Loyalty On Either Side of the Wall: The Berlin Apartment by Bryn Turnbull

BY CYNTHIA ANDERSON

Set in Berlin in 1961, Bryn Turnbull’s new novel, The Berlin Apartment (MIRA, 2024) is a heart-wrenching love story about Lise and Uli, a newly engaged couple whose lives are torn apart after barbed wire splits Berlin in two. Turnbull says she was inspired to write this story after researching the characters for her previous book, The Paris Deception (MIRA, 2023).

“I found that the research I’d done to develop characters who grew up in Berlin during Hitler’s rise to power, rejected Nazism and ended up in France had stuck with me. What happened to the children who’d been in Berlin at the end of the war? How had growing up in such a harshly ideological society shaped them, and what did it mean when that ideology crumbled? When the Wall went up, it was no surprise to me that Berlin’s young adults – those in their early twenties – were overwhelmingly the ones who tried to rescue friends and family: to me, it seemed a logical reaction from those who didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past generation. I dug deeper (if you can pardon the pun) into the real-life exploits of Free University students who orchestrated escapes from East Germany. I could see in my mind’s eye a young man digging a tunnel – and a young woman waiting at the other end.”

As this was the first novel she’s written where the history spans her lifetime, she found the research process much more first-hand than for her previous books. Relying on video oral histories from individuals who lived through the Wall’s construction and collapse, which she found on online databases, she gained insight into what it meant to live in either East or West Berlin during the Wall’s existence.

“There’s so much about East Germany that tends to get overlooked by people who have a more casual understanding of the time and place, says Turnbull. “When you talk to people about East Germany, the overwhelming perception is that it was a grey place, when in reality, the colour palette, so to speak, of East Berlin was quite bright: they viewed themselves as a modern society that manufactured modern goods using modern materials, and this was reflected in the clothing and consumer goods that emerged from East Germany at the time. I particularly enjoyed learning about the fashion of East Germany as reflected in the pages of Sybille magazine – East Germany’s answer to Vogue – and how fashion, through sartorial movements like punk, became a form of resistance that helped to bring down the Wall.”

The novel touches on the chilling reach that the Stasi had into peoples’ daily lives. As Turnbull explains, “At its height, East Germany’s secret police employed one secret agent for every 200 East Germans, whose surveillance was grounded by hundreds of thousands of informants. After the Wall fell and the Stasi Records Agency was opened, families broke apart because people discovered that their loved ones were passing information about them to the secret police. Imagine how destabilizing it would have been, not even to be able to trust your husband or wife.”

When East and West Germany were founded, individuals who moved between the two states were called grenzgängers. Turnbull explains that East Germans would cross into West Berlin to work or to study, and, other than being hassled by East German security forces, it wasn’t hard to live and work on both sides of the border.

author photo by Ben Ehrensperger

“However, as the 1950s wore on, grenzgängers found themselves under increasing scrutiny. East German authorities were aware that the West’s propaganda campaign – trying to win the hearts and minds of those living under Communist rule – was best waged in Berlin, which was physically located about 100 kilometres behind the Iron Curtain. As a result, the West poured big money into West Berlin to make it a showcase for capitalism. Because they spent time in the West, East Germany saw grenzgängers as the group most susceptible to turning away from socialism, and perhaps they had a point: before the Wall went up, many grenzgängers did indeed defect to West Germany. When the Wall was built in 1961, grenzgängers became scapegoats for many of East Germany’s societal ills – because they’d spent so much time in the West, they were viewed as ideologically impure. Many were barred from pursuing higher education or positions of authority.”

Turnbull explores the challenge that West Germany faced in dealing with West Berliners who helped East Germans escape. “It’s tempting to see them as vigilantes; however, to do so risks overlooking the sheer danger into which they were putting not only themselves, but many others, by their actions. The East German border guards had orders to shoot to kill, and 140 people died either trying to escape or trying to help people escape. While it was undoubtedly courageous to stand up for principles, it also put people at extreme personal, physical risk.”

She goes on to explain the wider political implications of their actions. “Berlin was in many respects the epicentre of the Cold War, and international relations were frayed to the point of breaking after the Wall went up. East Germany was an independent state, and although the erection of the Wall was undoubtedly a provocation, the state was very meticulous in making sure that not a single police officer or border guard stepped a toe into West German territory. As such, they were technically acting within their rights in imposing controls on their own citizenry. For many Western countries, leaving people like Lise to their fate behind the Iron Curtain seemed a small price to pay to avoid nuclear disaster, even if they were personally horrified by the actions of the East German state.”

The relationships within the novel—the bonds between parents and children, brothers and sisters, lovers and friends—are tested by the political backdrop of a Wall that divides people. Lise’s relationship with her brother Paul and her best friend Inge, as well as Uli’s connection with his parents are all put under enormous strain after the city is divided.

“I wanted to play with the idea of loyalty in this novel, and loyalty was the lens through which I refracted every single relationship that impacts Lise and Uli’s lives,” Turnbull says. “To me, Paul and Inge were the most complex characters to portray – it would have been easy to make either of them a straightforward villain, but to do so would have undermined the loyalty that they both feel towards Lise, in their own ways. With Inge in particular, I felt it was important not to make her a rival for Uli’s affections, but rather a person who got caught up in someone else’s love story.

“When it came to Paul, the mantra that kept running through my head was the idea that, with very few exceptions, no one actively tries to make life worse for others, particularly for people they love. With Paul, I wanted to show that some thrived under the socialist system – and you do hear from some former East Germans even now that life was better in the GDR – but also how easy it is to twist love into control and coercion: something that the state was doing on a much larger scale.”

Turnbull says when she was plotting out the novel, she wanted it to last for as long as the Wall’s existence. “I knew that I would have to make Lise, Uli and Inge quite miserable for long stretches of time! Originally the story was told only from Lise and Uli’s perspectives, but when I read through the draft, it was clear that there was a voice missing and that by threading in Inge’s narrative, I’d have an opportunity not only to strengthen the bonds between all three characters, but also to deepen the contrast, particularly for Lise, of what life was like before the Wall went up. By all accounts, the destruction of the Berlin Wall was one of the largest street parties in history, and I wanted to show the emotional impact of what it meant for people who’d lived with it for nearly 30 years.”

About the contributor: Cynthia Anderson is a writer living in Switzerland. She’s written The Pilot’s Watch, a novel about WW2 Switzerland. You can connect with her on Instagram at cynandersonwriter.