Room 2 felt like a small corner of Dixie dropped into the Rhineland mist. Lace doilies covered every surface, heavy and drooping like Spanish moss. A Confederate-flag patch had been sewn, Becky insisted it was pure irony, onto a throw pillow that read “Bless Your Heart.” A half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s Black Label stood on the dresser next to a stack of country cassettes mailed from home: Waylon Jennings, Dolly Parto...

Room 18 stood at the far end of the second-floor corridor. A single creaking floorboard announced every step. No one had ever bothered to fix it. Katja Petrović had chosen the room for its distance from the bar’s jukebox and the constant traffic on the stairs. The walls were bare white, scrubbed every morning with bleach until they shone like bone. No posters. No postcards from home. No lingering perfume to suggest anythi...

The brothel on the outskirts of Kaiserslautern was never meant to be a theater. Yet Liv Andersson had turned Room 5 into something perilously close. A battered wooden easel stood in the corner, nearly always holding a half-finished charcoal nude that looked unmistakably like her: long limbs, pale skin, head tilted downward in quiet melancholy. The walls formed a chaotic gallery. Sketches hung pinned next to torn pages fro...

The Western Front The brothel hunkered on the edge of Kaiserslautern like a forgotten relic, its faded yellow stucco blending into the misty hills of Rhineland-Palatinate. It was February 82, Germany felt like a pressure cooker, Cold War tensions simmering, Jets from Ramstein rocketing through the sky with deafening roars, the local economy struggling with high inflation and unemployment. The Deutsche Mark was strong but...

The Splintered Vow The winter of 1983 bit harder than usual in Kaiserslautern. January winds swept down from the Pfalz forest, rattling the windows of the brothel and carrying rumors of fresh protests in Bonn against NATO’s planned deployment of Pershing II missiles. On the radio, Nena’s “99 Luftballons” played endlessly, balloons mistaken for UFOs that somehow captured the era’s nervous laughter. Downstairs, the bar smel...

The brothel’s downstairs bar was thick with smoke and the smell of spilled beer on a Friday night in late autumn 1982. Outside, the rain drummed on the parked Opel Asconas and American Ford Pintos belonging to the evening’s clientele. Inside, David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” crackled from the jukebox while a group of Ramstein airmen argued loudly about the new Tom Cruise movie playing at the base theater. Frau Metzger surveyed...

Charlotte woke up from a nightmare, where she was forced to watch her two sons get killed over and over again, each time more brutally than the last time. She woke herself up with her scream echoing through the small room she was still in. Although she just woke up from a nightmare, this room reminded her of what her reality was now. Yesterday, she had been forced to watch her husband die, and instead of getting time alon...

Introduction I have yet to encounter anything quite as exhausting or more brutal than trying to fall asleep on the pavement at the height of a Johannesburg winter. The benefits are few, and the nights are long, but for me, there is nothing more distressing than the extreme loneliness that comes with the territory. I actually envy the junkies on these streets because they all have something that binds them together. While...