A gorgeously jacketed hardcover anthology of classic stories set in
Berlin, by an international array of brilliant writers.
Spanning more than a century, this collection of stories reflects
Berlin's rich and turbulent history, chronicling the creative ferment of
the Weimar Republic, the devastation of wartime, the cruel divisions of
the Berlin Wall, and the aftermath of reunification. Classics by Theodor
Fontane and Robert Walser provide a window on privileged society at the
turn of the century. Alfred Döblin, Erich Kastner, Vladimir Nabokov, and
Christopher Isherwood illuminate the frenetic Golden Twenties and the
ruinous crash that followed, while marginal youths roam the city's seamy
underside in Irmgard Keun's The Artificial Silk Girl and Ernst
Haffner's Blood Brothers. The hero of Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go
Home Again visits a city shadowed by Hitler's rise, while in Hans
Fallada's Alone in Berlin a working-class couple quietly resists the
Nazis. Cold War espionage enlivens works by Len Deighton and Ian McEwan;
Christa Wolf's They Divided the Sky and Peter Schneider's The Wall
Jumper depict the Berlin Wall's impact on a personal scale; and Thomas
Brussig's Stasi officers engage in meaningless surveillance in Heroes
Like Us. Günter Grass shows us German reunification through the eyes of
an elderly Luftwaffe veteran while Uwe Timm does so through a writer's
madcap wanderings in a bewildering post-Wall landscape. Finally, more
recent arrivals--from Chloe Aridjis's Mexican-Jewish university student
in Book of Clouds to the desperate African refugees in Jenny
Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone--bear witness to Berlin's continuing
evolution as an arena of the possible.
