Category: Books on Berlin

Books on Berlin XI

Whybrow, N. (2005). Street scenes: Brecht, Benjamin, and Berlin. Intellect Books.

“Always the focal point in modern times for momentous political, social and cultural upheaval, Berlin has continued, since the fall of the Wall in 1989, to be a city in transition. As the new capital of a reunified Germany it has embarked on a journey of rapid reconfiguration, involving issues of memory, nationhood and ownership. Bertolt Brecht, meanwhile, stands as one of the principal thinkers about art and politics in the 20th century. The ‘Street Scene’ model, which was the foundation for his theory of an epic theatre, relied precisely on establishing a connection between art’s functioning and everyday life. His preoccupation with the ceaselessness of change, an impulse implying rupture and movement as the key characteristics informing the development of a democratic cultural identity, correlates resonantly with the notion of an ever-evolving city. Premised on an understanding of performance as the articulation of movement in space, Street Scenes interrogates what kind of ‘life’ is permitted to ‘flow’ in the ‘new Berlin’. Central to this method is the flaneur figure, a walker of streets who provides detached observations on the revealing ‘detritus of modern urban existence’. Walter Benjamin, himself a native of Berlin as well as friend and seminal critic of Brecht, exercised the practice in exemplary form in his portrait of the city One-Way Street.” – from Intellect Books

Caplan, M. (2021). Yiddish writers in Weimar Berlin: a fugitive modernism. Indiana University Press.

“In Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin, Marc Caplan explores the reciprocal encounter between Eastern European Jews and German culture in the days following World War I. By concentrating primarily on a small group of avant-garde Yiddish writers—Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister, and Moyshe Kulbak—working in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, Caplan examines how these writers became central to modernist aesthetics. By concentrating on the character of Yiddish literature produced in Weimar Germany, Caplan offers a new method of seeing how artistic creation is constructed and a new understanding of the political resonances that result from it.

Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin reveals how Yiddish literature participated in the culture of Weimar-era modernism, how active Yiddish writers were in the literary scene, and how German-speaking Jews read descriptions of Yiddish-speaking Jews to uncover the emotional complexity of what they managed to create even in the midst of their confusion and ambivalence in Germany.

Caplan’s masterful narrative affords new insights into literary form, Jewish culture, and the philosophical and psychological motivations for aesthetic modernism.” – from Indiana University Press

Nelson, A. (2009). Red Orchestra: the story of the Berlin underground and the circle of friends who resisted Hitler (1st ed). Random House.

“Anne Nel­son has writ­ten a major work on a trag­ic dilem­ma of our time — how a cul­tured peo­ple, defeat­ed and impov­er­ished though they were, could turn on and bru­tal­ize their own cit­i­zen­ry. And how the civ­i­lized world could stand by, rea­son­ing that it would all ​“soon blow over.”

In an inno­v­a­tive approach this book describes Hitler’s rise to pow­er from the point of view of the under­ground, which opposed him. The Red Orches­tra was promi­nent in that opposition.

Using exhaus­tive­ly researched real-life accounts of peo­ple of the time, Nel­son, an expe­ri­enced jour­nal­ist, shows how men and women scram­bled in and out of Ger­many, some final­ly decid­ing to stay and fight the glit­ter­ing, ruth­less new power.

The vol­un­teer spies act­ed as loy­al mem­bers of the regime, often par­ty­ing with the Nazi elite and the Pruss­ian nobil­i­ty, while pass­ing mil­i­tary infor­ma­tion to the Rus­sians and Allies.

Nelson’s un-the­atri­cal style some­times lacks pace. But her work stands as a trib­ute to the under­ground that opposed Hitler, the many mur­dered, and the embit­tered sur­vivors. It is also a fine source for schol­ars, libraries, and curi­ous read­ers. Bib­li­o­graph­i­cal notes, doc­u­men­taries, epi­logue, index, pref­ace, pro­logue, select bibliography.” – from Jewish Book Council

Thacker, A. (2020). Modernism, space and the city: outsiders and affect in Paris, Vienna, Berlin and London. Edinburgh University Press.

“Explores the crucial role played by the city in the construction of modernism.

This innovative book examines the development of modernist writing in four European cities: London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna. Focusing on how literary outsiders represented various spaces in these cities, it draws upon contemporary theories of affect and literary geography. Particular attention is given to the transnational qualities of modernist writing by examining writers whose view of the cities considered is that of migrants, exiles or strangers, including Mulk Raj Anand, Blaise Cendrars, Bryher, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Christopher Isherwood, Hope Mirrlees, Noami Mitchison, Jean Rhys, Sam Selvon and Stephen Spender.

Key Features
* The first book in modernist studies to bring detailed discussion of these four cities together
* Breaks new ground in being the first book to bring affect theory and literary geography together in order to analyse modernism
* An extensive range of authors is analysed, from the canonical to the previously marginal
* Situates the literary and filmic texts within the context of urban spaces and cultural institutions” – from Edinburgh University Press

Funder, A. (2018). Stasiland. Penguin Random House Australia.

“In this now classic work, Funder tells extraordinary stories from the most perfected surveillance state of all time, the former East Germany. She meets Miriam, condemned as an enemy of the state at sixteen, and Frau Paul, for whom the Berlin Wall ‘went through my heart’. She drinks with the legendary ‘Mik Jegger’ of the East, once declared by the authorities to ‘no longer exist’. And she meets ex-Stasi – men who spied on their families and friends – still loyal to the deposed regime as they await the next revolution.

Stasiland is a brilliant, timeless portrait of a Kafkaesque world as gripping as any thriller. In a world of total surveillance, its celebration of human conscience and courage is as potent as ever.” – from Penguin

Books on Berlin X

Taberner, S., & Finlay, F. (ed.). (2002). Recasting German identity: culture, politics, and literature in the Berlin Republic. Camden House.

“This collection of fifteen essays by scholars from the UK, the US, Germany, and Scandinavia revisits the question of German identity. Unlike previous books on this topic, however, the focus is not exclusively on national identity in the aftermath of Hitler. Instead, the concentration is upon the plurality of ethnic, sexual, political, geographical, and cultural identities in modern Germany, and on their often fragmentary nature as the country struggles with the challenges of unification and international developments such as globalization, multiculturalism, and postmodernism. The multifaceted nature of German identity demands a variety of approaches: thus the essays are interdisciplinary, drawing upon historical, sociological, and literary sources. They are organized with reference to three distinct sections: Berlin, Political Formations, and Difference; yet at the same time they illuminate one another across the volume, offering a nuanced understanding of the complex question of identity in today’s Germany. Topics include the new self-understanding of the Berlin Republic, Berlin as a public showcase, the Berlin architecture debate, the Walser-Bubis debate, fictions of German history and the end of the GDR, the impact of the German student movement on the FRG, Prime Minister Biedenkopf and the myth of Saxon identity, women in post-1989 Germany, trains as symbols and the function of the foreign in post-1989 fiction, identity construction among Turks in Germany and Turkish self-representation in post-1989 fiction, the state of German literature today.”  – from Cambridge Core

Broadbent, P., & Hake, S. (ed.). (2012). Berlin divided city, 1945 – 1989: German Studies Workshop (2nd: 2008: University of Texas at Austin). Berghahn Books.

“A great deal of attention continues to focus on Berlin’s cultural and political landscape after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but as yet, no single volume looks at the divided city through an interdisciplinary analysis. This volume examines how the city was conceived, perceived, and represented during the four decades preceding reunification and thereby offers a unique perspective on divided Berlin’s identities. German historians, art historians, architectural historians, and literary and cultural studies scholars explore the divisions and antagonisms that defined East and West Berlin; and by tracing the little studied similarities and extensive exchanges that occurred despite the presence of the Berlin Wall, they present an indispensible study on the politics and culture of the Cold War.

“Eschewing the primacy of political history, the authors provide a nuanced picture of a city that, in many respects, was less divided than the Cold War mindset would have us believe…This interesting volume demonstrates the many ways in which East and West Berlin were mutually influential, and how commonalities extended beyond the division.” · English Historical Review

“This volume taps into the on-going fascination with Berlin but, refreshingly, broadens the historical and conceptual scope, asking us to reconsider some of the assumptions we tend to make about the relationship between East and West Berlin during the time of the city’s division…The volume is so well conceived and simply so interesting that most readers will probably want to read it in its entirety…It demonstrates what an essay collection can accomplish when it grows out of a shared discussion. The broad range of topics and the interdisciplinary perspectives presented in this book could not have been achieved by an individual author. The editors deserve praise for the volume’s coherence and consistency.” · The German Quarterly

“Adopting an explicitly interdisciplinary approach, this volume ambitiously aims to offer more than just a cultural history of Cold War Berlin…[Its] mix of spatial and chronological demarcations proves insightful inasmuch as the best essays transgress and even undermine them, in effect articulating one of the editors’ stated emphases ‘on the continuities of urban culture beyond historical ruptures and spatial divides” · German History

“[An] important contribution to current scholarship on Berlin in the Cold War period. Although this is an anthology, it is well conceived to focus on various aspects of Berlin culture during the years of the Cold War.” · Stephen Brockmann, Carnegie Mellon””  – from Bergahn Books

Fritzsche, P. (1998). Reading Berlin 1900 (2. print). Harvard Univ. Press.

“The great cities at the turn of the century were mediated by words—newspapers, advertisements, signs, and schedules—by which the inhabitants lived, dreamed, and imagined their surroundings. In this original study of the classic text of urban modernism—the newspaper page—Peter Fritzsche analyzes how reading and writing dramatized Imperial Berlin and anticipated the modernist sensibility that celebrated discontinuity, instability, and transience. It is a sharp-edged story with cameo appearances by Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and Alfred Döblin. This sumptuous history of a metropolis and its social and literary texts provides a rich evocation of a particularly exuberant and fleeting moment in history.

“There is no shortage of studies by cultural historians addressing the rapid and unique development of Berlin from a medium-sized Prussian residence to a world-class metropolis during the period between 1871 and the First World War. Among these, Peter Fritzsche’s Reading Berlin ranks as one of the most intriguing and, in my opinion, one of the best. Fritzsche does not write a cultural history of the city—he lets the city write it, and he reads the city as a text. The source for this text is the newspaper page, that is, the popular press—the mass-circulation papers… [and] Peter Fritzsche uses the collage of newspaper impressions to create a valid picture of Wilhelmine Berlin… Reading Berlin is an excellent book. It is very well written, and it reflects an enormous knowledge—not only of historical details but also of the literature and arts of the time. The book’s fourteen illustrations are well chosen and are not the standard fare of ‘Kaisers Deutschland.’ The notes are thorough and should be of help to anyone wanting to engage in further research on the subject or on Berlin around in general. Reading Berlin can be recommended to scholars and to the general public, to historians as well as Germanists, indeed, to anyone with a serious interest in urban culture and the urban experience.”—Gerhard Weiss, Journal of Modern History”” – from Harvard University Press

Taylor, F. (2006). The Berlin Wall, 13 August 1961 – 9 November 1989. Bloomsbury.

“The appearance of a hastily-constructed barbed-wire entanglement through the heart of Berlin during the night of 12-13 August 1961 was both dramatic and unexpected. Within days, it had started to metamorphose into a structure that would come to symbolise the brutal insanity of the Cold War: the Berlin Wall.

Frederick Taylor tells the whole gripping story of the post-war political conflict that led to the tragedy of a divided Berlin, when the city of almost four million was ruthlessly cut in two, unleashing a potentially catastrophic East-West crisis. For the first time the entire world faced the threat of imminent nuclear apocalypse, a fear that would vanish only when the very people the Wall had been built to imprison breached it on the historic night of 9 November 1989.

Weaving together official history, original archive research and personal stories, THE BERLIN WALL is the definitive account of a divided city and its people in a time when humanity seemed to stand permanently on the edge of destruction.” – from Frederick Taylor

Nooteboom, C. (2012). Roads to Berlin: detours and riddles in the lands and history of Germany. MacLehose Press.

“Roads to Berlin maps the changing landscape of Germany, from the period before the fall of the Wall to the present. Written and updated over the course of several decades, an eyewitness account of the pivotal events of 1989 gives way to a perceptive appreciation of its difficult passage to reunification. Nooteboom’s writings on politics, people, architecture and culture are as digressive as they are eloquent; his innate curiosity takes him through the landscapes of Heine and Goethe, steeped in Romanticism and mythology, and to Germany’s baroque cities. With an outsider’s objectivity he has crafted an intimate portrait of the country to its present day.” – from Goodreads