Part One of this series about the roots of my Berlin thriller Hauenstein I described how, aged 24 in the winter of 1984-85 I first encountered Peter Bruegel the Elder’s painting The Triumph of Death (1562) in the library of the Royal College of Art, where I was studying. To see the painting scroll down to Part One of this series, but be prepared for a terrifying experience like that which was a turning point in my life.
During my late teens and twenties I didn’t get on well with my father. However, when I received my MA in cultural history in July 1986, the fact that it was from the Royal College of Art enabled him to show pride in my achievement. However, not long afterwards, he insisted that I get „a real job“ as if my studies had been no more than a distraction, and I broke off contact with him. It was a struggle, but the freelance wine journalism I’d begun during my time at art school kept me above water.
All this would be irrelevant if, at the beginning of 1987, my father had not been rushed into hospital after falling into a coma. He was wheeled straight from the MRT scan into the operating theatre where a tumor was removed from his brain. That brought some relief, but afterwards no amount of radiation therapy could really help him.
Back in hospital at the end of July 1987 he told me that he took back everything he’d said during the preceeding years, and we bonded in a way I never thought would be possible. The last time I saw him, at the beginning of August 1987, he was in a coma agin, his body felt like a block of ice and each of his shuddering breaths was as painful to hear as the long eerie silence that followed it. Fearing I couldn’t be with him at the end, I wrote my name on a scrap of paper and put it under his pillow. The next morning death suddenly became very personal. It wasn’t just an idea or a feeling.
I struggled with depression through the remainder of 1987, but during 1988 discovering America helped me pull myself out of the dark labyrinth into which I’d fallen. The last of those trips, to New York City in December 1988, was breathtaking. I stayed with a friend of a friend in the wine business called Louis Broman and we instantly became friends. Louis introduced me to New York City and to a bunch of very interesting wine people; interesting people who happened to be involved in wine. We also visited a string of exciting bars and restaurants, and one night we went to the movies.
The IFC Center movie theatre on 6th Avenue in Greenwich Village was showing a new movie called Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders. I’d heard the name, but knew nothing about it. Louis hated the movie, and in the taxi from the IFC back up 6th Avenue to his place on West 97th Street he railed against it. „A movie isn’t just a series of images, however brilliant!“ he insisted. I vehemently disagreed with him, because the movie, its characters, story and visions of Berlin had captivated me.
I couldn’t have formulated it so clearly then, but Wings of Desire showed me how it’s possible to make a movie about the ancient themes of love and death, fear and longing that’s new, beautiful and inspiring. To do that you need to weave a thread of impossibility into the complex fabric of reality. That thin line of silver or gold changes everything, though the world remains recognizably our own.
On December 21st, 1988, just a couple of days after I returned to London, the same flight I’d taken to New York – Pan Am 103 – exploded in the air over Lockerbie in Scotland killing all 259 people on board, plus 11 people in Lockerbie itself. I was one of many who narrowly escaped this act of terrorism. The news images of the jagged fragments of the Boeing 747 strewn across the Scottish landscape are well-known. Less widely appreciated is the fact that the bodies of the victims were equally widely strewn, creating a landscape filled with death. Of course, Bruegel’s painting is dominated by red and ochre colors, and Scotland in winter is green.
At the beginning of January 1989 I moved to the Mosel Valley in Germany to work as a wine journalist, and to make a new start. Wim Wenders’ film had infected me with a fascination for Berlin. Health problems held me up, but finally in July 1990 I travelled to Berlin with my winemaker friend Ernst Loosen. He showed me Berlin just as Louis had introduced me to the substance and soul of New York. I was in love.
I couldn’t get enough Berlin, not just the contemporary city, but also Berlin’s past. I mean both the official history, and less easily definable things I absorbed by a kind of psychic osmosis. For me, many places in the city have multiple realities of which that which is clearly visible is only one. I never felt like that about a city before, so it was inevitable I’d move to Berlin. Wine journalism distracted me again, but I finally got there in late 1993.
Soon after that I became quite a successful wine journalist, but looking back nearly everything I wrote lacked emotional depth. Let’s face it, that’s something difficult to achieve when your subject is a bottle of wine! Then, in 1999 the filmmaker Thomas Struck asked me to be part of a very unusual documentary he was shooting in the Mosel Valley called Ein Weinjahr, or a wine year. It definitely has emotional depth!
In my high school theatre group, I’d worked my way up from the smallest speaking part to the male lead, and in more recent years I’d had no trouble talking in front of TV cameras. However, at first I struggled badly in front of Thomas’s camera. Sensing his frustration, I redoubled my efforts, and as work on the film progressed my performance improved.
I was distracted and can only guess that it must have been somewhere in the Mosel, because I have no memory of when Thomas told me about a character he’d created some years previously. Although Hauenstein is extremely old he only looks a fraction of his actual age. Somehow death didn’t touch him, although its army of shadows must have repeatedly visited him. More on this at a later point.
I remember being fascinated with Hauenstein, turning him over and over in my mind. In June 2000 in Vienna I became convinced that he had to be both a contemporary person and the embodiment of an ancient city’s history. When I returned to Berlin it was immediately clear to me that my new home city was the perfect fit.
At the end of 2000 I started work on a Hauenstein story of some complexity as the basis for a movie. Now it is clear to me that the basic elements of my thriller series had come together: Berlin (location), Hauenstein (protagonist) and the conviction that it’s possible to tell a compelling contemporary story about love and death, fear and longing (the ethos of the story). It was a serious beginning.