`Karl Hofer parked his Trabant across the street from the Church of Reconciliation and got out of the vehicle. The Beck residence, the end townhouse, sat to his left, a row of similar nineteenth-century brick buildings continuing to the corner. The fourth was damaged by a bomb during the war, the roof laying in a crumbled heap in what once was the second floor. Behind the row of townhouses sat a portion of the cemetery, tombs and mausoleums, trees and shrubs that dotted the landscape. And at the edge of the cemetery stood the concrete wall, what the Socialist government called the Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier – border guards patrolling it.
He walked past the church, where the cemetery reached the street, and continued along the pavement for a couple hundred feet to the wrought iron fen
