Berlin is presented chiefly through intelligence reports rather than as a directly depicted setting: its military-intelligence headquarters, in the Tiergarten district, is the distant center of a network whose agents, suspicions, and denials shape the French investigation. The city becomes especially significant when Richard Cuers’s information links German officers to an unnamed source inside the French Army and records their efforts to determine whether Alfred Dreyfus had ever worked for them.

Setting and Intelligence Headquarters

The Tiergarten is identified as the district in Berlin where German army intelligence has its headquarters. This gives the city a concrete institutional role in the novel’s map of espionage: Berlin is not merely a foreign capital, but the location from which German intelligence can assess information gathered in France and direct its contacts there.

The account reaches the reader through French intermediaries. Colonel Foucault briefs Georges Picquart at the Ministry of War, drawing on a file about Cuers, a former German intelligence agent in Paris whom the French had turned. Berlin therefore enters the narrative through a chain of reporting—Cuers to Foucault, and Foucault to Picquart—rather than through an independently witnessed account of German deliberations.

Cuers and the Unnamed French Source

Cuers had recently approached the French side in a state of fear. He believed the German General Staff might arrest him for treason and suspected that a friend in Brussels, Lajoux, had betrayed him for money. Unless the French protected him, Cuers threatened to tell Hauptmann Dame, his section chief, what he knew about the French operation. His precarious position makes the intelligence Picquart receives consequential, but also dependent on a source with urgent personal reasons to secure protection.

According to Cuers’s report, an unnamed French officer at roughly battalion-command level had been passing information to Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen for about two years. The material was mostly about artillery and often of poor quality; one example was information on a gunnery course at Châlons. The report says that this information had travelled up the German chain of command to von Schlieffen, who distrusted its source and suspected either a hoaxer or an agent provocateur. He instructed Schwartzkoppen to have no further dealings with the officer. The account thus distinguishes the existence of a reported source from the usefulness and credibility of what that source supplied.

The German Inquiry into Dreyfus

Cuers also relayed a separate inquiry into whether Germany had employed Dreyfus. In his account, the Kaiser demanded an answer from von Schlieffen, who questioned Dame. Dame denied knowing of any Jewish spy. Von Schlieffen then recalled Schwartzkoppen from Paris to Berlin for consultation; Cuers said he personally saw Schwartzkoppen in the Tiergarten. Schwartzkoppen maintained that he had first heard Dreyfus’s name in a newspaper after the arrest.

The inquiry reportedly extended beyond German officers. Dame made discreet enquiries of other friendly European intelligence agencies, and, according to Cuers, none had employed Dreyfus. These statements are presented as intelligence Picquart hears second-hand, not as direct testimony from the German officials themselves. Their significance lies in the contrast they establish between the French prosecution’s certainty and the reported absence of a foreign service claiming Dreyfus as its agent.

Narrative Significance

Berlin’s role is defined by the movement and testing of information: an alleged French source sends material to Schwartzkoppen, German commanders question its reliability, and German officials investigate whether Dreyfus was ever theirs. Each link is mediated by an agent or report, so the city’s apparent authority as an intelligence center does not make every claim about it certain.

This pattern also sharpens the difference between intelligence gathering and proof. Cuers’s account supplies Picquart with leads about a possible French spy and with denials concerning Dreyfus, but it does not itself identify the unnamed officer or establish the full truth of every conversation in Berlin. The city matters as the institutional destination of reports and as the setting for a reported meeting in the Tiergarten; its distance from the French inquiry leaves those reports powerful, useful, and difficult to verify.