I just came across this boring picture I took while I was waiting for a bus in Wannsee, the western suburb of Berlin where part of Red Pill is set. 
The reason I took it is the destination of the 118. "Onkel Tom str." Uncle Tom Street. It was a reminder to find out why on earth a suburban Berlin street would have that name
To be honest, I wasn't 100% sure I wanted to know the answer.
Turns out, in the 1880's, a man called Tom opened a pub by the Grunewald. And he built some huts to shelter his customers when it rained.
So Tom's huts reminded people of the book, which was famous in Germany, so the location became known as Uncle Tom's Cabins. Just that. A man called Tom. With some cabins. As you were.
Admit it, you thought I was going dark there, didn't you.
Wannsee is not un-dark, mind you. You're never very far away from history. It's there in the Weimar era Fraktur font on the sign at the railway station.
Fraktur is more than a typeface. Goethe thought it was a 'revelation of the German mind'. Supposedly it allows words to be recognized as 'closed conceptual structures' rather than whatever they are in Times New Roman
Type designer Rudolf Koch wrote that German and Fraktur have 'a strange connection that has to be felt more than expressed in words. There lives and weaves something wild, bold, combative, hard, gnarled and also again delicate, fine in its symbols: a rose hedge, German forest'
I'm getting way off the point, here. History, that's what I'm supposed to be talking about.
Wannsee is a summer destination. People have always come here to swim or go boating. On the other side of the lake in this picture is the Strandbad, a people's lido. The pavilions were built in the 1920's, in the style of the Neue Sachlichkeit, the New Objectivity
There's a 1930 film called People on Sunday about a couple of young modern Berlin girls, who go to Wannsee on their day off. If you watched Babylon Berlin, you'll find it borrows some visuals from this
In winter, it's a different matter. Your thoughts go in other directions
It's a melancholy place in winter, and the bluish greys and whites of the endpapers of the British edition of Red Pill really get that feel
And of course there's the site by the lake where the writer Heinrich von Kleist and his friend Henriette Vogel died in a suicide pact in 1811
I did a thread about Kleist and why, thanks to my walks to his grave in Wannsee he's now on a billboard in Shoreditch (with laser eyes)
I do go and visit the graves of writers. Here I am with Brecht
Anyway, this is the American Academy, where I lived and worked in Wannsee.
And here's Bismarck, who hangs around opposite the railway station, half hidden by a tree, waiting for people to notice him.
Of course, the name Wannsee has become inextricably linked to this unremarkable house, on the opposite side of the lake from the Strandbad
Here in January 1942, Nazi officials, under the direction of Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich met to decide on a 'final solution' to the 'Jewish question'. Participants were careful to speak elliptically. They knew what they were proposing.
The 'Wannsee Conference' is in some ways a misleading name. I always imagined that it was involved, detailed. But it was a meeting that took around 90 minutes. In that time, various government departments agreed to coordinate on the deportation and murder of the Jews of Europe.
The house had many other uses over the years, and it's now a holocaust memorial, with a detailed account of the progression towards genocide.
I've thought a lot about this photograph, reproduced at the house. After the Nuremberg race laws of 1935, local Nazis in various places staged carnivalesque humiliations of mixed couples
The sign says "I am a race defiler." The woman seems terrified, withdrawn. The man is looking straight at the camera, meeting its gaze. I feel very personally about this picture. I don't know what happened to these people, and I don't know if I'm reading his expression correctly
But when I saw it at the Wannsee conference house, I had the illogical impulse to speak to him, to say I see you, I am with you.
Prompted by someone who read this thread (I can't find your name right now, but thanks) I've now found out more about the photo of the couple I saw at the Wannsee conference house
Their names are Julius Wolff and Christine Neumann, and location is a small seaside town in East Frisia called Norden. The picture was published in a local paper in July 1935. Their crime, to get engaged.
Before I leave Wannsee, I realize I forgot to mention an important aspect of its atmosphere, which is its proximity to the Babelsberg film studio. Fritz Lang shot Metropolis there.
and Dr Mabuse ...
Von Sternberg shot the Blue Angel there
Because of its proximity to the film studio, Wannsee became popular with people from the film world. One thing I didn't know until recently was the Hitchcock connection. He came to the studio in 1924 as a scriptwriter, to work on an Anglo-German co production.
He was excited to find that on the next sound stage, the great FW Murnau was shooting. Hitchcock learned a lot from Murnau, and he was impressive enough that he was hired to shoot two films of his own.
Here he is, in 1926, working on his second film, Der Bergadler (The Mountain Eagle), sadly now lost. He later married Alma Reville, the woman behind him. It makes sense to me that Hitchcock had this exposure to Weimar Berlin. He carried that atmosphere into his later work.
