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Navigating Divided Berlin in 'The Berlin Apartment' with Bryn Turnbull

• Michele McAloon • Season 3 • Episode 87

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Ever wondered how a city could be divided by more than just a wall? Join me, Michele McAloon, as I sit down with the brilliant Bryn Turnbull to navigate the poignant and gripping world of historical fiction in her latest book, "The Berlin Apartment." We promise you'll gain a deeper understanding of Berlin's turbulent history post-World War II, from the city's division by Allied powers to the eventual rise of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Through the compelling story of Lise, a medical student caught on the West side while her fiancé remains trapped in the East, Bryn highlights the profound emotional and physical divides that affected real lives.

In another segment, we uncover the invasive surveillance tactics of East Germany and their impact on families split by ideology. Discover the contrasting paths of Lise, who leans towards Western ideals, and her brother Paul, a devout East German police officer influenced by the harrowing aftermath of World War II and Soviet occupation. We also have an enlightening conversation with Bryn Turnbull herself, discussing her inspirations and intricate writing process behind "The Berlin Apartment." Don't miss this captivating episode that blends historical insight with compelling storytelling, perfect for those looking to enrich their summer listening. And be sure to check out my new website at   http://michelemcaloon.squarespace.com  

Speaker 1:

You're listening to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word, and my name is Michelle Macklin, and I've actually advanced into modern age and I have a new website where you can find all my interviews and find out a little bit about me michellemacklinsquarespacecom. All right, thank you for listening and, as always, I ask that you like and subscribe so I can continue with this podcast. Thank you, god bless. Welcome to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word, and my name is Michelle McElhoun, your host, and today we have a little different turn of a book. It is a historical fiction called the Berlin Apartment, put out by Mira Publishing, and it's actually an adorable book. I get to talk to the fabulous young author, bryn Turnbull. Welcome, bryn.

Speaker 2:

Hi, thank you so much for having me on the show, Michelle.

Speaker 1:

We're really excited about this book. Bryn is a writer of historical fiction with a penchant for fountain pens, and I understand that because I love office supplies don't you?

Speaker 2:

Oh my gosh. I know there's a specialty stationery store about half a block from my house and I swear I'm their best customer.

Speaker 1:

Oh, I know, I just I don't know why I don't really use it for anything creative, but I do like that stuff. Anyway, brynn is a smart woman. She went and she got her Master's of Letters and Creative Writing from the University of St Andrews. She's got a professional communication degree from Ryerson University and a bachelor's degree in English literature from McGill University. In English Literature from McGill University, bren focuses on finding stories of women lost within the cracks of the historical record and she's written several other books the Woman Before Wallace, the Last Grand Duchess and the Paris Deception.

Speaker 1:

And the book that we are here to talk about today is her latest book, which I believe will be out by the end of this month, and it is called the Berlin Apartment. So, bryn, welcome once again. Thank you. I had one of my authors write earlier in a book earlier in the summer, and he said A city is more than a place. It's a drama in time, and Berlin really was a drama in time. What your book is so fascinating is that the main character in your book is the Berlin Wall. So can you tell us a little bit about the history of this wall and why it was such a dramatic event and this is within our lifetime, at least my lifetime. You're probably a lot younger than I am, but in my lifetime I do remember this.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I mean it astounds me that it really is so present. I mean, writing about historical fiction, you think of things as so far removed, right? You think of history as been and done there. And the Berlin Wall, yeah, it came down in my lifetime, which I found just such a fascinating thing to think that there was this historical moment that's still so prevalent and still so impactful for so many people today and still so impactful for so many people today. So, in terms of the history, the Berlin Wall really comes out of the wreckage of the Second World War.

Speaker 2:

What Berlin was after Germany lost the Second World War. Berlin itself, as the central nexus of power in Germany, was split up into four zones of influence by the victorious Allied powers. The French, the British, the Americans and the Russians each kind of took a corner of Berlin and they moved in and they were there as sort of the occupying powers to help get Germany back on its feet and stabilize it after the Second World War ended. Now, of course, we already knew of the rumblings at the end of the Second World War, the rumblings of the Soviet Union, and the tension between the Soviet Union and the Western powers, western capitalist powers, was already very prevalent and Berlin became really and truly the stage upon which that tension was played out, because everything was so close, because the city was really sort of this almost like a kettled boiling pot situation where we see East and West confronting each other directly. So East Germany grew out of this world, controlled by the Soviets, and West Germany, of course controlled by the Soviets and West Germany, of course, controlled by the Allied powers.

Speaker 2:

When it became clear that East Germany, under this socialist regime, was very much an ideologically and economically separate state, it worked for a while Between the two countries. There was free movement in Berlin itself, berlin being 100 kilometers behind East German territory. In East German territory, rather, it still worked. There was a corridor to the west and I mean you would think that this situation would play out where West Germany is the isolated part, geographically and politically, of Berlin at the time. But it really wasn't the case, because you know there was free flights in and out of the city and everything.

Speaker 2:

So what ends up happening is East Germany economically starts to lag behind and East German citizens start seeing very prevalently on the other side of the street, literally that there's another option, that there's a capitalist society where they might be able to make a better life for themselves. And as they start to leave, as there starts to become sort of this economic and brain drain in East Germany, the East German government ends up putting up this barrier. They called it the anti-fascist protection barrier in 1961. They put up this barrier in the middle of Berlin. They split the city apart 1861, they put up this barrier in the middle of Berlin. They split the city apart. And that is really where the book starts. Is this city that had been open in all sort of the ways that mattered? All of a sudden there's this wall and it's running down the middle of the street. It's splitting up families, it's splitting up loved ones and all of a sudden the entirety of Berlin is irrevocably changed.

Speaker 1:

You bring out this drama very well in your book and in your characters of how I think it was August 12th or August 13th 1961, people are on both sides of the wall. So your main character, lise, she's studying medicine in the West. Her boyfriend is in the West, or fiance at that point, but her family is in the East and this very fateful day is, a wall is immediately put up and no one could penetrate that wall. So at that point of time it depended on what side you physically were on that wall and that determined the fate of your life at that point. Is that correct?

Speaker 2:

More or less. Yeah, I mean the barrier. Sorry, the distinction between East and West had been decided at the end of the Second World War. So at that point the country was already, or the city was already split into two countries. And that was very much an arbitrary thing. It depended on where on the map you happened to be, whether you were in East Germany or West Germany.

Speaker 2:

And, yeah, I mean, when the wall went up there were ways. If you were on the wrong side of the wall as a West German citizen, there were ways for you to get back. But if you were an East German citizen, the whole point of the at that point, the quote anti-fascist protection barrier, the wall, the whole point of it was to keep East German citizens in and to keep them economically contributing to their country and ideologically beholden to the East German state. That was the point of the wall. So it was not so much a protection barrier, despite the measures, you know, despite kind of how they dressed it up, it was all about controlling their own citizenry and keeping them from accessing the West.

Speaker 1:

And how quickly did that wall come up? I know the barriers came up immediately, but how long did it take them to actually build, I think, the dead man's zone, the running dogs, the watchtowers? How long did that construction actually take?

Speaker 2:

So there were about I believe it was five different iterations of the Berlin Wall over the course of its 30-year existence and initially what it was. On the morning of August 13th, when the city woke up and saw this barrier running down the street, it was initially barbed wire. Barbed wire and just a line of soldiers. Essentially that's what it was at the start, and at that point people could kind of possibly find ways across it. You know, there's that very famous photo of an East German soldier literally leaping over the barbed wire.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely Everybody's seen it?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, they have. Everybody's seen that one. People at that point could get out by going up into the windows of buildings along the border and jump over them. They would swim across the river Spree and try and get into the West that way. It was meant to be impermeable but it was porous at that point. But very, very shortly thereafter, in the next sort of couple of weeks, they started putting up these cement barriers and using the buildings along the wall itself, breaking up the windows of the building and using that physically as part of the wall.

Speaker 2:

You know, as time progresses and as this wall becomes, it becomes very obvious this is a permanent structure, a permanent East German structure. That's when it starts to take on this. You know this more intense surveillance kind of feel to it. Where we have the, we've got the outer wall, which is the wall that you can see from the west. There's the inner wall, which is about a block away. In between there's the dog run, there's hedgehog tank traps, there's a line of raked sand called the death strip, which is looked over 24-7 by these watchtowers and big blinding lights. At that point in the 70s and the 80s, that's when the wall really and truly becomes completely impermeable.

Speaker 1:

You talk about a little bit about a community that is up against the wall on the Western side, and that community is kind of a bohemian community, correct? That is kind of the hippie culture that has planted itself against the wall. There was, was there okay? Was there any danger to people from the West going near the wall?

Speaker 2:

Not so much. I mean you could see from the watchtowers the guards had a view into, obviously into West Germany, but the West Germans were not their concern. It was the East Germans that were their concern. It was the East Germans that were their concern. It was to stop people from getting out, so much as to stop people from coming up to it, and that's one of the reasons why the wall becomes this artistic haven really. Well, not a haven, sorry. That's one of the reasons why the wall becomes this artistic sort of protest site, because people in the West can come up, they can touch the wall, they they paint on it. At that point, if you're that close to the wall from the east german side, you would have already been shot. But for the west it it really became this, this rather stirring protest really. People painting on it slogans, signs of resistance, everything that the East didn't want it to be. The West tried to make it.

Speaker 1:

So I usually do history books or biographies or political books. I've got to really train myself not to give away the plot here. I'm concentrating on that right now. But one of the scenes in the book is a tunnel dig and this is actually from what I read in some of your resources. This was actually a scene that you took from a historical event as close to possible as historical event. Tell us a little bit about that, because this is fascinating actually.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, actually the tunnel dig was the inspiration for this book. I had been listening to a podcast. This was during the pandemic, when there was nothing to do other than walk the streets of your city, and so I walked a ton and listened to podcasts and I got completely wrapped up in this one podcast called Intrigue Tunnel 29. And it was about one of these tunnels that was dug beneath the Berlin Wall by a group of students at the Free University in West Berlin and what these students did. They were engineering students and they had friends and family in the East and they dug a series of tunnels under the Berlin Wall in Bernauerstrasse and, you know, they ended up getting people out of Berlin that way. Actually, nbc ended up kind of cluing into what they were doing and they ended up filming the escape when it happened.

Speaker 2:

It's an incredibly moving documentary, if you ever get a chance to see it, where we see these people literally digging the tunnel and coming out the other side. And of course, you know, digging a tunnel under East Berlin it's not just physically challenging, right? You're also dealing with Stasi plants, possibly Stasi informants. The minute that you dig under the wall itself into East German territory, the East German border guards had listening devices dug into the ground to detect tunnels, to detect sounds of digging, and if they heard it they would drop a grenade. And so these tunnels were under constant threat of collapse, not only from natural forces, but obviously from political forces as well.

Speaker 1:

You really do with each of your characters. You show the dramatic difference between the East and the West and how the West really was life as normal life as we know as Western people, with this complexity of decisions and choices and all of that that goes with it. But on the Eastern side you really were kind of programmed into something and your choices were very narrowed. And you see that with some of the characters that you build and how their lives were so much affected by this government involvement in their life, in every aspect of their lives, and how some people could accept it and some people could not, and I thought that was really brilliant how, even within a family situation, you were able to show that there was these diverse experiences of what it meant to be an Oasty, or in the Eastern, in the Eastern land.

Speaker 2:

Thank you. Yeah, think about your own family. There are political disagreements. Everybody has different perspectives on everything, even if you've grown up in the exact same family. There are political disagreements. Everybody has different perspectives on everything, even if you've grown up in the exact same family. And with this family, with Lise and her older brother, paul. So Lise is educated in the West, she meets Uli, her eventual fiance, and she sees what life in the West is and that's what she wants, whereas her brother Paul is a police officer. He is fully bought into the East German state and that is the tension at the heart of their relationship. That I really did want to play with was this notion of what does loyalty look like and how do different characters kind of conceive of that notion. Because I think both Lisa and Paul, in their own ways, would consider themselves incredibly loyal people, but they would look at each other's definition of loyalty and say that's treacherous. So that was something I wanted to play with.

Speaker 1:

You really did. You brought that out. And one of the things with Paul is you showed the shadow of World War II on him because he was that much older than his sister and he had to live through the horrors when the Soviets actually did come. They were not. I mean a little spoiler alert the Soviets aren't great people and this really formed him in childhood. The Soviets aren't great people and this really formed him in childhood. And you did a nice job of showing he wasn't just blindly loyal, but there was a psychological reason why he did what he did, because chivalry was something that he had to.

Speaker 2:

He could not protect his own mother, but he had to protect his sister and I thought that was really brilliant. Thank you, yeah, I think it's incredibly important. In all of my stories, the thing that I always want to find is what's the reason for the way that they're acting, what is their backstory and how does that backstory shape a character? It's easy to look at a story like this In fiction. You need antagonists, right. You need kind of the quote-unquote bad guy for your character to sort of fight against. And I'm not saying Paul is the bad guy in this story, because I think that it's too easy to make a villain and it's not truthful to make a villain. Every single person who in one person's eyes is the hero, in another person's eyes can be the anti-hero, and so I think it's important to kind of build out that nuance and say, okay, what is it about their past that causes them to act in this particular way?

Speaker 2:

My last novel, the paris deception it's set in the second world war and it deals with two, uh two young german siblings who grow up in the hitler youth and end up leaving. They leave for France and kind of hide their past and everything. But it really kind of got me thinking okay, what did it look like in Germany in 1945 for young children? What was their experience of growing up in the shadow of that? How does that change their psyche right? How does that impact the person that they become, having been through such a trauma at such an early age? And that's really where Paul's personality is kind of built out of that?

Speaker 1:

Absolutely, and I think we as Americans, and you as a Canadian, we don't really, I think, fully grasp the impact of World War I and World War II. I mean, we understand the history of it. We have had relatives that have lost their lives in it. We have beautiful cemeteries honoring the men and women who did fight in those wars. However, it's not something baked in our DNA and my yes, my sons understand it as a history lesson. They don't understand it as something lived through.

Speaker 1:

I don't understand it as something lived through, and I'm 60 years old, but I tell you, living here in Europe, it is still baked in their DNA the experiences of World War I, World War II. I see this especially in Germany and there, where history's heavy man, it's just heavy and it shapes them. It's not fitting in the soundbite. We don't understand this. We don't understand this history. We just we've all moved on from it. Well, not so fast. Not everybody has moved on from it and you do see it, it comes up as sort of a ghost and different things in here in European society, and especially in Germany.

Speaker 1:

So I think that yeah, that emphasis on the past is. I thought you did a really fine job with that. So, as the years go by, though, the wall becomes a little more porous. What happens there?

Speaker 2:

Well, one of the reasons the wall became porous is because one thing that the East German government could not control was radio waves and television signals. So, despite their efforts at complete indoctrination and despite their efforts at having this full cultural control of their people, you could still tune into a Western television show and you could still tune into a Western radio station and, as a result, even if you couldn't physically be there, you knew what was happening in the rest of the world, you knew what's happening on the other side of the wall, you knew what was happening in Western Europe, in North America. And that's really one of the reasons it becomes so porous is because people start to see what the alternative is, and we see that really start to play out, particularly with the youth in East Germany. At the time the punk movement really really takes hold in East Germany, because it is this rebellion against the society that they've grown up in, where they don't feel that they have options available to them.

Speaker 2:

And then, on top of that, of course, east Germany, like a lot of socialist nations, was interested in propaganda. They were interested in promoting their way of life and isn't it wonderful. So they would invite Western tourists over and those Western tourists would interact with again East German youth. They would bring cassette, they'd smuggle across cassette tapes, for example, and show them punk rockers, the clash, joy division. They bring this music over and these young German citizens would say, wait a minute, that's, that's who I am. I'm not what East Germany wants me to be. That is a world that understands me. And so that's when the wall really starts. You start to see those cracks forming in this youth that is looking at a different way, a better. You know what they consider a better way, and that's really where we start to see those cracks start to form, and that's really where we start to see those cracks start to form.

Speaker 1:

This is your character, lisa's son, rudolph, who actually Rudy who is 17 or 18 years old and he becomes a punkster and living his life and he realizes that the East is not for him. But finally, I know her father is able to go visit at times in the West, and so it does become more porous. I wonder what the role the Voice of America played in the radio of blasting it over there, and you kind of wonder now even if walls could actually effectively be built with something like this that we're doing now with an internet or with YouTube or everything else that is out there. It's definitely become more of a shared world, at least in most of the world actually, except some probably very rare parts. So, yeah, we're not that isolated and actually maybe it's a good thing, maybe it's actually. Maybe that is democracy is that people have a voice. What did you learn in writing this book?

Speaker 2:

Oh gosh, I mean, I always find that a tough question to answer Because I learned a lot like two years of writing and three years of research and everything.

Speaker 1:

What surprised you most about the research and writing this book?

Speaker 2:

One of the things that really surprised me was the prevalence of the Stasi in East German life. And that's not to say that I didn't know what the Stasi was before writing this book, of course, to say that I didn't know what the Stasi was before writing this book. Of course I knew them, I kind of glanced at some history of it but just the prevalence of their surveillance techniques and just how chilling and pervasive they were in East German life. One of the things that they would do is they had this method of discouragement called decomposition and basically what it meant. It was sort of like gaslighting. So if they suspected you of being a dissident, you wouldn't know that you were under surveillance. But you'd come home at the end of the day.

Speaker 2:

I'm like everything would be exactly as you left it, but all of the tea cups in your cupboard, you would have left them turned over and they'd be turned the other way around and you, you know you're all of a sudden you're not getting called on at work. You know you and your girlfriend start to fight, and it's all of this stuff just to kind of discourage you and to have you start questioning your own reality. One of the things the Stasi said was they were the most effective without you know, without weaponry, without physical violence. That was the goal, was to control people through their own thoughts and feelings and minds, as opposed to through outside coercion. And just that notion of complete and utter surveillance state and that paranoia that people must have felt would have been, I think, just so pervasive and chilling, and it would change how you move through the world, right.

Speaker 1:

And it did. It changed your character at least, Because she really was a high-flying Western girl gets caught on the Eastern side and it really does change her world. She makes decisions based on this Stasi and the Stasi were the police, the security force of Eastern Berlin. And so it does. You weave that into the story in a way that you allow the reader to really understand that that was a reality in these people's lives and how it kind of it messed with their heads. It really did. Who to trust, who not to trust?

Speaker 2:

yeah, well, and one of the things that one of the ways that I wrote it was so that if you read through it a second time, you start to see it more and you can see. You can see the moments where she's being manipulated, but you don't see them the first time around.

Speaker 1:

Very good it is. It's actually an amazingly complex book. I thought it would be just a light little beach read, and it's really. It's anything but that, because it is written very skillfully. The craft of writing is very good in it, it's very descriptive and it really does sink the reader immediately into the story. And it's not just the story, but this desperation of the ultimate villain, which is that wall that separates families, that separates friends, that separates livelihoods, and how you create a story around. That is actually pretty ingenious. It's a good book. When is it out in the United States? It's out on August 27th, okay, so it's coming up All right and pretty soon, and I actually would looking forward to maybe reading some of your other books now, because you are a proven storyteller and the publisher is Mira, correct? Publisher is Mira. Yes, okay, and you have a website that's actually really good and shows your research that you did behind this book, and that's what is it. It's BrynnTurnbullcom.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's BrynnTurnbullcom. Yeah, I do deep dives into all of my books, into some of the research that went into it, because I am a classic student. I like to be able to show my work.

Speaker 1:

Very good, but you come to a conclusion at the very end in your postscript on history. Tell us a little bit about that.

Speaker 2:

Well, I mean, this was the first story that I wrote, so I was born in 1988.

Speaker 2:

The wall came down in 1989.

Speaker 2:

And it kind of was we were talking about at the start of the start of this conversation.

Speaker 2:

It was so striking to me to think that this is something that, despite the fact that I was unaware, it's in my lived history Right, it's in my this's in my lived history, right, it's in my this is in my lived history.

Speaker 2:

And that really struck me, because all my other books are kind of set in the earlier part of the 20th century and they feel like distant past, whereas this book does not feel to me like distant past, it feels like yesterday, and and so I think that it is important to really consider that we are living through history at any given moment. We don't necessarily know the moments that are going to be written about in the future. I mean, some of them, some of them are pretty obvious, but not all of them are and I think I think to be able to kind of look at life through the lens of our own responsibility to the historical record and our own responsibility to making a world without walls and making, you know, making the world a better place. That's just the little reminder that I want to leave my readers with.

Speaker 1:

And it is a great reminder. It really is, and you do this in such a way that it's a good read. It's an interesting read and you do bring that point home, which you know what History counts. It really does, and we are living our history now. Well, bryn Turnbull, I cannot thank you enough for this interview and I wish you the best of luck with this book and I'm waiting for the next one now.

Speaker 2:

Thank you so much, Michelle. It was lovely chatting with you.

Speaker 1:

It was lovely chatting with you. You've been listening to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word. We have been talking to Bryn Turnbull, the author of the Berlin Apartment a great read, especially as the summer finishes up and in the month of August. It was in August of 1961 that the wall went up, so it's a good time to read this book. Please look at my new website at michellemacklewsquarespacecom and remember there's no hell in my name, so I'm only a 1L, michelle. All right, keep reading, keep talking.