Berlin Stories
(Sprache: Englisch)
A gorgeously jacketed hardcover anthology of classic stories set in Berlin, by an international array of brilliant writers.
Berlin has long been a magnet for writers and artists from all over. Since the nineteenth century, when Dostoevsky sought...
Berlin has long been a magnet for writers and artists from all over. Since the nineteenth century, when Dostoevsky sought...
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A gorgeously jacketed hardcover anthology of classic stories set in Berlin, by an international array of brilliant writers.Berlin has long been a magnet for writers and artists from all over. Since the nineteenth century, when Dostoevsky sought inspiration in the city, to the creative ferment of the 1920s Weimar Republic, when German Expressionism flourished and expats like W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood found a haven there, Berlin has served as a leading cultural capital with an international reputation. Leveled during World War II and then divided by the Berlin Wall for decades, it is a city that has experienced multiple rebirths, and the stories collected here reflect that rich history. Classic German writers like Theodor Fontane, Robert Walser, Alfred Döblin, and Christa Wolf sit alongside writers from elsewhere, including Vladimir Nabokov, Christopher Isherwood, Ian McEwan, Len Deighton, and Kevin Barry.
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Foreword by Philip HensherCompared 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
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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
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
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Inhaltsverzeichnis zu „Berlin Stories “
ForewordTheodor 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
Autoren-Porträt von Philip Hensher
Edited by Philip Hensher
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Philip Hensher
- 2019, 432 Seiten, Maße: 12,7 x 18,8 cm, Gebunden, Englisch
- Herausgegeben: Philip Hensher
- Verlag: Penguin Random House
- ISBN-10: 1101908173
- ISBN-13: 9781101908174
- Erscheinungsdatum: 06.01.2020
Sprache:
Englisch
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