In aid of my German, I sought out a novel with short sentences. I copied slang from ads, and read popular magazines. But I wanted to use expressions I picked up on the street. My teacher was a stickler who was worried about the decline of the dative case, and who discouraged me from using expressions I picked up on the street. The D.A.A.D provided German lessons, so, as I had some elementary German left over from high school and college, I took them. The echoes of jackboots on the stairs were not audible, but they were there. What had they kept in that safe? What had become of them? I didn’t have a good feeling about that. Ours had a large iron safe in the living room. West Berlin at that time was partly empty - young men could avoid the draft there, but young families hesitated to expose their children to the risks - so the D.A.A.D had a range of rental apartments available for their visiting artists.

We were in Berlin at the invitation of the D.A.A.D, an academic exchange group that brought foreign artists into West Berlin so that local artists would not feel so cut off. No one suspected that in a mere five years we’d be buying fragments of it for souvenirs. The Berlin Wall was still firmly standing, and people were still being shot while trying to escape. The Soviet Union and its satellites were still in place, and showed no signs of vanishing: Every Sunday, the East German Air Force made sonic booms, just to let us know it was right next door. My family and I were living in West Berlin, where I was beginning to write “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Berlin was iconic for me: Having been born two months after the start of World War II, I’d lived all my life in the long shadows it cast.

It was 1984 - in real life, not the book.

1987 gore vidal novel