My Amazon Review of David Downing's "Wedding Station"

 

Berlin on the Brink

 

I read and enjoyed all six of David Downing’s “Station” series novels featuring the journalist John Russell set in prewar and wartime Berlin. This is his seventh effort which serves as a prequel of what was to come and trust me, I was not disappointed. As the title suggests much of the action takes place in Berlin’s gritty working class Wedding district which historically had been a hotbed of communist activity. Russell lives in a small apartment in Wedding.

 

The novel opens with Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933. Within a month Hitler was granted broad dictatorial powers. Against this dramatic backdrop we find John Russell working as a crime reporter for a Berlin newspaper that is gradually losing its freedom to print.   We see him arriving at the scene of the murder/mutilation of a seventeen-year-old “line boy” at night club catering to homosexuals. The presence of a brown shirted SA officer at the scene indicates that politics maybe involved.

 

He next works on the murder of a genealogist who was researching the past of high Nazi officials for the purpose of blackmail. More than a few of them had stronger Jewish connections than they would like to admit. With the discovery of the genealogist’s code book, he is led to a high officer in the intelligence division (SD) of the SS. Here we see the growing rivalry between the black shirted SS and the brown shirted SA.

 

Russell, as a favor to a friend, takes on a freelance assignment from a member of the German general staff in seeking to find his 19-year-old communist daughter. Russell is chosen because as recently as 1927 he was a member of the German communist party. (KPD) Through is contacts he finds her, but the net result is not pretty. Along the way Russell get beat up pretty badly.

 

Because Russell is not a German citizen his relationship to the authorities is very tenuous, especially because he is estranged from his wife. What is keeping him in Germany is his five-year-old son. Fortunately, the couple is on friendly terms.

 

Along the way we witness the attacks and boycott on Jews themselves and their businesses. The SA hooligans run riot through the streets of Berlin. At the very end Russell meets Effie Koenen who would become his paramour for the series.

 

I was really impressed the look and feel of 1933 Berlin that Downing brings to his work. By making his characters real your get a sense of the speed Hitler was operating at. To me the book represents a novelized version of Peter Fritzche’s very academic “Hitler’s First Hundred Days.” ( Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Peter Fritzche's "Hitler's First Hundred Days")To sum up, Downing does not disappoint!

For the full Amazon URL see: Berlin on the Brink (amazon.com)