Why a Booktrail?
1930s to 1950s: The Nazis have been in power for just eighteen months but already Germany has seen some frightening changes
If The Dead Rise Not
What you need to know before your trail
Berlin is preparing to host the 1936 Olympics, but in 1930s Berlin, behind the images of sporting pride and prowess, Jews are being expelled from all German sporting organisations. Discrimination on one hand and something much worse on the other.
Bernie Gunther used to work for Berlin’s Criminal Police until he was forced to resign and now works as a house detective at the famous Adlon Hotel. Two bodies have been found there – one a businessman and the other a Jewish boxer. As Bernie digs to unearth the truth, he discovers a vast labour and construction racket designed to take advantage of the huge sums the Nazis are spending to showcase the new Germany to the world. It is a plot that finds its dramatic and violent conclusion twenty years later in pre-revolutionary Cuba.
Travel Guide
Germany
1930s Berlin is a very frightening place to be.
People stop and start and to salute the traffic jam of Nazi flags and banners the soldiers were carrying
This is the Germany of the novel where the Nazis are very much in control and there the threat of war is just over the horizon. In fact the threat marches the streets and parades its fear among everyone who lives there.
Königgrätzer strasse/Ebertstraße/Saarland Strasse
I kept on walking and it was not until Saarland Strasse – formely Koniggratzer Strasse , until the Nazis decided we needed to be re,ned about the Treaty of Versailles and the injustice of The League of Nations – that the owner of the voice caught up with me”
Anhalter Banhof
The train station is now a tourist attraction. This was linked via a tunnel to the Excelsior hotel where the police drink in the novel and it was also the favourite watering hole of the Gestapo. This is an iconic place for the sporting facilities on site, important to the novel.
The Berlin Story Bunker and the Topography of Terror are nearby and part of the background to the story
Cuba
When the story moves to Cuba in 1954, this is the Havana of Batista’s. Castro has just been jailed for a failed attack on a barracks. Gunter meets people he needs to talk to and also comes across many of the island’s gangsters. The Jewish people, suffering so badly in Germany have found some sort of sanctuary here:
Jews had been arriving in Cuba since the time of Columbus. Many who had been forbidden entry to the USA more recently than that had been given sanctuary by the Cubans, who , with reference to the Jew’ most common country of origin, called them polacos”
Streetview Maps
A) Germany - Berlin - Hotel Adlon
C) Germany - Berlin - Anhalter Station
Booktrail Boarding Pass Information: If the Dead Rise Not ( Bernie Gunther 6)
Author/Guide Philip Kerr Destination: Berlin, Havana Departure Time: 1930s
Web: philipkerr.org/
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