The fire around the blast site was limited, but the smoke was not. He wasn’t impressed by restricted circuits and white-and-red ribbons, moved across the Grunewald, carried the smell of burning for kilometers across the Teufelsberg to the Westend, over the Avus to Nikolassee. Somewhere the Berlin air lost the smell of burning and was just itself. But even there, in Friedrichshain or Pankow, the Grunewald was the talk of the town in the past few days. For even more unbound than the clouds of smoke are the clouds of words emanating from a spectacular fire. This has been the case since the earliest times of communications, and only too sober minds can doubt that Heinrich von Kleist felt the smell of burning in his grave at Wannsee. He would never have gotten a fire alarm for his Berlin evening papers miss.
After the fire: the Grunewald as a place of German history – culture
