Berlin: Dark History And Modern Art with Rebecca Cantrell

Berlin is a modern city with vibrant street art, a growing tech scene and world-renowned museums and galleries — but it also has the dark history of the Nazi Third Reich and the Berlin Wall. In today’s episode, American thriller author Rebecca Cantrell talks about her love of the city and how it features in her historical mysteries. In the intro, I mention my own trip to the city when I visited the murals on the ruins of the Berlin Wall, and the Ishtar Gate at the Pergamon Museum, once an entrance to the ancient city of Babylon, erected by King Nebuchadnezzar in 575 BCE, and now in full splendor in Berlin. Rebecca Cantrell is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling and award-winning thriller and mystery author. Her books include the supernatural Sanguine series co-written with James Rollins, the Joe Tesla technothrillers, and the Malibu Mysteries co-written with Sean Black. Today we’re talking about Berlin, the setting for her Hannah Vogel historical crime thrillers. * How Rebecca fell in love with Berlin as a young American from Alaska * Where the past and present collide in modern Berlin — Nazi Germany and the Berlin Wall * Street art, murals and modern, arty Berlin * Fascinating museums * Recommended food * Books about the history of Berlin * Why Becky loves to travel Find Becky at www.RebeccaCantrell.com or on Twitter @rebeccacantrell Transcription of interview with Rebecca Cantrell Jo Frances: Welcome, Rebecca. Rebecca: Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here. Jo Frances: Thanks so much for coming on the show. First up, you’re American. Tell us why you decided to write about Berlin. What’s your history with the city? Rebecca: Well, I had a random history with Berlin. I was an exchange student from a little town called Talkeetna, Alaska, and I went to Germany. When I filled up my application, the board said, ‘Where do you want to stay?’ I said, ‘I’d like to stay in a small town because that will be most similar to where I’m coming from and I feel like it will be a little bit more manageable.’ So they sent me to Berlin, which that’s how that works! At the time, it was a city of about two and a half million people surrounded by a wall in the middle of communist East Germany. It was fantastic! I was blown away with how different things were and it was an amazing, artistic, wonderful place to be. History was right there and very, very real. When you went to East Berlin, you could see piles of rubble from when they had knocked it down to build the wall. When you went to look at the museums of East Berlin, they still had bullet holes on them from when they had been strafed by Russian artillery during the fall of Berlin in 1945. That was just amazing. I went back again for a year in college. I went to the Freie Universität. Then I wanted my son to get a taste of Europe before he grew up, so we moved there when he was 12 and lived there for 4 years. We’re just back in the United States for almost three years now. Jo France: Wow. I had no idea you moved from Alaska. Rebecca: Very different weather-wise. Jo France: Different in so many ways. Is there a culture shock that you think Americans get when they hit Europe? Berlin is very European. Rebecca: Part of it is just that everything is different. In Berlin, for example, I had public transportation, which, of course, I didn’t have in Alaska. That meant that as a teenager, I could go anywhere. I had a little bus pass and the subway and the S-Bahn,