Throughout the novel I tried to capture the many different ways Berlin presented itself over the course of four seasons. Here is a sampling of some of the photos I took while living there. If you are interested in copying or using them, please have a look at the copyright notice.

"Poor Friedrichstrasse. The street was a self-contained tumultuous world of robots. Machines with jaws at the end of pheumatic necks — mechanized dinosaurs — were perched high on mountains of rubble. All along Friedrichstrasse the jaws clacked, probed under roofs, punched through walls, pecked at corners, ripped into masonry. Elsewhere, the rubble had been hauled away and power shovels reached down into soft sand ..."
(p. 122)
"Twelve years of Fascism, a war, forty-five years of Communism. See what it does to physical heritage. East Berlin received a terrible dressing down. We are determined to make it great again." (p. 100)

"What about Potsdamer Platz, a place one filled with throngs of people? Potsdamer Platz, the heart of Berlin before the bombs rained down. After the annihilation it was a collection of ghostly black and burned out shells. The little that remained after the war was dynamited away, the bricks recovered and recycled into utilitarian structures someplace else. Greatness reprocessed into dullness." (p. 116)
"The Reichstag was filling fast. The galleries were were loaded with TV cameras. In one corner, members of the Berlin Philharmonic were taking their positions. The section reserved for diplomats, close to the front, was just behind the political elite. The Berlin diplomatic corps, with its morbid desire to spend time in the democratic vault of horrors, always turned out in numbers for Reichstag functions." (p. 417)
"On a high-tech cushion of air, the consul roamed through fascinating places - Prenzlauerberg, the Scheunenviertel, Pankow - all of them moody, all of them stuck between a desire for transition and a deep reluctance to change." (p. 175)

"Trekking through cemeteries he studied names on Jewish gravestones in one, and of Huguenots in another. He discovered the places of eternal rest of famous personalities ..." (p. 182)
Sabine described the day the Wall went up, not far from where she lived. Through barbed wire they watched the torment of neighbours on the other side. Then came concrete blocks and the view - and sense of neighbour - disappeared. The sinister permancence of the Wall made everyone feel violated. The communists, Sabine said bitterly to Tony, had sealed her in. "Maybe not sealed in, " he replied, pointing a bright side. "Maybe the other side got sealed out." Sabine didn't argue.
"Sealed in. Sealed out," she said with resignation. "Sealed off." (p. 79)

"The Wall ran into the river here and continued on the opposite side. At first, Easterners tried to swim out through the watery opening. Good shooting practice for Communist border patrols: a decent distance, a target that moves, though not too fast. On the south bank by the Reichstag the West kept score. Dozens of white crosses sprouted up." (p. 426)
"It's incredible what the East Germans destroyed. Take one example: they destroyed the Kaiser's Palace because they couldn't separate architecture from politics. The East Germans blew the palace up. A country that dynamites its heritage dynamites its people. It could have been saved. It could have been restored. Had Stalin slept there once they would have kept it." (p. 164)

"The Russians are beginning to depart. Six hundred thousand of them. Imagine the logistics."
"One of the all-time great military retreats." (p. 469)
"For years Günther Rauch cleaned the streets near Stasi headquarters. After the Wall opened he knew something was going on ...(the files were being burned)... At the gate, Günther Rauch in a reverberating voice demanded to see a ranking officer. As the smoke continued to rise, so did the indignation of the citizens. The Stasi had been stealing pieces of their lives for as long as they remembered and, watching the chimney emissions, they knew it was their files, their lives going up in smoke..." (p. 297)