The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [71]
Finally, it is signed: 'Comradely Greetings, Yours, Dr G. Strauss, in Berlin, Heinrich-Mann-Platz 4, GDR'.15
We go back to our notes. We compare this letter to the one sent in October 1949 to Kuchumov by Soldier Kazakhov. 'Tomorrow I will go to the general commander with a report and inevitably they will send the doctor to Kaliningrad... because either he really did forget or he is pretending he cannot remember,' Kazakhov advised Kuchumov.
Before us is a letter from a forgetful doctor who is writing in 1973 and referring to a trip to Kaliningrad made by him twenty-four years earlier. There is only one way to establish if Dr G. Strauss is the same doctor Kazakhov referred to. We cannot get back into Kuchumov's private papers for another five months. But we can go to Berlin and check out Dr G. Strauss. When the Stasi, the East German secret police, was disbanded in March 1990 it left behind comprehensive files on one in every three German citizens. An East German who corresponded with a Soviet official about the search for the Amber Room must have come to the attention of the authorities in East Berlin. We call the Federal Authority for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), the bureaucratic structure that is responsible for sifting and disseminating what was left behind by the Stasi. Yes, they say that there is material concerning Dr G. Strauss and the Amber Room. But, they add, it may take several months to process our application.
Once again our research is put on hold.
6
Berlin is clear and white. Even though it is two days after Christmas 2002 the city is still festively optimistic. But beneath the iced pavements we are rolling back in time. The U2 subway revives feelings from an age when West Berliners boarded city-bound trains at the comfortable shopping and residential quarters of Zoologischer Garten and Sophie-Charlotte-Platz while their compatriots in East Berlin stepped on at tense Pankow or at functional Schonhauser Allee. But the shoppers and workers never saw each other, riding instead within their separate political systems. When the westbound and eastbound trains were forced to converge at Potsdamer Platz, each would wiggle around and retreat back along the darkened tracks. Now, thirteen years after die Wende (or 'the turning point', as Germans describe the process of reunification), it is still something of a novelty to travel the entire length of the U2 and see incredulous faces crease up with surprise as a brightly lit carriage rattles past their train window, in the opposite direction.
Six months after leaving Russia we are still waiting to hear if our application to see the Stasi files has been approved, and in frustration we have come to Pankow to search for Dr G. Strauss ourselves.
Outside the station, the easternmost stop on the U2, fierce winds from the Baltic slice between the cement towers, whipping woollen scarves from red-raw necks and thieving hats. We cross the street, looking for the address recorded in Gothic capitals: 'EEL Berlin, Heinrich-Mann-Platz 4'. We make our way down the slippery path.
The supermarkets are prefabricated, the houses muddled with concrete and pebble dash. In the 1960S and 1970S, the red brick and carved masonry of Pankow were replaced by a bloc utilitarianism that was deemed more suitable to the hard-wearing society that was being raised there. Today its residents are not so durable and beneath the ripped steel awnings are greasy drunks and fumbling dealers, elderly junkies and wrinkled skinheads, all of them more than likely former servicemen who now have no one to serve.
It has not always been so deadbeat. Pankow was once a gentile retreat for prosperous nineteenth-century Berliners and in the 1940S it became the favoured suburb of Walter Ulbricht and his clique. Within a year of the collapse of the Third Reich, in February 1946, Ulbricht, the leader of the German Communist