In a recent article in the Journal of European Studies, “Berlin in English: The German capital in recent Anglophone fiction,” David Anderson looks at how Berlin, Germany’s capital, appears in recent Anglophone fiction — and asks if it means something more than “literary tourism.”
Anderson considers authors who in recent years published work set in Berlin, “including Amit Chaudhuri, Adrian Duncan, Helon Habila, Hari Kunzru, Lauren Oyler, Chris Power, Bea Setton, and Matthew Sperling.”
Berlin novels used to be about Nazis and spies. But the more recent variety, Anderson writes, strikes a very different note: “the expat lured by cheaper rents, generous stipends and an easier, perhaps cooler, English-spoken-here lifestyle — a sort of extended slacker existence’ — and ‘engage with universal themes of bad relationships, paranoia, fragile masculinity and geopolitical tensions’ as well as things like ‘Berlin’s evolving tech scene.’”
Anderson draws a distinction between “Berlin literature” and “German literature.” The novels in which he’s interested are set in and are in some ways about Berlin, but are obviously in English, and thus not part of the German literary tradition (though it is connected to it — as Anderson notes, there have been “flare-ups” in the German press about the supposed decline of German, and further English is accepted in Berlin in a way that other foreign languages are not).
“Strikingly Absent”
Moving through previous periods of English-language Berlin literature — the “golden twenties,” the Third Reich, and the Cold War — Anderson then turns to work from 2000 on, in which, by and large, characters are not “would-be worldly native German speakers,” but tourists and expats.
Berlin novels used to be about Nazis and spies.
Their authors thus risk only superficially engaging with the city setting — though, as Anderson also notes, the characters’ own unstable or ever changing psychology is often of particular interest to authors of contemporary Berlin literature, in a way that they sometimes write as being reflected by the city itself. But the divisions of Berlin’s and German history — these, Anderson writes, are “strikingly absent” from today’s English-language Berlin novels.
The novels all present protagonists who recently moved to Berlin, but “thematize migration in different ways,” and have protagonists (and, some might argue, authors) of varying degrees of self-awareness.
Ultimately, Anderson decides that “these novels do have valuable things to say, particularly concerning the ways in which an urban literary imaginary is being reconfigured for a digital age,” since digital technologies “accelerate and complicate” characters’ adjustment to the city, feeding into characters’ senses of connectivity, but also isolation.
Perhaps this is as meaningful as delving into the history of the city’s divisions, or at least meaningful in a different sort of way: As Anderson writes, “digital technologies shape the experience of urban space, producing an urban experience that is both local and global and sometimes contributing to acute experiences of disorientation, are relevant to an understanding of the contemporary city as such, as well as of Berlin in particular.” And he suggests that literary topography, too, even outside a city’s native tongue, can be useful in understanding its contemporary urban space.
