Category: List

Till, K. E. (2005). The new Berlin: memory, politics, place. University of Minnesota Press.

“The New Berlin reveals a city haunted by ghosts from difficult pasts and “remembered futures,” a place where past, present, and future collide in unexpected ways as individuals and groups search for what it means to be German. Karen Till skillfully moves through the spaces and times of a city marked by voids, ruins, and construction cranes to search through material and affective landscapes of intentional forgetting and painful remembering. In doing so, she deepens our understanding of the practice and politics of place making—and of how particular places embody and narrate distinct national pasts and futures, stories of belonging, and the absences and presences of social memory-work.

Four locations frame The New Berlin: the Topography of Terror, the much-debated Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Jewish Museum, and the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial and Museum. Through these and other sites, we encounter people unexpectedly colliding with and evoking ghosts from multiple Berlins as they dig through social and material landscapes, claim public spaces, market the city, go on tours, or debate what national past should be remembered, for whom, where, and in what form. Through a complex interweaving of field notes, interviews, archival texts, personal narratives, public art, maps, images, and other sources, Till deftly describes how these places and spaces uniquely exemplify the contradictions and tensions of social memory and national identity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Highlighting an interdisciplinary “geo-ethnographic” and nonlinear temporal approach to place making and memory in postunification Germany, The New Berlin introduces readers to people confronting loss and past injustices amid the construction sites and ghosts of the contemporary city.” – from University of Minnesota Press

---

Evans, J. V. (2011). Life among the ruins: cityscape and sexuality in Cold War Berlin. Palgrave Macmillan.

“As home to 1920s excess and Hitler’s Final Solution, Berlin’s physical and symbolic landscape was an important staging ground for the highs and lows of modernity. In Cold War Berlin, social and political boundaries were porous, and the rubble gave refuge to a re-emerging gay and lesbian scene, youth gangs, prostitutes, hoods, and hustlers.

“Evans’s analysis of the available visual material proves to be innovative and illuminating.” – Malte Zierenberg, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany

“Greatly aided by her eloquent storytelling, the book reaches out across disciplines and appeals not only to historians of postwar Germany but also to geographers as well as scholars of film, literature, and gender studies.” – Yuliya Komska, Dartmouth College, United States” – from Springer Link

---

Dekel, I. (2013). Mediation at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Palgrave Macmillan.

“Analyzing action at the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, this first ethnography of the site offers a fresh approach to studying the memorial and memory work as potential civic engagement of visitors with themselves and others rather than with history itself.

“Dekel focuses on the participation in memory work as a potential act of citizenship citizenship defined in cosmopolitan and inclusive terms and, by exploring the different stages of participation in memory work, she is able to theorise the ‘moral career’ of visitors. Mediation at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin moves us away from the restrictive notions of the Holocaust sublime and towards the Holocaust’s speakability through performances of memory.” – Richard Crownshaw, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

“Irit Dekel’s book presents an innovative approach to the study of memorials and the memory that they embody, applied to the ideal memorial for such a study…As memorials and other mechanisms for dealing with the past change, so too must the methods we use to study them. Dekel’s book provides one such new approach to studying engagement with the past as it occurs in the Holocaust Memorial, and it is to be hoped that it will pave the way for future ethnographic studies of the interactions between memorials and their visitors, and between past and present.” – Amy Sodaro, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 2014″ – from Springer Link

---

Biro, M. (2009). The Dada cyborg: visions of the new human in Weimar Berlin. University of Minnesota Press.

“In an era when technology, biology, and culture are becoming ever more closely connected, The Dada Cyborg explains how the cyborg as we know it today actually developed between 1918 and 1933 when German artists gave visual form to their utopian hopes and fantasies in a fearful response to World War I.

In what could be termed a prehistory of the posthuman, Matthew Biro shows the ways in which new forms of human existence were imagined in Germany between the two world wars through depictions of cyborgs. Examining the work of Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Otto Dix, and Rudolf Schlichter, he reveals an innovative interpretation of the cyborg as a representative of hybrid identity, as well as a locus of new modes of awareness created by the impact of technology on human perception. Tracing the prevalence of cyborgs in German avant-garde art, Biro demonstrates how vision, hearing, touch, and embodiment were beginning to be reconceived during the Weimar Republic.

Biro’s unique and interdisciplinary analysis offers a substantially new account of the Berlin Dada movement, one that integrates the group’s poetic, theoretical, and performative practices with its famous visual strategies of photomontage, assemblage, and mixed-media painting to reveal radical images of a “new human.”” – from University of Minnesota Press

---

Beevor, A. (2007). Berlin: the downfall, 1945. Penguin Books.

““A tale drenched in drama and blood, heroism and cowardice, loyalty and betrayal.”—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

The Red Army had much to avenge when it finally reached the frontiers of the Third Reich in January 1945. Frenzied by their terrible experiences with Wehrmacht and SS brutality, they wreaked havoc—tanks crushing refugee columns, mass rape, pillage, and unimaginable destruction. Hundreds of thousands of women and children froze to death or were massacred; more than seven million fled westward from the fury of the Red Army. It was the most terrifying example of fire and sword ever known.

Antony Beevor, renowned author of D-Day and The Battle of Arnhem, has reconstructed the experiences of those millions caught up in the nightmare of the Third Reich’s final collapse. The Fall of Berlin is a terrible story of pride, stupidity, fanaticism, revenge, and savagery, yet it is also one of astonishing endurance, self-sacrifice, and survival against all odds.” – from Penguin Random House

Gordon, M. (Ed.). (2006 [2000]). Voluptuous panic: the erotic world of Weimar Berlin (Expanded Edition). Feral House.

“When Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin first appeared in the fall of 2000, it inspired wide acclaim and multiple printings.

This sourcebook of hundreds of rare visual delights from the pre-Nazi, Cabaret-period “Babylon on the Spree” has the distinction of being praised both by scholars and avatars of contemporary culture, inspiring performers, filmmakers, historians straight and gay, designers, and musicians like the Dresden Dolls and Marilyn Manson.

Voluptuous Panic’s expanded edition includes the new illustrated chapter “Sex Magic and the Occult,” documenting German pagan cults and their bizarre erotic rituals, including instructions for entering into the “Sexual Fourth Dimension.” The deluxe hardcover edition also includes sensational accounts of hypno-erotic cabaret acts, Berlin fetish prostitution (“The Boot Girl Visit”), gay life (“A Wild-Boy Initiation!”), descriptions and illustrations of Aleister Crowley’s Berlin OTO secret society, and sex crime (“The Curious Career and Untimely Death of Fritz Ulbrich”).” – from Feral House

---

Hockenos, P. (2017). Berlin calling: a story of anarchy, music, the wall, and the birth of the new Berlin. The New Press.

“Berlin Calling is a never-before-told account of the Berlin Wall’s momentous crash, seen through the eyes of the divided city’s street artists and punk rockers, impresarios and underground agitators. Berlin-based writer Paul Hockenos offers us an original chronicle of 1989’s “peaceful revolution,” which upended communism in East Germany, and the wild, permissive years of artistic ferment and pirate utopias that followed when protest and idealism, techno clubs and sprawling squats were the order of the day.

This is a story stocked with larger-than-life characters from Berlin’s highly political subcultures—including David Bowie and Iggy Pop, the internationally known French Wall artist Thierry Noir, cult figure Blixa Bargeld of the industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, and a clandestine cell of East Berlin anarchists. Hockenos argues that the do-it-yourself energy and raw urban vibe of the early 1990s shaped the new Berlin and still pulses through the city today.” – from The New Press

---

Schneider, P. (2014). Berlin now: the city after the Wall (S. Schlondorff, Trans.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

“A smartly guided romp, entertaining and enlightening, through Europe’s most charismatic and enigmatic city.

It isn’t Europe’s most beautiful city or its oldest. Its architecture is not more impressive than that of Rome or Paris; its museums do not hold more treasures than those in Barcelona or London. And yet, “when natives of New York, Tel Aviv, or Rome ask me where I’m from and I allude to Berlin,” writes Peter Schneider, “their eyes instantly light up.”
Berlin Now is a longtime Berliner’s bright, bold, and digressive exploration of the heterogeneous allure of this vibrant city. Delving beneath the obvious answers—Berlin’s club scene, bolstered by the lack of a mandatory closing time; the artistic communities that thrive due to the relatively low cost of living—Schneider takes us on an insider’s tour of this rapidly metamorphosing metropolis, where high-class soirees are held at construction sites and enterprising individuals often accomplish more, and without public funding (assembling, for example, a makeshift club on the banks of the Spree River), than Berlin’s officials do.
Schneider’s perceptive, witty investigations of everything from the insidious legacy of suspicion instilled by the East German secret police to the clashing attitudes toward work, food, and love held by former East and West Berliners have been sharply translated by Sophie Schlondorff. The result is a book so lively that readers will want to jump on a plane—just as soon as they’ve finished their adventures on the page.” – from macmillan

---

Nilsen, M. (2008). Railways and the Western European capitals: studies of implantation in London, Paris, Berlin, and Brussels. Palgrave Macmillan.

“This study examines the intense and multifaceted impact of the rail- ways on cities, but it does not attempt to offer a comprehensive treatment of railways in cities: half a dozen books might provide a start for such an agenda. Instead, this work presents various aspects of implantation, high- lighting the complexity of the process and the diversity of its implications. Rather than striving to be a classical edifice, this book is a postmodern faceted construct. It is conceived not as a Grand Central, but as a Union, structure, bringing different lines together.” – from the “Introduction” section of the book

---

Nash, B. (2015). A Walk Along The Ku’damm: Playground and Battlefield of Weimar Berlin. Self-published?

“The Kurfürstendamm is numbered up one side from Breitscheidplatz to Halensee and back down again, so this walk is about three kilometres round-trip and should take approximately two hours. It is recommended that you do this on a Sunday or Public Holiday if possible, as at all other times the street is so busy that you may not get the chance to pause and take in the detail.In addition to the landmarks and stories along the route, the street is also peppered with Stolpersteine, small brass blocks laid in the cobbles to remember the names of the victims of Nazi rule, outside the homes and workplaces they were taken from. These stones are not always easy to spot, and there are sadly too many of them to tell every individual story, but it’s worthwhile to take the time to pause and reflect.This is, of course, not a definitive history – records get lost, streets are renamed and people forget – but a personal collection of stories that detail the history of a street through the Weimar era and beyond.” – from “How to use this Guide” section of the ebook

Föllmer, M. (2015). Individuality and modernity in Berlin self and society from Weimar to the wall. Cambridge University Press.

“Moritz Föllmer traces the history of individuality in Berlin from the late 1920s to the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. The demand to be recognised as an individual was central to metropolitan society, as were the spectres of risk, isolation and loss of agency. This was true under all five regimes of the period, through economic depression, war, occupation and reconstruction. The quest for individuality could put democracy under pressure, as in the Weimar years, and could be satisfied by a dictatorship, as was the case in the Third Reich. It was only in the course of the 1950s, when liberal democracy was able to offer superior opportunities for consumerism, that individuality finally claimed the mantle. Individuality and Modernity in Berlin proposes a fresh perspective on twentieth-century Berlin that will engage readers with an interest in the German metropolis as well as European urban history more broadly.” – from Cambridge Core

---

Stratigakos, D. (2008). A women’s Berlin: building the modern city. University of Minnesota Press.

“Around the beginning of the twentieth century, women began to claim Berlin as their own, expressing a vision of the German capital that embraced their feminine modernity, both culturally and architecturally. Women located their lives and made their presence felt in the streets and institutions of this dynamic metropolis. From residences to restaurants, schools to exhibition halls, a visible network of women’s spaces arose to accommodate changing patterns of life and work.

A Women’s Berlin retraces this largely forgotten city, which came into being in the years between German unification in 1871 and the demise of the monarchy in 1918 and laid the foundation for a novel experience of urban modernity. Although the phenomenon of women taking control of urban space was widespread in this period, Despina Stratigakos shows how Berlin’s concentration of women’s building projects produced a more fully realized vision of an alternative metropolis. Female clients called on female design professionals to help them define and articulate their architectural needs. Many of the projects analyzed in A Women’s Berlin represent a collaborative effort uniting female patrons, architects, and designers to explore the nature of female aesthetics and spaces.

At the same time that women were transforming the built environment, they were remaking Berlin in words and images. Female journalists, artists, political activists, and social reformers portrayed women as influential actors on the urban scene and encouraged female audiences to view their relationship to the city in a radically different light. Stratigakos reveals how women’s remapping of Berlin connected the imaginary to the physical, merged dreams and asphalt, and inextricably linked the creation of the modern woman with that of the modern city.” – from University of Minnesota Press

---

Hake, S. (2008). Topographies of class: modern architecture and mass society in Weimar Berlin. University of Michigan Press.

“In Topographies of Class, Sabine Hake explores why Weimar Berlin has had such a powerful hold on the urban imagination. Approaching Weimar architectural culture from the perspective of mass discourse and class analysis, Hake examines the way in which architectural projects; debates; and representations in literature, photography, and film played a key role in establishing the terms under which contemporaries made sense of the rise of white-collar society.

Focusing on the so-called stabilization period, Topographies of Class maps out complex relationships between modern architecture and mass society, from Martin Wagner’s planning initiatives and Erich Mendelsohn’s functionalist buildings, to the most famous Berlin texts of the period, Alfred Döblin’s city novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) and Walter Ruttmann’s city film Berlin, Symphony of the Big City (1927). Hake draws on critical, philosophical, literary, photographic, and filmic texts to reconstruct the urban imagination at a key point in the history of German modernity, making this the first study—in English or German—to take an interdisciplinary approach to the rich architectural culture of Weimar Berlin.” – from University of Michigan Press

---

Gay, P., & Gay, P. (1999). My German question: growing up in Nazi Berlin. Yale University Press.

“In this poignant book, a renowned historian tells of his youth as an assimilated, anti-religious Jew in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1939—“the story,” says Peter Gay, “of a poisoning and how I dealt with it.” With his customary eloquence and analytic acumen, Gay describes his family, the life they led, and the reasons they did not emigrate sooner, and he explores his own ambivalent feelings—then and now—toward Germany and the Germans.

Gay relates that the early years of the Nazi regime were relatively benign for his family: as a schoolboy at the Goethe Gymnasium he experienced no ridicule or attacks, his father’s business prospered, and most of the family’s non-Jewish friends remained supportive. He devised survival strategies—stamp collecting, watching soccer, and the like—that served as screens to block out the increasingly oppressive world around him. Even before the events of 1938–39, culminating in Kristallnacht, the family was convinced that they must leave the country. Gay describes the bravery and ingenuity of his father in working out this difficult emigration process, the courage of the non-Jewish friends who helped his family during their last bitter months in Germany, and the family’s mounting panic as they witnessed the indifference of other countries to their plight and that of others like themselves. Gay’s account—marked by candor, modesty, and insight—adds an important and curiously neglected perspective to the history of German Jewry.” – from Yale University Press

---

Manghani, S. (2008). Image critique & the fall of the Berlin Wall. Intellect.

“Although we are now accustomed to watching history unfold live on the air, the fall of the Berlin Wall was one of the first instances when history was produced on television. Inspired by the Wall and its powerful resonances, Sunil Manghani’s breakthrough study presents the new critical concept of “image critique,” a method of critiquing images while simultaneously using them as a means to engage with contemporary culture. Manghani examines current debates surrounding visual culture, ranging from such topics as Francis Fukuyama’s end of history thesis to metapictures and East German film. The resulting volume is an exhilarating interweaving of history, politics, and visual culture.

“Sunil Manghani’s Image Critique & the Fall of the Berlin Wall is the best sort of scholarly book—an intellectually grounded and theoretically adventurous critical performance. Through his concept of image critique, Manghani makes a virtue out of the many attributes of images that bedevil visual cultural studies, rightly insisting that rather than domesticating images for the tyranny of the word, scholars must do visual studies from the ground of images, in the process reconceptualizing theory and criticism. Manghani adeptly anchors his insights in close engagements with images, most notably images from the event of the fall of the Berlin Wall. If heeded, Manghani’s book will change the trajectory of visual cultural studies by making critique a performance with force in the world.” – from The University of Chicago Press

MacLean, R. (2015). Berlin: portrait of a city through the centuries. Picador, St. Martin’s Press.

“Berlin is a city of fragments and ghosts, a laboratory of ideas, the fount of both the brightest and darkest designs of history’s most bloody century. The once arrogant capital of Europe was devastated by Allied bombs, divided by the Wall, then reunited and reborn as one of the creative centers of the world. Today it resonates with the echo of lives lived. No other city has repeatedly been so powerful and fallen so low; few other cities have been so shaped and defined by individual imaginations.

Berlin tells the volatile history of Europe’s capital over five centuries through a series of intimate portraits of two dozen key residents: the medieval balladeer whose suffering explains the Nazis’ rise to power; the genius Jewish chemist who invented poison gas for First World War battlefields and then the death camps; the iconic mythmakers like Christopher Isherwood, Leni Riefenstahl, and David Bowie, whose heated visions are now as real as the city’s bricks and mortar. Alongside are portrayed some of the countless ordinary Berliners whose lives can only be imagined: the ambitious prostitute who refashioned herself as a baroness, the fearful Communist Party functionary who helped to build the Wall, and the American spy from the Midwest whose patriotism may have turned the course of the Cold War.

Berlin is a history book like no other, with an originality that reflects the nature of the city itself. In its architecture, through its literature, in its movies and songs, Berliners have conjured their hard capital into a place of fantastic human fantasy. No other city has so often surrendered itself to its own seductive myths. Berlin captures, portrays, and propagates the remarkable story of those myths and their makers.”  – from macmillan

---

Stahl, G. (Ed.). (2014). Poor, but sexy: reflections on Berlin scenes. Peter Lang.

“Poor, But Sexy: Reflections on Berlin Scenes offers readers a varied cross-section of the city’s scenes, providing a prismatic view of one of Europe’s mythical cultural capitals. The authors gathered here address a range of topics, including Turkish gay clubs, queer filmmaking, record labels, the legendary Russendisko, electronic music festivals, the city’s famous techno scene, the clandestine dimensions of its nighttime club culture, and the fraught emergence of the Mediaspree. With the shifting context of post-Wende Berlin its backdrop, this collection puts into relief an electic array of case studies, presenting to readers interested in exploring urban issues a number of critical and analytical perspectives on the city’s cultural life as it moves into the twenty-first century. Poor, But Sexy is an important contribution to the critical analysis of the cultural spaces in the city, and allows readers access to one of the few scholarly overviews of Berlin’s varied cultural life available in English.”  – from Peter Lang

---

Loberg, M. J. (2020). The struggle for the streets of Berlin: politics, consumption, and urban space, 1914-1945. Cambridge University Press.

“Who owns the street? Interwar Berliners faced this question with great hope yet devastating consequences. In Germany, the First World War and 1918 Revolution transformed the city streets into the most important media for politics and commerce. There, partisans and entrepreneurs fought for the attention of crowds with posters, illuminated advertisements, parades, traffic jams, and violence. The Nazi Party relied on how people already experienced the city to stage aggressive political theater, including the April Boycott and Kristallnacht. Observers in Germany and abroad looked to Berlin’s streets to predict the future. They saw dazzling window displays that radiated optimism. They also witnessed crime waves, antisemitic rioting, and failed policing that pointed toward societal collapse. Recognizing the power of urban space, officials pursued increasingly radical policies to ‘revitalize’ the city, culminating in Albert Speer’s plan to eradicate the heart of Berlin and build Germania.” – from Cambridge Core

---

White-Spunner, B. (2021). Berlin: the story of a city. Simon & Schuster.

“The intoxicating history of an extraordinary city and her people—from the medieval kings surrounding Berlin’s founding to the world wars, tumult, and reunification of the twentieth century.

There has always been a particular fervor about Berlin, a combination of excitement, anticipation, nervousness, and a feeling of the unexpected. Throughout history, it has been a city of tensions: geographical, political, religious, and artistic.

In the nineteenth-century, political tension became acute between a city that was increasingly democratic, home to Marx and Hegel, and one of the most autocratic regimes in Europe. Artistic tension, between free thinking and liberal movements started to find themselves in direct contention with the formal official culture. Underlying all of this was the ethnic tension—between multi-racial Berliners and the Prussians. Berlin may have been the capital of Prussia but it was never a Prussian city.

Then there is war. Few European cities have suffered from war as Berlin has over the centuries. It was sacked by the Hapsburg armies in the Thirty Years War; by the Austrians and the Russians in the eighteenth century; by the French, with great violence, in the early nineteenth century; by the Russians again in 1945 and subsequently occupied, more benignly, by the Allied Powers from 1945 until 1994.

Nor can many cities boast such a diverse and controversial number of international figures: Frederick the Great and Bismarck; Hegel and Marx; Mahler, Dietrich, and Bowie. Authors Christopher Isherwood, Bertolt Brecht, and Thomas Mann gave Berlin a cultural history that is as varied as it was groundbreaking.

The story vividly told in Berlin also attempts to answer to one of the greatest enigmas of the twentieth century: How could a people as civilized, ordered, and religious as the Germans support first a Kaiser and then the Nazis in inflicting such misery on Europe? Berlin was never as supportive of the Kaiser in 1914 as the rest of Germany; it was the revolution in Berlin in 1918 that lead to the Kaiser’s abdication. Nor was Berlin initially supportive of Hitler, being home to much of the opposition to the Nazis; although paradoxically Berlin suffered more than any other German city from Hitler’s travesties. In revealing the often-untold history of Berlin, Barney White-Spunner addresses this quixotic question that lies at the heart of Germany’s uniquely fascinating capital city.” – from Simon & Schuster

---

Schlör, J. (2016 [1991]). Nights in the big city: Paris, Berlin, London, 1840-1930 (P. Imhof & D. Roberts, Trans.; 2nd ed.). Reaktion Books.

“This elegantly written book describes the changes in the perception and experience of the night in three great European cities: Paris, Berlin and London. The lighting up of the European city by gas and electricity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought about a new relationship with the night, in respect of both work and pleasure.

Nights in the Big City explores this new awareness of the city in all its ramifications. Joachim Schlör has spent his days sifting through countless police and church archives, and first-hand accounts, and his nights exploring the highways and byways of these three great capitals. Illustrated with haunting and evocative photographs by, among others, Brandt and Kertész, and filled with contemporary literary references, Nights in the Big City has already been acclaimed in the German press as a milestone in the cultural history of the city.” – from The University of Chicago Press

Sandler, D. (2016). Counterpreservation: architectural decay in Berlin since 1989. Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library.

“In Berlin, decrepit structures do not always denote urban blight. Decayed buildings are incorporated into everyday life as residences, exhibition spaces, shops, offices, and as leisure space. As nodes of public dialogue, they serve as platforms for dissenting views about the future and past of Berlin. In this book, Daniela Sandler introduces the concept of counterpreservation as a way to understand this intentional appropriation of decrepitude. The embrace of decay is a sign of Berlin’s iconoclastic rebelliousness, but it has also been incorporated into the mainstream economy of tourism and development as part of the city’s countercultural cachet. Sandler presents the possibilities and shortcomings of counterpreservation as a dynamic force in Berlin and as a potential concept for other cities.

Counterpreservation is part of Berlin’s fabric: in the city’s famed Hausprojekte (living projects) such as the Køpi, Tuntenhaus, and KA 86; in cultural centers such as the Haus Schwarzenberg, the Schokoladen, and the legendary, now defunct Tacheles; in memorials and museums; and even in commerce and residences. The appropriation of ruins is a way of carving out affordable spaces for housing, work, and cultural activities. It is also a visual statement against gentrification, and a complex representation of history, with the marks of different periods—the nineteenth century, World War II, postwar division, unification—on display for all to see. Counterpreservation exemplifies an everyday urbanism in which citizens shape private and public spaces with their own hands, but it also influences more formal designs, such as the Topography of Terror, the Berlin Wall Memorial, and Daniel Libeskind’s unbuilt redevelopment proposal for a site peppered with ruins of Nazi barracks. By featuring these examples, Sandler questions conventional notions of architectural authorship and points toward the value of participatory environments.” – from Cornell University Press

---

Vasudevan, A. (2016). Metropolitan preoccupations: the spatial politics of squatting in Berlin. Wiley/Blackwell.

“In this, the first book-length study of the cultural and political geography of squatting in Berlin, Alexander Vasudevan links the everyday practices of squatters in the city to wider and enduring questions about the relationship between space, culture, and protest.

• Focuses on the everyday and makeshift practices of squatters in their attempt to exist beyond dominant power relations and redefine what it means to live in the city
• Offers a fresh critical perspective that builds on recent debates about the “right to the city” and the role of grassroots activism in the making of alternative urbanism
• Examines the implications of urban squatting for how we think, research and inhabit the city as a site of radical social transformation
• Challenges existing scholarship on the New Left in Germany by developing a critical geographical reading of the anti-authoritarian revolt and the complex geographies of connection and solidarity that emerged in its wake
• Draws on extensive field work conducted in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany” – from Wiley

---

Hessel, F. (2017 [1929]). Walking in Berlin: a flaneur in the capital (A. DeMarco, Trans.). The MIT Press.

“The first English translation of a lost classic that reinvents the flaneur in Berlin.

Franz Hessel (1880–1941), a German-born writer, grew up in Berlin, studied in Munich, and then lived in Paris, where he moved in artistic and literary circles. His relationship with the fashion journalist Helen Grund was the inspiration for Henri-Pierre Roché’s novel Jules et Jim (made into a celebrated 1962 film by Francois Truffaut). In collaboration with Walter Benjamin, Hessel reinvented the Parisian figure of the flaneur. This 1929 book—here in its first English translation—offers Hessel’s version of a flaneur in Berlin.

In Walking in Berlin, Hessel captures the rhythm of Weimar-era Berlin, recording the seismic shifts in German culture. Nearly all of the essays take the form of a walk or outing, focusing on either a theme or part of the city, and many end at a theater, cinema, or club. Hessel deftly weaves the past with the present, walking through the city’s history as well as its neighborhoods. Even today, his walks in the city, from the Alexanderplatz to Kreuzberg, can guide would-be flaneurs.

Walking in Berlin is a lost classic, known mainly because of Hessel’s connection to Benjamin but now introduced to readers of English. Walking in Berlin was a central model for Benjamin’s Arcades Project and remains a classic of “walking literature” that ranges from Surrealist perambulation to Situationist “psychogeography.” This MIT Press edition includes the complete text in translation as well as Benjamin’s essay on Walking in Berlin, originally written as a review of the book’s original edition.” – from MIT Press

---

Pan, L. (2016). In-visible palimpsest: memory, space and modernity in Berlin and Shanghai. Peter Lang.

“In the early 1990s, Berlin and Shanghai witnessed the dramatic social changes in both national and global contexts. While in 1991 Berlin became the new capital of the reunified Germany, from 1992 Shanghai began to once again play its role as the most powerful engine of economic development in the post-1989 China. This critical moment of history has fundamentally transformed the later development of both cities, above all in terms of urban spatial order. The construction mania in Shanghai and Berlin shares the similar aspiration of «re-modernizing» themselves. In this sense, the current experience of Shanghai and Berlin informs many of the features of urban modernity in the post-Cold-War era. The book unfolds the complexity of the urban space per se as highly revealing cultural texts. Also this project doesn’t examine the spatial changes in chronological terms, but rather takes the present moment as the temporal standing point of this research. By comparing the memory discourse related to these spatial changes, the book poses the question of how modernity is understood in the matrix of local, national and global power struggles.” – from Peter Lang

---

Hausdorf, N., & Goller, A. (2015). Superstructural Berlin: a superstructural tourist guide to Berlin for the visitor and the new resident. Zero Books.

“The book amalgamates poetry, cultural critique, narrative and art into a strange and unsettling medley, putting the reader in the bizarre position of ‘confused investigator’ whilst also giving them an alternate way to read and respond to the streets of Berlin.

This text, written by Nicolas Hausdorf and designed by Alexander Goller, is much inspired by Benjamin’s work. Like in Benjamin’s text, here we find a mixture of quotations from others (including important and still understudied writers of the city such as Georg Simmel), observations of the writer’s own and interesting art work from the designer, often eclectically arranged on the page, perhaps to simulate the feeling of rummaging through a Benjaminian archive. The book’s intention, put forward abstractly in the prologue or ‘act one,’ is to break from sociological models entrenched in academic rules and regulations, approaching the city from outside these limitations and producing a reading of the city or an experience of reading the city that is perhaps more honest and certainly more radical.” – from Hong Kong Review of Books