Summary

Alex Meier, a German Jewish socialist author who escaped to Los Angeles before the Holocaust, finds himself back in Berlin in 1949 during the height of the Berlin Airlift. Notably, the novel is written in the third person, casting Alex as a character in his own narrative and allowing some of his inner thoughts to be kept private from the reader. He describes the sheer volume of planes buzzing above the city, wondering how long they can continue. Martin Schramm, a young man whom Alex met when he changed cars at the Czech border, is certain that due to the exorbitant expense, the effort to “...make two cities [with] two mayors, two police…” (4) will have to end soon. Martin assures him that eventually the Russians will leave the occupied zones too, highlighting the mounting tensions between American and Soviet Cold War foreign policy...