Goodreads asked Matthias Drawe:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Matthias Drawe I've lived in a squatted house in Berlin (at the time West-Berlin) myself, so I know all of what happens in the book first hand.

West-Berlin was a very weird place, really like no other in the world, since it was surrounded by the Wall and communist East Germany. So you were living in a Western enclave surrounded by a hostile communist country. West-Berlin drew all kinds of artist and bohemians from all around the globe because of that situation.

Beer was cheap and there were plenty of "open spaces", or abandoned and some of the houses at the time, so you could just move in and live rent free. Some of those houses still hat bullit holes from the Second World War.
Sure the houses were run down, but who cared as long as you could live there for free and did not have to work. At the time basically nobody from that scene got up earlier than 11am. To disturb somebody before 11am was a serious invasion of privacy.

It was an artist's paradise, full of life. West Berlin never closed. It was a 24h City with a famous underground night life.

Even though the story happened a long time ago and the Wall gone, now, I had a draft script for a story in my drawer which I discovered 25 years after the fact. It all came back to me when I read the draft and decided that I had to tell the story as a novel.

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