I’m the product of an east Texas Army periodontist and German Jewish mother from southwest Berlin. My parents met at the swimming pool on Finkensteinalle that Hitler built for the 1936 summer Olympics in Berlin. After the Olympics the athletes village at Finkensteinalle and pool were repurposed to be the main SS barracks until the end of the war. After the war, the U.S. Army had the good fortune to repurpose this strangely untouched barracks yet again until 1994. When I was a kid and young adult I used to swim there with Frieda when it was still under the control of the U.S. Army. And oddly enough when I chose to move BACK to Berlin in 2016, my kids were on the swim team and that was their home pool. The windows Herbert looks out of at the beginning of the movie I have looked out of a hundred times. I have walked every street, ridden every train, rowed every lake in ADLON. I have breathed in the very essence of Berlin my whole life. The connection is deep, it’s part of my fabric. There wasn’t a day of my childhood and even adult life where the war,  Frieda, Emil, the holocaust, and the Americans weren’t the topic of discussion in some form. In an eerie chain of events, my Texan father was Rudolph Hess’s dentist at Spandau prison while he was stationed in Berlin. But that’s another story. In the meantime, I’m going to tell this one.

Danke,

MArcus