Unter den Linden is a Berlin boulevard transformed into a monumental display of Nazi power. The novel sets its imposing Party eagles against the avenue’s erased lime trees, making the street both a practical route through the capital and a visible record of the regime’s remaking of urban space.

The Avenue Remade

The lime trees along Unter den Linden were cut down in 1936, during the Berlin Olympics. In their place, Berlin’s Gauleiter, Joseph Goebbels, had ten-meter stone columns erected on both sides of the boulevard, each topped by a Party eagle with outspread wings. Rainwater drips from the eagles’ beaks and wingtips; the monumental symbols appear less triumphant than strange and oppressive.

The contrast between the lost trees and the stone avenue gives the transformation its force. A familiar, living landscape has been replaced by a repeated emblem of political authority. The boulevard’s grandeur is therefore inseparable from the destruction that produced it: official pageantry occupies the space left by the trees.

A Route Through the Capital

The avenue is also part of March’s everyday movement through Berlin. After a band performance ends and the crowd clears, he drives on Unter den Linden toward the Friedrich-Strasse intersection, then turns right. Two minutes later, he parks opposite the Criminal Police building at Werderscher Markt. The sequence makes the boulevard a working urban thoroughfare as well as a ceremonial one, carrying the investigation from the public spectacle of the capital toward police headquarters.

The novel returns to Unter den Linden in a different nocturnal journey. March drives west along Bülow-Strasse, passes the Berlin-Gotenland station, and heads north along the Avenue of Victory; the account recalls that the boulevard is lined with captured artillery from the Barbarossa campaign, its barrels angled toward the stars. The weapons and floodlit buildings draw crowds who stroll and window-shop, while March estimates that more than three million tourists will arrive by the twentieth. The avenue’s militarized display has become part of the city’s attraction to visitors.

Monument and Spectacle

These appearances place Unter den Linden between political image and ordinary circulation. The columns and eagles convert the boulevard into a conspicuous state monument, while the traffic, crowds, and police routines keep it embedded in daily city life. Its changing surfaces—trees removed, stone erected, captured guns displayed—show how the regime makes Berlin’s public spaces carry its preferred history. Yet the novel’s attention to what was cut down, and to the weapons exhibited as attractions, also makes that official spectacle visible as a construction rather than a natural feature of the city.