Humane, thought provoking, and moving, this hybrid literary portrait
of a place makes the case for radical close readings: of ourselves, our
cities, and our histories.
The Undercurrents 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
center of great historical changes, but also smaller domestic ones. The
view from this house offers a ringside seat onto the city's theater of
action. The building has stood on the banks of the canal since 1869, its
feet in the West but looking East, right into the heart of a metropolis
in the making, on a terrain inscribed indelibly with trauma.
When her marriage breaks down, Kirsty Bell--a British-American art
critic, adrift in her midforties--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.
