Author Marilyn Baron talks about the phenomenon of Stumble Stones (Stolpersteine)

25th April 2018

#TalkingLocationWith… author Marilyn Baron

My husband has always wanted to see Berlin and he never gets his way, so I agreed to travel there on a recent vacation. One thing you have to know about my husband. He’ll rarely read a book unless it’s about spies and World War II. In fact, I had to write a book set in Berlin during World War II just to get his attention (Stumble Stones: A Novel).

Stumble Stones is a dark and humorous Romancing the Stones-style suspense, set in contemporary and 1940s Europe, about a cache of priceless diamonds hidden in WWII that holds the key to an unsolved mystery and a promise of love. It features a contemporary love story between Hallelujah Weiss, writer for the steamy soap opera As The Planet Spins and lonely Berlin hedge fund manager Alexander Stone, and two women’s Holocaust stories.

Actually, I share my husband’s obsession with books set in World War II. My favorite are The Bernie Gunther novels by Philip Kerr.

I found Berlin to be a warm and welcoming place, except for the weather. It was very cold in mid-October and I wasn’t dressed appropriately. I didn’t even bring a trench coat, a wardrobe requisite for any self-respecting spy.

The author in front of the Hotel Adlon Kempinksi

One of the places in Berlin that’s mentioned in Kerr’s books and in my book, is the Hotel Adlon Kempinski, located close to all the foreign embassies, where all the famous spies in literature stay.

This luxurious hotel is located near the Neo-Classical Brandenburg Gate (Brandenburger Tor, one of the few remaining historic city gates, the city’s most famous landmark) at the end of the fashionable street Unter den Linden (Under the Linden or lime tree), which are also mentioned in my novel.

The Brandenburg Gate

We decided to have some coffee, hot chocolate and pastries in the hotel’s elegant lobby. We didn’t run into any spies, but we did sit with a nice couple from California. The first thing that happened was the server asked to see their papers. Papers were required to eat a pastry? We weren’t carrying any papers, just our passports. When the lady seemed satisfied with their papers, she left us alone, assuming we were with them. Actually, it turns out she was just checking their reservation at the hotel. They were staying there. I used that scene in the book.

My husband loves Wurst (to me, nothing could be worse) so he was in heaven. For dinner the first night we went to a wonderful German-Austrian restaurant, Lutter & Wegner. I had roast duck and he had Wienerschnitzel. Then we ate at a German/French restaurant, Dressler, and I had duck again. We went to two Italian restaurants—Il Punto and Bocca Di Bacco—and they were better than any Italian restaurants I’ve ever been to (including restaurants in Italy). For breakfast, we ate at Café Einstein Unter den Linden, a meeting place for politicians and media.

We took a hop-on, hop-off bus around the city and stopped at Kaufhaus Des Westens, better known as KaDeWe, on Kurfürstendamm Boulevard, where we spent hours, gawking and eating in the food hall on the sixth floor. It is the biggest and best department store in Germany, on the order of Harrods. It offers cheeses, chocolate, about 400 kinds of bread and every kind of food you could ever imagine.

KaDeWe

We stayed at a wonderful hotel, the Westin Grand Berlin on Friedrichstrasse, which I was surprised to find out was in the former East Berlin. There was a piece of the Berlin Wall displayed at the hotel’s entrance. Evidence of the Berlin Wall (Berliner Mauer) was everywhere, either pieces of the wall or double rows of bricks on the street or pavement, which indicated where the wall had been. Checkpoint Charlie, the former allied border crossing was around the corner from our hotel.

There were many Holocaust Memorials in the city. We toured the beautiful Neue (New) Synagogue, the Jewish museum and an outdoor Holocaust Memorial near the Brandenburg Gate and the new American Embassy called the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which consists of 2,711 slabs of gray concrete, some rising as high as 13 feet. The New Synagogue—which was constructed in 1866 and left in ruins after Kristallnacht and the Allied bombing of Berlin—has been completely renovated.

But when I visited Berlin, I never looked down, so I never saw one of the most poignant Holocaust memorials, stumble stones or Stolpersteine, the inspiration for my novel, Stumble Stones.

A former neighbor, who now lives in Stuttgart, emailed me about a moving ceremony in front of his house. German artist Gunter Demnig was placing a stumble stone in the pavement, commemorating a victim of the Holocaust. Demnig has made it his life’s work to place these square, cobblestone-sized Holocaust memorial stones at the last known address of the victim. There are about 60,000 of these brass plaques in 20 countries in Europe—5,000 in Berlin.

I am fascinated by these stumble stones and after every presentation I make about my book, people send me pictures of stumble stones they’ve seen throughout Europe. I actually saw my first stumble stone in Budapest last summer during a Danube River cruise.

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