word.

Although this is clearly a work of fiction, some real people are portrayed. Erich Mielke, the head of the Stasi, makes a cameo appearance. I hope that I have done him justice. Lt Colonel Vladimir Putin was at the time of the action a KGB officer stationed in Dresden. His duties included spying on the city’s Technical University and after the Wall fell he was indeed responsible for rescuing certain sensitive files from the Stasi’s Dresden headquarters. But of course his role in this plot is entirely made up. My character Colonel Otto Biermeier is very loosely based on Colonel Rainer Wiegand, a courageous member of the Stasi’s counter-espionage directorate who revealed details of East Germany’s active collaboration with Middle Eastern terrorists to the West. In 1996 Wiegand was due to be the star witness in the trial of the perpetrators of the bombing of La Belle discotheque in West Berlin, when his car crashed in mysterious circumstances in Portugal killing both himself and his wife. It is assumed that he was murdered.

How much the Eastern Bloc had to do with the Middle Eastern terrorism of the seventies and eighties is still largely unknown. The CIA successfully managed to attribute much of the responsibility for support of Arab terrorists to the Soviet Union. Now it appears the Russians were relatively innocent in the matter. The same was not true of the East Germans, who had a relationship with the late Abu Nidal and sheltered terrorists from Lebanon, Libya and Yemen. It is true that before the Wall came down Russia and America had begun to cooperate at a high level on Middle Eastern terrorism.

The characters of Mike Costelloe and Lisl Voss are based on real people. When news of the Wall coming down hit London on 9 November 1989 both were attending an informal dinner held at Langan’s Brasserie for the West German intelligence service, prior to a briefing by Germans of the British Joint Intelligence Committee. The West German traitor on whom I have modelled Lisl Voss insisted that the fall of the Wall would not entail the end of the GDR.

There was never anyone remotely resembling Dr Rudi Rosenharte working at the Dresden Gemäldegalerie during the eighties. Rosenharte’s background was inspired by an account of the Nazis’
Lebensborn
programme in Caroline Moorehead’s excellent study of the Red Cross,
Dunant’s Dream
(HarperCollins).

Finally, Schloss Clausnitz - the grand country house where Rudi and Konrad Rosenharte were taken as babies at the beginning of the war - is based brick for brick on Schloss Basedow, a huge pile in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern region. I have moved it to the beech forests of southern Saxony.

Henry Porter
London, 2004

Thanks are due to Pamela Merrit, who read the manuscript and gave me unstinting encouragement, and to Jane Wood, my editor at Orion, Tif Loehnis of Janklow and Nesbitt, and Sophie Hutton-Squire, who all contributed greatly to
Brandenburg
’s final form. My research trips to East Germany would have been far less easy, pleasant and effective without the help of Birgit Kubisch. I thank Christopher Hilton, author of the definitive history of the Berlin Wall (
The Wall, the People’s Story
- Sutton) for his introduction to her. Finally, I offer my gratitude to my wife Liz Elliot, who put up with the agonies of another book being written in her home, and to Lina Dias for all her support.

Scores of books have been written on the GDR and fall of the Wall. These are some of the best.
The Rise and Fall of the German Democratic Republic 1945-1990
by Mike Dennis (Longman),
The Fall of the GDR
by David Childs (Longman),
The Stasi: the East German Intelligence and Security Service
by D. Childs and R. Popplewell (Macmillan),
The Stasi: Myth and Reality
by Mike Dennis (Longman),
The Stasi Files
by Antony Glees (Free Press),
Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR 1949-1989
by Mary Fulbrook (Oxford),
Keine Gewalt!
, a photographic record compiled by Norbert Heber and Johannes Lehmann (Verbum),
Beyond the Wall: The Lost World of East Germany
by Simon Marsden and Duncan McLaren (Little, Brown), and finally the hypnotizing
Memoirs of a Spymaster: the Man Who Waged a Secret War Against the West
by Markus Wolf with Anne McElvoy (Pimlico).