Berlin Stories

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

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

Edited by Philip Hensher