Heinz Rein - Berlin Finale

Dr Böttcher shudders when he turns back to Wiegand. ‘It’s almost too hard,’ he says. ‘Those cries will follow us for a long time to come…’

‘Oh come on!’ Schröter interrupts him. ‘You have too gloomy an outlook.’

‘I wish that were so,’ says Wiegand. His face is sceptical.

Then they go downstairs. In the street they encounter a fine, thin rain. They turn up the collars of their coats and walk out into the ruined city.

A van with loudspeaker has stopped at the corner. It is announcing the capitulation.

Heinz Rein was an influential German novelist writing before and after the Second World War. He became a major figure in the ‘rubble literature’ period, and his famous novel Berlin Finale , published in 1947, was one of the first bestsellers in the tumultuous German rebuilding period. He abandoned East Germany for the West in the 1950s.

Shaun Whiteside is a distinguished translator of both German and French literature. His translations for Penguin include Sigmund Freud’s On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia , Norman Ohler’s Blitzed , Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy , Sybille Steinbacher’s Auschwitz and several novels by Georges Simenon, including Maigret’s Doubts and The Saint-Fiacre Affair .

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First published by Dietz Verlag, Berlin in 1947.

This translation is based on the edition published by Schöffling & Co.

Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, Frankfurt am Main in 2015

This translation first published in Penguin Classics 2019

Translation copyright © Shaun Whiteside, 2019

The moral right of the translator has been asserted

Cover photograph © akg-images

ISBN: 978-0-241-24566-8

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

In 1807 the French Imperial Army laid siege to the Prussian-held fortress of Kolberg. The siege, which lasted from April to June, was lifted with the signing of the Peace of Tilsit.

The sadistic corporal in All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque.

Pecunia non olet , ‘money doesn’t stink’, a phrase attributed to the Roman Emperor Vespasian.

Walter Rathenau, 1867–1922, liberal German Foreign Minister murdered by right-wing zealots in 1922.

Julius Rastenberger, a famous jockey at the Hoppegarten racetrack.

Roland Freisler, 1893–1945, German jurist and Minister of Justice.

Allgemeine Ortskrankenkasse – the general health service provider.

Literally ‘Muslims’, a slang term meaning apathetic idlers.

A reference to the Stauffenberg plot, an attempt to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944.