The Berlin Murders – travelling back to Weimar

Submitted: 30th January 2026

The Berlin Murders – travelling back to Weimar

How about a weekend in Berlin?

Let’s start your visit with a guided tour by Fiona Veitch Smith….

berlin postcard

Whenever I am about to start a new book I search vintage bookshops – online and in person. I want to find a travel or tourist guide as close to the period in which my fictional characters are travelling as possible.

For my debut historical mystery novel, The Jazz Files, which sees my heroine, Poppy, moving to 1920s London, I found Muirhead’s London and its Environs from their Blue Guide series, 1922. It helped my heroine and I know which bus to catch, how much it would cost to post a letter, and how to use one of those new-fangled public telephones.

Location map of Berlin Murders

Since then, I have used vintage guides to York, Newcastle upon Tyne, Oxford and New York. In 2023 I travelled to Cairo with the wonderful 1929 Cook’s Traveller’s Handbook to Egypt and the Sudan. This helpfully informed me that I should pack opium in case of a dicky tummy. And another piece of advice was to avoid bathing in the Nile lest I catch a chill!

So, when it came to research for my fifth Miss Clara Vale Mystery, The Berlin Murders, I couldn’t possibly travel back to Weimar Berlin in 1930 without my trusty first edition of Baedeker’s Berlin and its Environs (1929).

Location map of Berlin Murders

Despite there being nearly 100 years between my visit and Clara’s, Herr Baedeker helped me find key locations for my story (or what remains of them today)

These include the Lehrter Bahnhof Station, the Brandenburg Tor, Alexanderplatz Police Station (above) (then known as the Red Castle), the Hausvogteiplatz garment district (which had been the centre of the Jewish fashion industry in the Weimar era),

The Eldorado Club (above) is of particular interest. This is the same one that appears in Cabaret and in Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin! It was taken over by the Nazis in 1933 as the Stormtrooper headquarters, and is now an organic food market).

Then you have the remains of the Fasasenstrasse Synagogue (which was burned to the ground on Kristallnacht in 1938 and is now a Jewish community centre).

The Neues Museum which houses the bust of Nefertiti and was mercilessly bombed in WWII and only properly rebuilt in the last 20 years. And last but not least, the very posh Hotel Adlon which still stands today as the Hotel Adlon Kamplinski (above).

Location map of Berlin Murders

Herr Baedeker told me and Clara how and when to register at the police station when we arrived, how difficult it was to stipulate entrance fees to museums and other buildings because of the wildly fluctuating Mark, and which hotels had the luxury of hot water on tap. Thankfully, the Adlon did.

The Baedeker also helped me find where Clara might have stayed with friends in genteel Charlottenburg. Olievaer Platz is still there, and some of its gorgeous Hanoverian town houses remain, as well as the park where nannies and their charges played back in 1930. Today you can sit and scroll through your phone while enjoying a cup of espresso from one of the park kiosks.

Location map of Berlin Murders

I had been warned when I told friends and colleagues that I was going to Berlin to search for locations for my next book that I might be disappointed. That much of the city, after being bombed in WWII, was not as it used to be. But I wasn’t disappointed at all.

The Berlin Murders Fiona Veitch Smith

Most of the locations I wanted to find were still there in one form or another. The only disappointment, really, was the absence of the Red Castle police station. There is now a modern police building near the site, but it’s not the brooding edifice that Clara visited in 1930 in her search for murderers and spies.

Location map of Berlin Murders

If you too want to travel back in time to Berlin 1930, and solve a couple of murders while you’re there, dip into The Berlin Murders by Fiona Veitch Smith.