Berlin brought to book

In his latest pre-WWII thriller, Mission to Paris, author Alan Furst's film star hero, Fredric Stahl, briefly checks into Berlin's Hotel Adlon. It seems an intrusion into the territory of another wartime character: Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther, who becomes the hotel's house detective in If the Dead Rise Not (2009).

Just over 80 years ago, the city was the setting for another detective, a child: Emil Tischbein. In Emil and the Detectives (1931), Erich Kästner's plucky hero teams up with local kids to retrieve his stolen money after Emil takes the train to Berlin. Kästner is as careful in his description of the boys' attempts to recover the cash as he is in his portrayal of the city:

'The noise was indescribable, and on the pavements crowds of people kept hurrying by. Out of every turning vans and lorries, trams and double-decker buses swarmed into the main thoroughfare. There were newspaper stands at every corner, with men shouting the latest headlines. Wherever Emil looked there were gay shop windows filled with flowers and fruit, books, clothes, fine silk underwear, gold watches and clocks. And all the buildings stretched up and up into the sky. So this was Berlin!'

The chase leads the gang from Friedrichstrasse station, along Kaiserdamm, Trautenaustrasse, to Nollendorfplatz. In a sentiment that might be replicated by Hans Fallada, Emil initially believes, 'No one has time for other people's troubles in a city. They've all troubles enough of their own.'

Writing just one year after Emil..., in Little Man, What Now? Fallada has 'little man' Pinneberg trudge the city's streets in a pattern also recognisable from Alfred Döblin's earlier Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), which was adapted as a 15-and-a-half hour film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1980. In the latter books it is not children who dominate the streets but the unemployed, hopeless and hucksters.

Pinneberg realises Berlin is not the place for him following an altercation with a policeman on Friedrichstrasse: 'Then Pinneberg went on his way, one step at a time, through Berlin. But nowhere was completely dark, and going past policemen was particularly difficult.'

The collaborators?

As well as racism and anti-semitism, a familiar charge levelled against Georges Remi (Hergé) is one of collaboration. When the Allies liberated Brussels in September 1944, the Belgian creator of cartoon hero Tintin was arrested as a traitor and questioned.

Hergé had decided to stay in Belgium following the country's invasion by the Nazis, and continued to produce comic strips for the German-run Le Soir newspaper. During World War II, he retreated into the apolitical fantasies of The Secret of the Unicorn, Red Rackham's Treasure (recently made into a film by Steven Spielberg, of course) and The Seven Crystal Balls.

The Shooting Star (1942) is undoubtedly anti-semitic but its apocalyptic atmosphere can surely only have been informed by the arrival of the Nazis, while the pre-war King's Ottokar's Sceptre is decidedly anti-fascist (though only Tintin in America and The Black Island were banned by the Nazis).

Nevertheless, the first form of official pardon for Hergé came as late as 1958, when he was met by the Belgian ambassador on a visit to London. According to biographer Harry Thompson, the author 'remained bitter at the treatment meted out to those who - as he saw it - had stuck with Belgium in her hour of need.'

One of the reasons Hergé gave for remaining in the country was because his beloved king (Leopold III) had also stayed and, indeed, urged his subjects to work as usual. Another possibility may be that Hergé was not disposed to living in another country, as was the case with German Hans Fallada - real name, Rudolf Ditzen - currently much celebrated for Alone in Berlin and A Small Circus.

Fallada had any number of opportunities to leave Germany during the Nazis' rise, but decided to stick it out. In 1944 he wrote: 'I am a German, I say that today with pride and sorrow, I love Germany, I don't want to live or work anywhere else in the world. I probably couldn't live or work anywhere else.' (Quoted in Jenny Williams' biography More Lives than One.)

His novels show a fine judge of the human spirit, though whether his political judgement was so sharp remains open to question. In November 1937 he accepted an approach to write a novel 'dealing with the fate of a German family from 1914 until around 1933'.

When Fallada brought Iron Gustav to a close in 1928, Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, intervened to ensure the writer fulfilled the detail of his contract, which meant Fallada had to cover the rise of the National Socialists. Williams writes: '[Fallada] later tried to justify his capitulation in the following terms: "I do not like grand gestures, being slaughtered before the tyrant's throne, senselessly, to the benefit of no one and to the detriment of my children, that is not my way."'

He may have found some sympathy from Vasily Grossman, the Russian celebrated for Everything Flows and Life and Fate, his massive novel centred on the battle for Stalingrad. For three years from 1943, Grossman contributed to an astounding narrative of Jewish massacres in Poland and the Soviet Union - informing some of Life and Fate - and yet, in 1952, he signed an official letter condemning Stalin's Jewish doctors for a plot to kill the dictator.

Perhaps only someone who has experienced such extremes can write, as Grossman does in Life and Fate: 'Does human nature undergo a true change in the cauldron of totalitarian violence? Does man lose his innate yearning for freedom? The fate of both man and the totalitarian state depends on the answer to this question. If human nature does change, then the eternal and worldwide triumph of the dictatorial state is assured; if his yearning for freedom remains constant, then the totalitarian state is doomed.'

Men, women, war - and books

Two very different books from the middle of the last century with similar concerns. German author Hans Fallada's Little Man, What Now? (1932) presages the rise of the Nazis in much the same way as Michael Haneke's film The White Ribbon (2009) posthumously chronicled their coming: indirectly. Fallada's grimly comic tale of an impoverished, none-too-bright everyman was made into a popular film in 1934, which in part sealed the author's fate with the incoming fascists.

Cinema plays a central role in Fallada's book, too, when the little man Pinneberg and his wife, Lämmchen, go out to enjoy a movie, which is described in some detail. The main actor, so sympathetic on screen, brings about Pinneberg's downfall. As the character struggles to cope with unemployment, the one-time communist Fallada finds hope in his heroine, much as he did in his own wife: 'Lämmchen is my answer, I know no better one.'

Just over a decade later, Alexander Baron pitches the British soldiers of There's No Home (1950; cover detail, pictured) into a form of leave in Catania, Sicily, following the island's bloody invasion. The men retreat into domesticity around the street where they're billeted, many of them moving in with local (married) women. (This is the Via dei Martiri; in Baron's 1963 book The Lowlife, the central player finds pre-war domestic bliss in Paris on the Rue des Martyrs.)

Baron was inspired by his own experience in the Eighth Army as a scene, again in a cinema, attests: 'Once, in some back-street hall, I sat squeezed on a bench among an audience of women who were all weeping loudly. The cause of their grief was the film we were watching, Wuthering Heights. They rocked in sympathy with Cathy Earnshaw. From all parts of the hall they cried, "Ah, la poverina, la poverina!"' It plays pretty much identically in the book.

In his afterword, John L Williams examines the roles of the different sexes in the book: 'The men… feel the imperative of narrative, the need to move forwards. The women, on the other hand, want life to stand still. They have all lost men to the war: husbands and lovers, fathers, brothers and sons.'