Free The Moment by Douglas Kennedy Page A

looked upon him as one of those flighty nineteenth-century literary personages whose work was largely divorced from quotidian realities and, as such, had to be dismissed as the height of bourgeois narcissism. Whatever the interpretation, when I came upon the Heinrich Heine Checkpoint, all I could think was—as it was for him in life, so it continues one hundred and twenty-eight years after his death. For he remains a writer who traversed the contradictions of the German consciousness—and, as such, deserved to belong to both sides of this now-divided land.
However, upon arriving in Berlin three days earlier I was geographically far away from Heinrich Heine Strasse, as I’d taken up temporary residence in a pension off the Ku’damm . . . right in the heart of an elegant square called Savignyplatz. The place was recommended in a “Berlin on the Cheap” guidebook I’d found in New York. It was a small, immaculate bed-and-breakfast place with rooms for forty deutsche marks a night—which, in 1984, worked out at around $12—affordable for a week or so, but not a long-term prospect for a writer with a small advance, working on a tight budget. Facing the green leafy plaza that was Savignyplatz, the Pension Weisse was a soft landing into Berlin. My room—with its firm single bed, its simple, Scandinavian-style furniture, its spotless en-suite bathroom, its ample heating, its spacious desk upon which I parked my typewriter, its soundproof windows—was a delight. I was punch-drunk after thirteen hours of travel via New York and Frankfurt, but the matron at the reception desk—none other than Frau Weisse—immediately endeared herself to me by letting me have access to the room a full three hours before check-in time.
“I have given you a room with a very nice view,” she told me. “And knowing you were arriving today we turned up the heating in it early this morning. Berlin has been arctic for days. Please do not risk frostbite and venture outside. I would hate to have to rush you to hospital on your second day here.”
Of course, I did venture outside—around three hours later when the wind and the blowing snow subsided. I made it out to the newspaper kiosk right next to the Savignyplatz S-Bahn station where I bought an International Herald Tribune, a packet of Drum rolling tobacco and cigarette papers, and a half-bottle of Asbach Uralt brandy (the idea of buying alcohol at a newspaper shop always pleased me). I then ducked into a pasta place. I ate a bowl of spaghetti carbonara, washed back with a glass of rough red wine. I read the newspaper and smoked several roll-up cigarettes with two espressos. I studied my fellow clientele. They were divided into two groups. There were businesspeople in suits who worked in the offices that lined the nearby Kurfürstendamm. There were also—judging from such standard-issue urban art house gear as their leather jackets, their black turtlenecks, their Bertolt Brecht eyeglasses and their packets of Gitanes—well-heeled members of the creative classes. I’d no doubt these were the sort of people who spoke the same lingua franca in which all cultured metropolitan people were fluent. And after lunch—when I was able to manage twenty minutes out of doors before the cold sent me back to my room—my walk around the quarter brought me past the elegant left-behinds of nineteenth-century burgher apartment blocks, and expensive, amply stocked local delicatessens, and fashionable clothing boutiques, and excellent bookshops and emporiums of classical music. The result of this hurried arctic dance around these well-heeled streets was to inform me that I had landed myself in one of West Berlin’s most pleasing neighborhoods. Coupled with the ease and comfort of the Pension Weisse, it was clear to me that I would have to get out of here fast. I wanted to write a book that reflected the edgy rhythms of this edgy city. But how could I simply commute into such edginess, then return home to an