Fiona Veitch Smith travels to Weimar Berlin in 1930, using her antique Baedeker guidebook, and finds that the nearly 100-year-old book can still help her find the places she’s researching in the 2020s.
In previous articles for Historia I outlined how I use vintage fashion and vintage guide books as research for my neo-Golden Age murder mysteries. In my latest book, The Berlin Murders, the two gloriously collide.
In September 2024, armed with my trusty first edition of Baedeker’s Berlin and its Environs (1929) I travelled to Berlin just as my character Miss Clara Vale would do in September 1930, but in less luxurious circumstances.
On Herr Baedeker’s advice, I caught the ferry from Newcastle to Amsterdam. In Clara’s day it was known as the ‘steamer’, run by the United Steamship Company, but is now known as DFDS Seaways. Clara, of course, was in a first-class cabin; I managed to fork out for one that at least had a porthole.
From Amsterdam I would ideally have liked to get the sleeper train to Berlin, as Clara did, but the departure and arrival times didn’t work for me. Instead, I caught an ordinary Inter City Express (‘express’ being a misnomer) and spent my time staring out of the window and imagining what Clara would do.
She travelled on the art deco-styled Mitropa Schlafwagen, designed by the renowned Bauhaus creator Walter Gropius and famed for its luxurious, modern accommodation.
Although 94 years apart, Clara and I arrived at the same station:
“It was rush-hour at Lehrter Bahnhof, the main station in Berlin. Commuters, dressed for the office, rushed to catch their trains on the Stadtbahn, Ringbahn, S-Bahn or U-Bahn, all linking into the central station like a spiderweb. The Berliners ignored the out-of-town travellers disembarking from the sleeper train, looking around, peering at signage and wondering where to go next.” (From The Berlin Murders).
Herr Baedeker then advises us to register our arrival at Alexanderplatz Police Station within 24 hours of arrival:
“HEAD POLICE OFFICE (Polizei-Präsidium), Alexander-Platz. The Passport Office entrance is in Alexander-Str. (1st floor, open 9–1; from No. 153 for foreigners). All foreigners arriving in Berlin must report personally at the police station within 24 hrs. with their passports and separate photos. (from Baedeker’s Berlin and its Environs, 1929)
Fortunately, that is no longer required – not even post-Brexit. But as a novelist I used it to my advantage as Clara was to meet key characters at the police station including an old flame and a mysterious spy.
From the police station Clara and friends are taken to Spiegler’s Modefabrik in Hausvogteiplatz – the home of the Jewish fashion industry of Berlin. The Berlin Murders is not just about a fictional murder (or two) that take place during Berlin Fashion Week in September 1930, a week before the Nazis are to make huge gains in the Reichstag election, but the subsequent ‘murder’ of the Jewish-led fashion industry that was to play out over the next few years.
The centre of the industry was the Hausvogteiplatz, a genteel Hanoverian square in the Mitte district of Berlin, just a few miles north-east of the Brandenburg Tor.
When Clara visits in 1930 the square is home to over 2,000 thriving businesses, large and small. But within a few years they were either bought out or forced out in the Nazi attempts to ‘Aryanise’ the fashion industry.
(I owe my introduction to this little known chapter of Weimar-era history to the fashion journalist Uwe Westphal’s book Fashion Metropolis Berlin – the Rise and Destruction of the Jewish Fashion Industry.)
If you travel to Hausvogteiplatz today, there is a memorial on the steps outside the U-Bahn station entrance, with the names of people known to have worked there before the Nazi purge – and those who were known to have died. Spiegler’s Modefabrik, where the first victim in the novel is murdered, is a fictional business, and I imagined it could have been in any one of the beautiful buildings (largely undamaged in the war) that flank the square today.
The department stores of Berlin were also mainly owned by Jews, and just like in this book, the fashion departments were stocked with ‘off-the-peg’ creations. Fashion Week was started by a consortium of department stores to showcase German-made fashion during and after World War I.
Hertzog’s, mentioned in this book, was one of the organisers. The store was confiscated by the Nazis in 1934. I followed the map in Baedekers (cross referencing whenever I got lost with Google Maps) but was sadly unable to find it.
However, I was cheered up no end when I found the Eldorado Club. The Eldorado, which plays an important role in my book, was originally featured in Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin and the stage and film versions of Cabaret. Considered a nest of homosexual iniquity, it was shut down and seized by the Nazi Stormtroopers in 1933 and then became their headquarters in 1934.
The building – still called the Eldorado – stands today. It is now an organic food market in the ‘queer quarter’ of Berlin. I visited in 2024 for research and my vegetarian daughter shopped there when she was in Berlin just last month. I’m glad to see some things can never be destroyed.
I hope Herr Baedeker would agree.
The Berlin Murders by Fiona Veitch Smith is published on 13 January, 2026. It’s the fifth in her Clara Vale mysteries.
Find out more about this book.
Fiona writes Golden Age mysteries and historical fiction. The Miss Clara Vale Mysteries and the Poppy Denby Investigates series are set in the 1920s and 1930s. Her debut crime novel, The Jazz Files, was shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger in 2016. Fiona is a former journalist and university lecturer and lives in Newcastle upon Tyne with her partner and two border collies.
Read Fiona’s other Historia features about her immersive approach to research:
Fashion research for historical novels
How period guidebooks and maps help me write murder mysteries
Imagining Somerville: a research mystery
Some features on related topics:
The lost cities of Berlin and
An appearance of serenity: the French fashion industry in WWII, both by Catherine Hokin
The surprising joys of armchair travel by Elizabeth Buchan
Images:
- The books Fiona took to Berlin: photo by Fiona Veitch Smith
- Illustration by Ernst Deutsch-Dryden for Die Dame, 1930: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Map from The Berlin Murders (detail): courtesy Embla Books
- Hausvogteiplatz by Mario von Bucovich from Berlin, 1928: Wikimedia (public domain)
- The Eldorado, 1932: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1983-0121-500 via Wikimedia (CC-BY-SA 3.0)
