A wrong turn, Hotel Berlin and how I wrote ‘SS-GB’

A couple of hours later I was delivered to the Hotel Adlon in communist-ruled East Berlin. My Western money encouraged the hotel receptionists to find me a room. But this was not the world famous luxury Adlon that I had read about in bestselling books such as Vicki Baum’s Hotel Berlin’ and seen in the movie made from it. Baum’s Dr Otternschlag had lost half his face in a First World War bombardment, so had the Hotel Adlon. Only the small rooms at the rear were still standing. In one of these rooms, I spent the first of many nights in Berlin, a city that dominated my thoughts and a dozen or more books for many subsequent years.

IAs BBC One unveils its adaptation of his novel about a Britain under Nazi occupation, Len Deighton recalls the Cold War escapade that led to the book

didn’t get much uninterrupted sleep in the Adlon. I hadn’t even closed my eyes before the barking and yapping of dozens of fierce dogs started on both sides of the newly built Berlin Wall. Looking out of my window I could see the floodlit compound, the huts and barbed wire that backed on to the Adlon and to the boundary of the Soviet Sector.

I soon discovered that these sudden alerts were frequent; whether they were the response to some desperate individual trying to cross the “Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier” and being shot dead in the process, or simply a way of keeping the border guards alert, I could not be sure.

I had only one friend in Berlin, a film and theatre director who lived in Pankow, but it was enough, for this hospitable