Tom Ripley’s Shed

Berlin is in a state of constant change; some streets are barely recognizable from one year to the next. Every gap is being filled, scaffolding and cranes stretch into the air, construction activity is everywhere.

Yet, there are places in Berlin where time stands still—likely because building regulations prohibit or complicate new developments.

One such place is Lübars, that West Berlin topographic curiosity, which truly still looks exactly as 50 years ago: a few equestrian farms, the village church, the Labsaal, the Dorfkrug (village inn), and the village school. And then there is the Tegeler Fließ valley, which in summer looks just like the landscape in Spitzweg’s painting "The Sunday Stroll" (Der Sonntagsausflug).

If you follow the path toward the Fließ at the entrance of the village, there is an old open shed on the left-hand side that has always been there. Whether it was intended as a shelter for horses or for hay remains unclear; today, it stands empty.

Very few people know that this exact shed was once the backdrop for a bloody confrontation. It took place in 1980: during a failed ransom handover behind the shed, one of the extortionists was shot dead by Tom Ripley.

However, this atrocity occurred only in the imagination of Patricia Highsmith when she wrote the fourth part of the world famous five-volume Ripleyiad, The Boy Who Followed Ripley. Tom Ripley is the sinister hero of this series, a man who is far from squeamish in the choice of methods to achieve his goals. In every volume of the series except the last, he kills at least one person—and always gets away with it scot-free.

Patricia Highsmith was actually famous for displaying an almost obsessive attention to detail when it came to the settings of her novels. Particularly in "Ripleyiad," she traveled to almost every single location she had her amoral hero, Tom Ripley, visit. Among her literary estate at the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern, researchers found boxes of meticulously collected, alphabetically sorted city maps, road maps, and travel guides, all filled with her handwritten notes.

Many literary critics emphasize that crime writers in particular need this extreme topographical accuracy to make the implausible—the perfect murder—believable to the reader. Since Ripley is a cosmopolitan and an art connoisseur, Highsmith's own research had to be flawless. For her books, she retraced the exact paths her characters would later take in Venice, Rome, Hamburg, Tunis, or indeed in the wintry West Berlin of the 1980s.

If you look closely inside the shed, a fan has carved "Patricia was here" into the wooden beams.