Berlin Stories

Lange Beschreibung
A gorgeously jacketed hardcover anthology of classic stories set in Berlin, by an international array of brilliant writers.

Spanning more than a century, this collection of stories reflects Berlin's rich and turbulent history, chronicling the creative ferment of the Weimar Republic, the devastation of wartime, the cruel divisions of the Berlin Wall, and the aftermath of reunification. Classics by Theodor Fontane and Robert Walser provide a window on privileged society at the turn of the century. Alfred Döblin, Erich Kastner, Vladimir Nabokov, and Christopher Isherwood illuminate the frenetic Golden Twenties and the ruinous crash that followed, while marginal youths roam the city's seamy underside in Irmgard Keun's The Artificial Silk Girl and Ernst Haffner's Blood Brothers. The hero of Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again visits a city shadowed by Hitler's rise, while in Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin a working-class couple quietly resists the Nazis. Cold War espionage enlivens works by Len Deighton and Ian McEwan; Christa Wolf's They Divided the Sky and Peter Schneider's The Wall Jumper depict the Berlin Wall's impact on a personal scale; and Thomas Brussig's Stasi officers engage in meaningless surveillance in Heroes Like Us. Günter Grass shows us German reunification through the eyes of an elderly Luftwaffe veteran while Uwe Timm does so through a writer's madcap wanderings in a bewildering post-Wall landscape. Finally, more recent arrivals--from Chloe Aridjis's Mexican-Jewish university student in Book of Clouds to the desperate African refugees in Jenny Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone--bear witness to Berlin's continuing evolution as an arena of the possible.

Inhaltsverzeichnis
Foreword
 
Theodor Fontane, from Effi Briest
 
Robert Walser, The Little Berliner
 
Alfred Döblin, from Berlin Alexanderplatz
 
Vladimir Nabokov, from King, Queen, Knave
 
Erich Kästner, from Going to the Dogs
 
Ernst Haffner, from Blood Brothers
 
Irmgard Keun, from The Artificial Silk Girl
 
Christopher Isherwood, A Berlin Diary: Winter 1932 3
 
Thomas Wolfe, The Dark Messiah
 
Hans Fallada, from Alone in Berlin
 
Heinz Rein, Berlin, April 1945
 
Peter Schneider, from The Wall Jumper
 
Thomas Brussig, from Heroes Like Us
 
Len Deighton, from Funeral in Berlin
 
Christa Wolf, from They Divided the Sky
 
Ian McEwan, from The Innocent
 
Günter Grass, The Diving Duck
 
Wladimir Kaminer, Business Camouflage
 
Chloe Aridjis, from Book of Clouds
 
Uwe Timm, The Reichstag, Wrapped
 
Kevin Barry, Berlin Arkonaplatz My Lesbian Summer
 
Jean-Philippe Toussaint, from Television
 
Jenny Erpenbeck, from Go, Went, Gone
 

Buchausschnitt
Foreword by Philip Hensher
 
      Compared to Paris, London or Rome, Berlin has a short history. There are no signs of habitation before the 12th century, and it remained a relatively insignificant place until the 18th century. At the end of the 17th century, Berlin s population was around 10,000, when Paris and London both had over half a million inhabitants. After that, the city grew explosively. It is substantially a creation of the nineteenth century, with all that era s addiction to modernity, technology and novelty. Its most celebrated contribution to urban architecture, the Wall, was only erected in the early 1960s. That was demolished thirty years ago in any case. It has always been a city of desperate modernity.
 
      The physical substance is reflected in its characteristic ways of behaving and interacting. It has been a city dedicated to discovering new ways of living. In most decades of the twentieth century, Berlin has produced whole classes of people very conscious that they are living lives that nobody has ever attempted before. It is an arena of the possible, where the imagination carves out cities of the future. The first social housing projects are here. Gay men and lesbians started to live their lives openly in large numbers in the 1920s. The postwar division of the city and the Wall, too, created multiple possibilities, few foreseen, some explosive. In the aftermath of unification, the city was cheap and rundown; it quickly became a hub for creative artists. The sense of making it up as you go along is never far away in Berlin.
 
      The fiction of Berlin exemplifies much of this excitement. Unlike most capital cities, it imposes no obligation on writers to come to terms with it. There are very many great German and German-language writers with absolutely nothing to say about Berlin. Those who do write about it, I suspect, are those who were drawn to it. Such writers may be of a particular type. Despite the different settings, and the totally different nature of each new experience described, a mood recurs. It is a mood of wonder and astonishment, lightly veiled in an affectation of chic boredom. We have seen all this before, suggests each writer, uncovering scenes that have never been dreamt of until this moment. A layer of period nostalgia has settled over Fontane, but in his time, he was an artist of the present moment, even of modernity. Erich Kastner s Fabian, behaving according to his most animal instincts and finding no resistance in those around him, is another example of this languid joy in the unprecedented. Another might be Irmgard Keun s heroine, making her way in the big city with what resources she has, or Ernst Haffner s gang of juvenile derelicts.
 
      These innovations don t always come from outcasts and drop-outs. Sometimes lives of unanticipated modernity are conducted in accordance with the central apparatuses of control and orthodoxy. Thomas Brussig s Stasi officers conduct their meaningless lives of surveillance like realist novelists determined to leave nothing out of the narrative. The Wall imposes its obligation to try to understand Peter Schneider s wall jumper and Uwe Timm s wanderer in a post-Wall landscape both seem like naïfs, so colossal and impregnable are the things they are trying to understand. Their behaviour is predicted and constrained by the Wall and its sudden absence. For Wladimir Kaminer or Kevin Barry, the newest arrivals in the city are literally making things up as they go along, finding out what the rules of engagement might be. For outsiders like Thomas Wolfe or Christopher Isherwood, it just doesn t seem possible to guess what might happen next; other outsiders, like Chloe Aridjis, place their trust in solitary wandering through t