Brodie said, “Still, they had the guns. You were all very brave.”
Ulrich shrugged. “We were tired of being afraid. Tired of being abused. It was as simple as that. Once you cross this line, it is almost… easy. We didn’t want to die, but we were prepared to. We knew we had a chance to take those bastards down, and we could not afford to let the moment pass.” Ulrich glanced at Taylor in the rearview. “Excuse my language, miss.”
“No fucking problem,” Taylor assured him.
They all got a laugh at that.
They entered a residential neighborhood of handsome prewar apartment buildings and storefronts, and then the buildings quickly transitioned to a hodgepodge of more recent construction.
Berlin was not a beautiful city in any traditional sense. It didn’t have much in the way of architectural uniformity or charm, which was a result of it being bombed and then blown to hell in street-to-street fighting, then divided into four occupation zones—American, British, French, and Russian—then split in two by the Wall. But what it lacked in traditional beauty it more than made up for with its sheer intrigue. During his last visit, Brodie remembered feeling that every corner of the city had a story to tell. And most of those stories didn’t have happy endings.
They crossed the Spree River and entered onto a wide six-lane boulevard with thick growths of bare trees on either side.
Ulrich gestured out the window. “This is the Tiergarten, which Mr. Brodie might remember. Beautiful park, even in winter. The eastern end of the park is across the street from your embassy. Good for a nice walk.”
They approached a traffic circle surrounding a tall decorative stone column that Brodie recalled from his last visit. The column was ringed with sculptures of gilded cannons, and on top was a bronze statue of a winged woman holding aloft a wreath of laurels and a lance.
Ulrich, who had probably heard “What is that?” a few hundred times, anticipated the question and said, “That is the Victory Column. Built in 1873 by Prussia to commemorate military conquests that expanded the German Empire. On top is Victoria, Roman goddess of victory.”
Brodie looked up at Victoria, her feathered wings and raised lance shining in the bright morning sun. He imagined that contemporary Germans were a little more comfortable with displays of martial pride like this one, which predated the Third Reich.
They rounded the traffic circle and then continued east along the boulevard that cut through the Tiergarten. In a few minutes they passed another monument on their left, a modernist stone colonnade behind a large plaza. A brass statue of a helmeted soldier stood on a high pedestal, flanked on either side by artillery guns and tanks. The pedestal featured Cyrillic writing etched in gold.
Taylor looked at it out the window as they drove past. “What is that?”
“It is one of the Soviet War Memorials,” said Ulrich. “For the Red Army soldiers who died in the battle for the city. Much of the marble used to build it was taken from the ruins of Hitler’s Reich Chancellery.”
Brodie remembered this from his last visit. The Soviets had built this memorial on the spot where they had buried thousands of their own dead within the Tiergarten, which had been reduced to a charred wilderness from incendiary bombings and from the Red Army’s advance into the heart of the city.
Brodie eyed the colossal Soviet soldier towering over the now regrown trees of the Tiergarten. He wondered if it was disturbing for Berliners out for a stroll in the park to have to see a prominent memorial to the sacrifices of the conquering army, while no memorials existed to their own soldiers who had fought and died for the most hated regime in history. This was a complicated place.
Ulrich eyed the memorial as they drove past it and said, “The Soviets are gone, but it was part of the German reunification treaty to keep these memorials. In order to… honor the men who defeated the fascists.”
Ulrich said that last part as if he didn’t exactly agree with the reasoning. Indeed, the Red Army did deserve much of the credit for defeating Hitler. But they also flattened Berlin and other German cities in their path, and raped millions of German women before and after the fall of the Reich. To the victor go the spoils. History hung over this city like a shroud.
Ulrich said, “Up ahead is the Brandenburg Gate. Built by King Friedrich Wilhelm the Second in 1791. This serves as a passageway to Unter den Linden, the main boulevard in the city center and also where your embassy is. The boulevard used to lead straight to the Royal Palace, which was badly damaged in the war and then demolished by the Communists, but has now been rebuilt.”
Brodie looked at the iconic Brandenburg Gate ahead of them. A row of neoclassical columns formed five passageways, through which Berliners on bike and on foot were passing in both directions, which was not possible when the Brandenburg Gate divided East and West Berlin. Atop the structure was a sculpture of a horse-drawn chariot carrying Victoria, who must have been the Germans’ favorite Roman goddess.
As they got closer to the gate, Brodie noticed mottled patches of lighter-colored stone along the lengths of the Doric columns, where the sandstone had been replaced to cover bullet holes and pockmarks from grenade and bomb shrapnel.
Ulrich made a right turn at the T-intersection in front of the gate, and they passed along the eastern edge of the Tiergarten. Ulrich pointed to their left. “This is the embassy here.” He added, “We will go around to the back.”
Brodie and Taylor looked out the driver’s-side window. From here they could see the western side of the embassy, which was a modern, fairly nondescript four-story sandstone building. Brodie noticed a Berlin Police officer standing near a small side entrance. Knee-high security bollards lined the curb between the road and the tree-lined cobblestone sidewalk, and a metal fence stood in front of the embassy walls. A few pedestrians passed by.
Ulrich drove a block past the embassy and then made a left. He again pointed out his window. “This is the Holocaust Memorial. The architect is an American Jew.”
Brodie and Taylor looked out at a field of thousands of rectangular stone slabs arrayed in long rows. The slabs were suggestive of a cemetery—or perhaps a mass grave. They all appeared to be the same shape but varied in height from a few inches high to over fifteen feet tall, and followed the curves of the ground beneath them, creating ripples across the field. Two teenagers sat on top of one of the slabs. A tourist family took a selfie.
This place, like the memorial of the Soviet soldier flanked by howitzers and tanks in the Tiergarten, seemed to be not only a monument to a dark past, but—due to its central location—a piece of public art. A place not only prominent but unavoidable. Maybe that was the point.
They passed the memorial, and Ulrich made a series of turns to bring them around to the back of the embassy. As they approached the rear of the building he pulled onto a narrow shoulder and stopped in front of a row of security bollards.
Ahead of them stood a short, stocky man in his mid-forties with a full head of dirty-blond hair. He was dressed in a black topcoat and holding a walkie. He and Ulrich exchanged waves, and the man said something into the walkie. After a moment the security bollards lowered into the ground, and Ulrich pulled the Mercedes forward onto the embassy property.
Ulrich parked the car near the rear entrance, a glass entryway with a security booth next to it. A Berlin Police officer was inside the booth, watching them without much interest.
Ulrich said, “I am to take you to your hotel when you are ready.”
