Moss, T. (2020). Remaking Berlin: a history of the city through infrastructure, 1920-2020. The MIT Press.
“An examination of Berlin’s turbulent history through the lens of its water and energy infrastructures.
In Remaking Berlin, Timothy Moss takes a novel perspective on Berlin’s turbulent twentieth-century history, examining it through the lens of its water and energy infrastructures. He shows that, through a century of changing regimes, geopolitical interventions, and socioeconomic volatility, Berlin’s networked urban infrastructures have acted as medium and manifestation of municipal, national, and international politics and policies. Moss traces the coevolution of Berlin and its infrastructure systems from the creation of Greater Berlin in 1920 to remunicipalization of services in 2020, encompassing democratic, fascist, and socialist regimes. Throughout, he explores the tension between obduracy and change in Berlin’s infrastructures. Examining the choices made by utility managers, politicians, and government officials, Moss makes visible systems that we often take for granted.
Moss describes the reorganization of infrastructure systems to meet the needs of a new unitary city after Berlin’s incorporation in 1920, and how utilities delivered on political promises; the insidious embedding of repression, racism, autarky, and militarization within the networked city under the Nazis; and the resilience of Berlin’s infrastructures during wartime and political division. He examines East Berlin’s socialist infrastructural ideal (and its under-resourced systems), West Berlin’s insular existence (and its aspirations of system autarky), and reunified Berlin’s privatization of utilities (subsequently challenged by social movements). Taking Berlin as an exemplar, Moss’s account will inspire researchers to take a fresh look at urban infrastructure histories, offering new ways of conceptualizing the multiple temporalities and spatialities of the networked city.” – from MIT Press
Callaghan, M. (2020). Empathetic memorials: the other designs for the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. Palgrave Macmillan.
“This book is a study of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial Competitions of the 1990s, with a focus on designs that kindle empathetic responses. Through analysis of provocative designs, the book engages with issues of empathy, secondary witnessing, and depictions of concentration camp iconography. It explores the relationship between empathy and cultural memory when representations of suffering are notably absent. The book submits that one design represents the idea of an uncanny memorial, and also pays attention to viewer co-authorship in counter-monuments. Analysis of counter-monuments also include their creative engagement with German history and their determination to defy fascist aesthetics. As the winning design for The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is abstract with an information centre, there is an exploration of the memorial museum. Callaghan asks whether this configuration is intended to compensate for the abstract memorial’s ambiguity or to complement the design’s visceral potential. Other debates explored concern political memory, national memory, and the controversy of dedicating the memorial exclusively to murdered Jews.” – from Springer
Weiner, J. (2016). Berlin notebook: where are the refugees? Los Angeles Review of Books.
“The chronicle of a fall and spring in Berlin during the peak influx of refugees into Europe in 2015-16, Joshua Weiner’s Berlin Notebook opens a new view on German society’s attempt to cope with an impossible situation: millions of people displaced by the Syrian civil war, fleeing violence, and seeking safety and the possibilities of a new life in the west. As some Germans, feeling the burden of the nation’s dark past, try to aid and shelter desperate asylum seekers, others are skeptical of the government’s ability to contain the growing numbers; they feel the danger of hostile strangers, and the threat to the nation’s culture and identity. Unlike other contemporary reports on the situation in Europe, Weiner’s sui generis writing includes interviews not only with refugees from the east, but also everyday Berliners, natives and ex-pats – musicians, poets, shopkeepers, students, activists, rabbis, museum guides, artists, intellectuals, and those, too, who have joined the rising far-right Alternative for Germany party, and the Pegida movement against immigration. Intermixed with interviews, reportage, and meditations on life in Europe’s fastest growing capital city, Weiner thinks about the language and literature of the country, weaving together strands of its ancient and more recent history with meditations on Goethe, Brecht, Arendt, Heidegger, Joseph Roth and others that inflect our thinking about refugees, nationhood, and our ethical connection to strangers.” – from LA Review of Books
Carrington, T. (2019). Love at last sight: dating, intimacy, and risk in turn-of-the-century Berlin. Oxford University Press.
“Love at Last Sight is a history of dating in the modern metropolis. It opens with the seemingly simple question, “How did single people meet and fall in love in new big cities like Berlin at the turn of the century?” but what emerges from this investigation of daily newspapers, diaries, serial novels, advice literature, police records, and court cases is a world of dating and relationships that was anything but simple. The murder of Frieda Kliem, a young, enterprising seamstress who was using newspaper personal ads to find a husband—the story of which serves as the book’s central narrative—reveals the tremendous risk associated with modern approaches to love and dating. The risk of fraud, censure, or worse was ever present, especially for the many Berliners who strove for the stability of middle-class life but were outsiders to the social power structures of German society. Indeed, though the technologies and opportunities of the big city offered the best shot at finding love or intimate connection among the urban sea of strangers, availing oneself of them—pursuing a missed connection from the streetcar or using a newspaper personal ad—meant putting one’s livelihood, respectability, and life on the line. This was the romantic dilemma facing the vast majority of city dwellers at the turn of the century, and a great many chose to risk everything for some measure of connection and intimacy. This book explores their stories as a way of illuminating this core tension of modern, metropolitan life.” – from Oxford Academic
Brass, A., & Light, P. (2021). On the barricades of Berlin: an account of the 1848 revolution (A. Weiland, Trans.). Black Rose Books.
“The 1848 wave of worker rebellions that swept across Europe struck the German states with the March Revolution. While Richard Wagner and Mikhail Bakunin fought side by side in Dresden, the writer August Brass led the successful defense of the barricades in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz public square. Published in English for the first time, On the Barricades of Berlin provides a riveting firsthand account of this uprising. Brass’ testimony begins with the tumultuous events leading up to the revolution: the peaceful democratic agitation; the demands that were brought to the king; and the key actors involved on all sides of the still peaceful, yet tense, struggle. It then follows the events that led to the outbreak of resistance to the forces of order and sheds light on the aftermath of the fighting once the exhausted Prussian army withdrew from the city.” – from Black Rose Books