Berlin, a City of Passions

by Pa Rock
Reader and TV Junkie

Lately, through no intentional planning on my part, I have been exposed to two compelling views of Berlin, the capital of Germany.  The city, which was partitioned and divided by a wall during the first forty years after the end of World War II, has been a geo-political focus for Europe and most of the world throughout much of my lifetime.

One of the Berlins that I have been experiencing is a view of the racism and criminal activity rolling through the streets of modern Berlin that is set forth in the new Netflix series, The Dogs of Berlin.  The line between the good guys (the cops) and the bad guys (the criminal and racist gangs) quickly becomes blurred during the first episode.  The lead character, a policeman who is a former neo-Nazi and still has family ties to extremist organizations, sleeps around, essentially manages two households, and constantly schemes and struggles to pay off his gambling debts – and he is one of the good guys!  It is an uncomfortable, yet compelling, police drama without definitive heroes.

The other Berlin with which I have been involved is the historical city captured in Café Berlin, a work of historical fiction by Harold Nebenzal.  It is an enthralling account of the rise and fall of the Third Reich as witnessed by a young entrepreneurial immigrant to the city.

Daniel Sapporta, the unlikely hero of this story, begins life as the son of a spice merchant in Damascus, Syria – the oldest continually occupied city on earth.  Daniel and his family are Jewish.  As a young boy he works for his father and learns the spice business in intricate detail, then, on the occasion of his bar mitzvah, a German couple who have business dealings with his father, travel from Germany to attend the boy’s manhood celebration.  The couple offer to take him into their home and their business in Berlin when he reaches an age where he can strike out on his own.  

Daniel leaves home at the age of seventeen and travels to Berlin by train, with much of the trip being on the famed Orient Express.  While enroute to Berlin he strikes up a friendship with a fellow passenger, a Jewish professor from Berlin who cautions him about the ascendancy of the Nazis in German politics.  Once he arrives in Berlin, Daniel moves in with the friends of his father’s, a living situation that is quickly imperiled when the businessman’s wife begins making sexual advances toward him, advances that the seventeen-year-old is neither able nor willing to reject.

A year later, after being kicked out of the household where he had been living, Daniel Sapporta begins his career as a businessman in Berlin when he buys a defunct nightclub with money that his mother had sewn into the lining of his coat.  He befriends several of the former employees of the club who are glad to have an opportunity to regain their jobs, and they help him figure out how to run a successful club.    With Daniel’s past experience in the import-export business, and his ability to speak several languages, he is soon bringing in exotic dancers from the Middle East and establishes his club as a social center for many of Berlin’s elite, including a raft of young Nazi officers.

Through the advice and encouragement of the professor whom he met on the train, Daniel acquires a Spanish passport, changes his last name to Salazar, and is now posing as a Franco supporter (and Christian) with no official war leanings.  It is from that perch that he gradually becomes a spy for the Resistance.

As his role as a spy grows, he becomes physically involved in the business of war to the point where he actually has to shoot a couple of soldiers, and is called on to help to derail a train loaded with Bosnian soldiers who have been assigned to round-up and kill Jews.

The Gestapo raid Daniel’s club as he is preparing to leave Berlin in the winter of 1941, and instead of escaping the city he is forced into hiding.  He spends the rest of the war secluded in an attic of an old house in the heart of the city, and survives on the kindness members of his former staff at the club.   During the time he is hiding in the attic, Daniel maintains his sanity and his perspective by writing a diary about his time in Berlin – and that diary is the crux of Café Berlin.

Café Berlinis obviously a bit of an homage to Anne Frank. It also has elements of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories which formed the basis of Cabaret, as well as a pinch of Bridge Over the River Kwai.   Taken on the whole, however, it is a damned fine story of ordinary people trying to survive in a time of war.  The account is fiction, but it has been crafted by a writer who prides himself on historical accuracy and detail.  

The Berlin of Harold Nebenzal is richly alluring and decadent, and every bit as dangerous as the modern Berlin that is being offered up by Netflix.  And while three-quarters of a century separate the two visages, it is still strikingly clear that they are blood relatives.