Long before the World Wide Web, and much longer before smartphones and Google Maps, we relied on maps to get from points A to B. In 1988, when I travelled to Berlin, I purchased a handy fold-out map to help me get around that divided city.
Now, in 2020, I'm turning to the map again as I write my fiction. Berlin is a different place than it was in 1988. There is no wall to divide the two sectors of the city. To look at the city with Google Maps, there's no way to tell where West Berlin ended and East Berlin began, save for some memorial landmarks.
(If you look at the map, to the right, you can see West Berlin's Tiergarten. Between the R and the G is the traffic circle of Siegessäule, the column that opened in 1874 to commemorate the Prussian victory over the Danish during the war of 1864. Follow the road that leads east, and you come to the Brandenburg Gate. The red line indicates the Berlin Wall. This was also one of the most-used sections of the map during my visit, in 1988.)
In writing Gyeosunim, the sequel to Songsaengnim: A Korea Diary, I have introduced a timeline that takes Roland Axam to 1988 Berlin. With the help of my old Falk Plan, I can see where the wall moved its way through the city. I can find streets that suddenly came to an end, to possibly continue somewhere past the no-man's land that made escapes practicably impossible. With the help of Google Maps street view, I can virtually go to spots and see how they look now, and even imagine how it would have appeared when I visited the city.
Though I still haven't made the final decision to keep this timeline in my novel, I'm having fun writing it, nonetheless. I'll share some of these excerpts later this week.
Google Maps is helpful but if I want to go back into the past, having old fashioned maps has saved my skin when it comes to writing.
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