First attempt at building a personal archive of books about Berlin. I plan to randomly search for books online or in bookstores and find texts on the different aspects of the city, hopefully from different disciplines. I was firstly inspired by a bookstore’s “Books on Berlin” section. I have no end goal, but I’m hopeful about the process. In the worst case, I’ll be reading some book promotion paragraphs.
The first list includes two books I frequently see in bookstores: The Undercurrents and Revolutionary Berlin. They are published pretty recently, both non-academic. I haven’t seen The First Days of Berlin, but it’s also translated into Turkish. I’m reading that one now. Free Berlin looks like a more art-focused version of it. Finally, we have Berlin Contemporary focusing on the architecture and rebuilding of the city.
Gutmair, U. (2021). The first days of Berlin: the sound of change (S. Pare, Trans.; English edition). Polity Press.
“Berlin in the early 1990s, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall: this is the place to be. Berlin-Mitte, the central district of the city, with its wastelands and decaying houses, has become the centre of a new movement. Artists, musicians, squatters, club owners, DJs and ravers are reclaiming the old city centre and bringing it back to life. This interregnum between two systems – the collapse of the old East Germany, the gentrification of the new Berlin – lasts only a few years. West Berliners, East Berliners and new residents from abroad join together to create music, art and fashion, to open bars and clubs and galleries, even if only for a few weeks. In the months following the fall of the Wall, there is a feeling of new beginnings and immense possibilities: life is now, and to be in the here and now feels endless. The phrase ‘temporary autonomous zone’ is circulating, it describes the idea – romantic and naive but, in the circumstances, not absurd – that, at a certain moment in history, you can actually do whatever you want.
Ulrich Gutmair moved to West Berlin as a student in autumn 1989: two weeks later the Wall came down. He spent the next few years studying during the day in the West and exploring the squats, bars and techno clubs in the East at night. He fell in love with House and Techno and raved at Tresor, Elektro, Bunker and many other places that in the meantime have almost disappeared from collective memory. Ten years later he decided to write a book about that period in between, when one regime was brought down and a new one wasn’t yet established. When utopia was actually a place to inhabit for a moment.” – from Polity
Smith, B. J. (2022). Free Berlin: art, urban politics, and everyday life. The MIT Press.
“An alternative history of art in Berlin, detaching artistic innovation from art world narratives and connecting it instead to collective creativity and social solidarity.
In pre- and post-reunification Berlin, socially engaged artists championed collective art making and creativity over individual advancement, transforming urban space and civic life in the process. During the Cold War, the city’s state of exception invited artists on both sides of the Wall to detour from artistic tradition; post-Wall, art became a tool of resistance against the orthodoxy of economic growth. In Free Berlin, Briana Smith explores the everyday peculiarities, collective joys, and grassroots provocations of experimental artists in late Cold War Berlin and their legacy in today’s city.
These artists worked intentionally outside the art market, believing that art should be everywhere, freed from its confinement in museums and galleries. They used art as a way to imagine new forms of social and creative life. Smith introduces little-known artists including West Berlin feminist collective Black Chocolate, the artist duo paint the town red (p.t.t.r), and the Office for Unusual Events, creators of satirical urban political theater, as well as East Berlin action art and urban interventionists Erhard Monden, Kurt Buchwald, and others. Artists and artist-led urban coalitions in 1990s Berlin carried on the participatory spirit of the late Cold War, with more overt forms of protest and collaboration at the neighborhood level. The temperament lives on in twenty-first century Berlin, animating artists’ resolve to work outside the market and citizens’ spirited defenses of green spaces, affordable housing, and collectivist projects.
With Free Berlin, Smith offers an alternative history of art in Berlin, detaching artistic innovation from art world narratives and connecting it instead to Berliners’ historic embrace of care, solidarity, and cooperation.” – from MIT Press
Flakin, N. (2022). Revolutionary Berlin: a walking guide. Pluto Press.
“Few European cities can boast a history as storied and tumultuous as that of Berlin. For more than 150 years it has been at the centre of revolutionary politics; of era-defining struggles between the Left and the Right. It has been bombed, rebuilt and carved in two.
In Revolutionary Berlin, veteran tour guide Nathaniel Flakin invites you to stand in the places where this history was written, and to follow in the footsteps of those who helped write it. Through nine self-guided tours illustrated with maps and photographs, readers enter the heady world of 19th century anti-colonial struggles, the 1918 November Revolution and the 1987 May Day riots — encountering the city’s workers, queer community and radical women along the way.
The first English-language guidebook to tell the story of Berlin’s radical history, this is a must-have for Berliners and visitors alike.” – from Pluto Press
Bell, K. (2022). The undercurrents: a story of Berlin. Fitzcarraldo Editions.
“The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin is a dazzling work of biography, memoir and cultural criticism told from a precise vantage point: a stately nineteenth-century house on Berlin’s Landwehr Canal, a site at the centre of great historical changes, but also smaller domestic ones.
When her marriage breaks down, Kirsty Bell – a British-American writer, in her mid-forties, adrift – becomes fixated on the history of her building and of her adoptive city. Taking the view from her apartment window as her starting point, she turns to the lives of the house’s various inhabitants, to accounts penned by Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg and Gabriele Tergit, and to the female protagonists in the works of Theodor Fontane, Irmgard Keun and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A new cultural topography of Berlin emerges, one which taps into energetic undercurrents to recover untold or forgotten stories beneath the city’s familiar narratives. Humane, thought-provoking and moving, The Undercurrents is a hybrid literary portrait of a place that makes the case for radical close readings: of ourselves, our cities and our histories.” from Fitzcarraldo
Walker, J. (2022). Berlin contemporary: architecture and politics after 1990. Bloomsbury Visual Arts.
“For years following reunification, Berlin was the largest construction site in Europe, with striking new architecture proliferating throughout the city in the 1990s and early 2000s. Among the most visible and the most contested of the new projects were those designed for the national government and its related functions.
Berlin Contemporary explores these buildings and plans, tracing their antecedents while also situating their iconic forms and influential designers within the spectacular world of global contemporary architecture. Close studies of these sites, including the Reichstag, the Chancellery, and the reconstruction of the Berlin Stadtschloss (now known as the Humboldt Forum), demonstrate the complexity of Berlin’s political and architectural “rebuilding”-and reveal the intricate historical negotiations that architecture was summoned to perform.” – from Bloomsbury