Berlin City-lit (City-Lit Series) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0955970040 ISBN 13: 9780955970047

Publisher: Oxygen Books, 2009

Synopsis

Experience the haunting and exciting city of Berlin as never before, in the company of over sixty fascinating writers. Join them as

Christopher Isherwood takes us to the cabaret
David Bowie cycles through Berlin
Anna Funder remembers Stasiland
Ian McEwan overhears talk in a Berlin bar
Christabel Beilenberg wouldn't live anywhere else
David Hare contemplates a wartime memorial
Marlene Dietrich receives a graveside hommage
Chloe Aridjis shows us around town
John Simpson sees the Wall come down
... and much, much more.

Introduced by Rory Maclean

Other titles in the series: Paris, London, Dublin, Venice, New York, Amsterdam, Istanbul, St Petersburg

About this title

Review

'This wonderful anthology explores what it is really like to be a Berliner' -- The Guardian

'A stimulating intellectual tour of the idea of the city that would complement any more practical guidebook.' -- The Financial Times

'A fascinating cornucopia of Berlin writing' -- Real Travel Magazine

'A gem ... an elegant, enjoyable and essential book' -- Rosie Goldsmith, Radio 4

'This is a sublime introduction to the city' --The Sydney Morning Herald

'The emphasis is on unexpected vantage points and new, less familiar voices ... there's no dutiful trot through the city's history' --Podularity

'Another in this sterling series of city-writing compilations ... a mighty fine cover-to-cover read in itself. --Fictional Cities

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Berlin is all about volatility. Its identity is based not on stability but on change. No other city has repeatedly been so powerful, and fallen so low. No other city has inspired so many artists and witnessed so many murders. It's a capital city made up of villages. An island long adrift on a foreign sea. A city where history broods. Its legends, both real and imagined, stalk the streets: Lenin drinks at the same café as Bowie's heroes, Wim Wender's trench-coated angels wing above torch-lit Nazi processions, Speer conjures myths from the same canvas as Georg Grosz, Dietrich shops alongside Sally Bowles at KaDeWe, le Carré's George Smiley watches the packed trains leave for Auschwitz.
Berlin is all about volatility. Its identity is based not on stability but on change. No other city has repeatedly been so powerful, and fallen so low. No other city has inspired so many artists and witnessed so many murders. It's a capital city made up of villages. An island long adrift on a foreign sea. A city where history broods. Its legends, both real and imagined, stalk the streets: Lenin drinks at the same café as Bowie's heroes, Wim Wender's trench-coated angels wing above torch-lit Nazi processions, Speer conjures myths from the same canvas as Georg Grosz, Dietrich shops alongside Sally Bowles at KaDeWe, le Carré's George Smiley watches the packed trains leave for Auschwitz.
Berlin's unpredictable undercurrents long attracted artists. The historian Peter Gay wrote that living in the city in the Golden Twenties was the dream of `the composer, the journalist, the actor; with its superb orchestras, its 120 newspapers, its forty theatres, Berlin was the place for the ambitious, the energetic, the talented. Wherever they started, it was in Berlin that they became, and Berlin that made them famous.' During the Weimar years it was the world's most exciting city. Here Walter Gropius conceived the Bauhaus, Weill penned `The Ballad of Mack the Knife' and Isherwood immortalized the cabaret. Nabokov, Kafka, Auden and Spender were inspired in its cafés. At Babelsberg Studio Fritz Lang filmed `Metropolis' while von Sternberg and Dietrich created `The Blue Angel'. For ten breathless years, artists and intellectuals danced on the edge of a volcano. When their vision of a new world was rejected by Germans in 1933, the year Hitler became Chancellor, Berlin's exiles carried their new modernity abroad.

German literature went up in smoke in the 1933 book burnings. Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, Thomas Mann and many other writers fled the country, alongside Lang, Einstein and Mies van der Rohe. With the Nazis' arrogant triumph Hitler proposed rebuilding Berlin as `Germania', the new capital of the populist, nationalistic `Thousand Year Reich'. `In ten years no one will recognise the city' he boasted. During the Second World War more bombs fell on Berlin than on the whole of England. By 1945 three-quarters of the city lay in ruins. The victorious Allies divided Berlin into four sectors. Stalin's secret intention was to draw it -- and then the whole of Germany -- into the Communist orbit. In 1948 he blockaded the city as a means of driving the Americans out of Europe, but the Allies retaliated by launching the Berlin Airlift to sustain its freedom. With the brutal suppression of the 1953 uprising, hundreds of thousands of East Germans began moving west, forcing the Communists to close their escape route by building the Wall. Behind it East German literature flourished, though not necessarily in print due to strict censorship. In the encircled western sectors writers struggled to come to terms with the recent past, handicapped by both widespread denial and young men moving to West Berlin only to escape military service, their spirit of refusal emasculating criticism and engendering self-indulgence. The return to literature of quality -- influenced by the residencies of Heinrich Böll, Wolf Biermann, Günter Grass and Uwe Johnson as well as Ryszard Kapuscinski, Cees Nooteboom and Susan Sontag -- was accelerated by reunification. The city has emerged from its dark anger to become again a creative capital of Europe: cool, experimental, bohemian, with cheap rents and an irony-free exuberance that attracts aspiring scribblers and the international cultural elite alike. East and west, German and foreign, meet once more, as illustrated in the work of Thomas Brussig, Bernhard Schlink and Uwe Tellkamp, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen and Imre Kertesz.
Today I ride my bicycle past the site of the wooden observation stand where I decided to become a writer, across the former death strip, to the glittering glass and steel phoenix of Potsdamer Platz. Near to it is the Holocaust Memorial, the undulating labyrinth of concrete plinths which commemorates the murdered European Jews. The black husk of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, destroyed by Allied bombs in 1943, casts a long shadow along buzzy Kurfürstendamm. At my son's school an old brick wall is still pockmarked from machinegun fire. A young German painter told me recently, `I do not want to say that they -- the SS officers, the guards by the Wall, the Stasi interrogators -- are like us. It is different, worse I guess. They are us -- and we would have been them, in our respective times. It does not mean that I think we -- the Germans -- are likely to ever become Nazis again. Germany is a profoundly different land now, its identity reshaped forever by cataclysmic events. But it is the potency of us, them, me, to have been part of such events that is the horror today.'
Of all human characteristics change is ever the most constant. Germans no longer shy away from acknowledging the darkness in their past. Convinced of the Freudian idea that the repressed (or at least unspoken) will fester like a canker unless it is brought to light, Germany has subjected itself to national psychoanalysis. Past atrocities are unearthed and confessed, as a condition of healing, as if the psychic health of a society depends upon it. This courageous, humane and moving process is inspiring painters and authors at home and abroad, illuminating legends real and imagined, galvanizing again this volatile, ever-changing city ... for a time.
Rory MacLean, author of the much acclaimed Stalin's Nose and Under the Dragon, lives in Berlin where he is writing a book on the city and its ghosts. Today I ride my bicycle past the site of the wooden observation stand where I decided to become a writer, across the former death strip, to the glittering glass and steel phoenix of Potsdamer Platz. Near to it is the Holocaust Memorial, the undulating labyrinth of concrete plinths which commemorates the murdered European Jews. The black husk of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, destroyed by Allied bombs in 1943, casts a long shadow along buzzy Kurfürstendamm. At my son's school an old brick wall is still pockmarked from machinegun fire. A young German painter told me recently, `I do not want to say that they -- the SS officers, the guards by the Wall, the Stasi interrogators -- are like us. It is different, worse I guess. They are us -- and we would have been them, in our respective times. It does not mean that I think we -- the Germans -- are likely to ever become Nazis again. Germany is a profoundly different land now, its identity reshaped forever by cataclysmic events. But it is the potency of us, them, me, to have been part of such events that is the horror today.'
Of all human characteristics change is ever the most constant. Germans no longer shy away from acknowledging the darkness in their past. Convinced of the Freudian idea that the repressed (or at least unspoken) will fester like a canker unless it is brought to light, Germany has subjected itself to national psychoanalysis. Past atrocities are unearthed and confessed, as a condition of healing, as if the psychic health of a society depends upon it. This courageous, humane and moving process is inspiring painters and authors at home and abroad, illuminating legends real and imagined, galvanizing again this volatile, ever-changing city ... for a time.
Rory MacLean, author of the much acclaimed Stalin's Nose and Under the Dragon, lives in Berlin where he is writing a book on the city and its ghosts.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxygen Books
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0955970040
• ISBN 13: 9780955970047
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 200
• Editor: Reyes Heather, Derbyshire Katy