Editing Demon: Berlin (section)

===The Cities of Berlin===

====What Has Gone Before====

1163: Berlin founded by Albert "The Bear".

1902: Berlin Subway starts operations.

1923: Tempelhof Airport constructed on former Knights Templar site

1926: The Berlin Radio Tower (Funkturm) is built to transmit radio and later television signals.

1930: Pergamon Museum built.

1933: The Reichstag is burned and remains a burnt-out shell throughout the war and after.  

1936: The Berlin Olympics are held.

1937: Albert Speer becomes Chief Architect for the city and goes on a building spree.

1939: Don't Mention the War.

1940: Bombing of Berlin begins and the rest of the city begins to catch up to the Reichstag. 

1945: War ends. Victory parades.  Berlin is divided into four zones of occupation: American, Russian, British, and French.  Each zone is occupied by armed forces of that nation; it soon becomes clear that Berlin is really divided into two zones, the West and the East.  The West gets the best neighborhoods, the zoo, the train station, and the Ku'Damm shopping street. The East gets a lot of slums, the Museum Island, and Alexanderplatz, formerly the busiest town square in Europe, now a lonely and closely monitored open space.  The West gets the Brandenburg gate, but only by a hair. Berliners start to call their city "Bizonia", although there is nothing separating the zones in most places but a street and some bored soldiers.  

1948: The Berlin Blockade and Airlift: The Russians, for their own reasons, block every access point to Berlin except the airport.  West Berlin is kept alive through the heroic effort of the "air bridge" bringing in all the requirements for daily life.  After a year, the siege is lifted without comment and closely monitored roads are designated for entry into West Berlin.  The crisis leads to the Western powers merging their sectors under a unified command. 

1953: Stalin dies, Kruschev takes over as General Secretary of the Soviet Union, gives the famous "Secret Speech" on the hidden history of Stalin's reign.  

1961: Berlin Crisis.  Kruschev issues an ultimatum to the West to withdraw their troops from West Berlin.  On 12 August, the East German security service moves to close the border around the Western zone by tearing up the street, stopping pedestrians,and setting up barbed wire fences.  In downtown Berlin, there are face-to-face confrontations between Russian and American tank commanders, moving the Russian commander to exclaim "We have tanks too!"  Secret negotiations establish a new agreement: the USA will give the Soviets a free hand in East Berlin, and the Soviets won't harass West Berlin.  The tanks are withdrawn and the Cold War kicks into high gear. 

1962: The primitive barriers of the summer of 1961 are replaced with breezeblock walls and guard patrols.  Established checkpoints are built around the city with guard posts, watch towers, and dogs. 

1962: Funkturm Berlin ceases broadcasting, remains a city landmark.  


====Highlights of the Two Berlins====


'''Tempelhof Airport''' -- the name means "Templar Court", based on a templar fortress that was here 600 years earlier.  This has led some Demons to speculate that Berlin's been a control point for the ''Weltmaschine'' (world-machine, what they call the G-M in German) for a very long time.  Most notable for having a giant roof that airplanes are parked under, so that passengers and their luggage don't get rained on.  <br>
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'''Bahnhof Zoo/Zoo Station''' -- the main railway station into West Berlin, next to the zoo.  Behind the station on the other side from the zoo, there's a sketchy area which in a decade or so will blossom into an open-air drug and prostitution scene, but is already a pretty good black market.  <br>
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'''U-Bahn/Subway''' -- the network dates back to the turn of the century.  It was roughly cut in half when the Berlin Wall went up (just a year or two ago in game time), so for West Berliners, there are numerous abandoned Geisterstationen (Ghost Stations) which are patrolled by VoPo police and where you can't get off, plus one station in East Berlin on Friedrichsstrasse where you can get on and off, with a checkpoint manned by VoPos.  West Berliners seem to pretend that stop doesn't exist. <br>
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'''The Berlin Wall''' -- it was never very tall or imposing at any time, but at this time it's pretty sketchy, in some places no more than a fence.  There's already a "death strip" along it, though, where Easterners can get shot if they get too close.  Over the next decade, it will gradually get expanded, spotlights and guard towers will go up, and it will be invisibly reinforced with Infrastructure to keep supernaturals from passing through, but for the moment, even a gutsy mortal can cross with no more preparation than some forged papers or, at night, a blanket to throw over the barbed wire so you can climb over.<br>  
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'''Checkpoint Charlie''' -- the most famous crossing point, in the middle of downtown, and the busiest.  A good place to cross if you've got good papers, but not good for sneaking through.  There's an impromptu memorial on the Western side to all the people who have already been killed trying to cross -- already dozens, and soon to be hundreds.<br>
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'''The Bridge of Spies''' -- complete nonsense.  It's just a crappy little bridge across the river Spree that happens to connect East and West Berlin.  The Russians and Yanks like to exchange spies across this bridge in one of their absurd Cold War rituals. The rest of the time it's locked up and guarded from both sides -- probably the worst place to cross in the whole city.  <br>
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'''Gedachtniskirche/Memorial Church''' -- a pre-WWI Gothic church, blown to hell by the Allies in 1943, preserved as a memorial to man's inhumanity to man and all that.  There's a hideous modernistic new church being built right next to it, and Germans like to point to it as if to say, "We weren't the only murderers back then, you know."  It's conveniently located in the middle of the Ku'damm shopping street and near a U-Bahn stop, which makes it a great place to rest and have a smoke while shopping, and a great place to meet contacts.  <br>
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'''Salon Kitty''' -- cabaret, nightclub and brothel with a pre-war flair.  Some people say it was the inspiration for the "Kit-Kat Club" in the movie Cabaret. During WWII, one of the Gestapo's bright boys had the idea of staffing it with spies to see what secrets people let slip in their pillow talk.  The owner, "Kitty" was convinced to go along with the plan, a group of unusually clever prostitutes were trained in the necessary skills, and the whole place was wired for sound.  It's said that Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich, among others, liked to go there for regular inspections, at which time the microphones were turned off.  It's also said that the British found out about it and tapped into the surveillance system, so that intelligence analysts from both sides were listening in.  And some people even say that the Russians slipped some of their own agents into the place as working girls!  But who knows?<br>
In any case, the place was demolished by Allied bombs at the very end of the war.  Kitty reopened it across the street a few years later, with nicer rooms and no microphones.  It's one of the worst-kept secrets in Berlin that Kitty is a Demon, at least she is now, and she keeps a private room, the Unterwelt (Underworld) room in the back which is her own little slice of Hell.  <br>
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'''Teufelsberg/Devil Mountain''' -- it's no real mountain, but it ''is'' the biggest hill in Berlin.  The story goes that Hitler's favorite architect, Albrecht Speer, built an air defense facility here towards the end of the war that was so well-built the Allies couldn't blow it up -- so they decided to cover it up, with tens of thousands of pounds of rubble from all the bombing.  Naturally the Yanks built a huge listening post on the top of it to spy on the Russians; just as naturally, there's a massive amount of Infrastructure up there that is well concealed. There's also a ski jump for use in winter, and a year-round carnival. Funny story, that: the carnival's Ferris wheel was discovered to improve reception for the NSA antenna further up the hill, so the carnival was subsidized to stay there year-round, offering cheap rides and listless shows whether there's an audience or not, in a bit of extremely flimsy cover.  There are also rumors of tunnels leading down into the indestructible Nazi base, or even underground caverns beneath that. All you know for sure is that it's not a healthy place for Demon to poke around without a lot of friends along.  Lots of people and not-people are watching that place.

====Getting Around====
Getting in and out of Berlin is tricky, because there are only a limited number of checkpoints and controlled roads leading through East Germany to the West.  If you're not worried about Infrastructure and have good papers, you can take the autobahn.  There are also regular flights from Tempelhof.  

Within the city, there is a great U-Bahn subway network, the S-Bahn trolleycar network, and very congested roads.  Bicycling is an excellent option as well. The U-Bahn is rumored to have something down there that is of the God Machine, but rumors differ.  

====Life in the City of Spies====
Berlin, especially West Berlin, can be a little claustrophobic.  The city is not that big and is now closed off physically, and has a high density of surveillance from every major intelligence organization of Eastern and Western Europe, especially the Americans, the British, the Russian, and the East Germans.  The West Germans tend to keep clear of the place since they are not actually in charge of anything.  On the other hand, the Berlins are a noisy, anarchistic lot and all those competing spy networks create a buzz of suspicious activity which makes conspiracy easier in some ways.  Sit on a park bench by the memorial park for an hour, and you'll see a dozen people having odd encounters and conversations.  "Oh, are those bananas fresh?" "I hear the weather is good for flying kites."  "Have you seen a Schnauzer with a gray muzzle?"  Impossible to tell if that sad old man with a beret or the young woman with an LP record of Sibelius on her lap are just resting, or offering recognition signals to the world. The two men in shirt sleeves smoking and looking out the window at the deserted street corner at 2 AM - well, they're probably on the job.  But whose?