When the German writer Peter Schneider published “The Wall Jumper,” his celebrated elliptical novella about the divided Berlin of the Cold War, in 1982, the city’s central importance to the 20th century was unquestioned. First the kaiser and then the Führer had touched off world wars from Germany’s capital. And when the world was split between Soviet and American blocs, Berlin could rightly claim to be the front line. The concrete barrier zigzagging through its streets stood as the tangible symbol of that division.
President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 Berlin speech is best remembered for the phrase “Ich bin ein Berliner,” but before his indelible German declaration he said more broadly, “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin.” Caring about what happened in Berlin meant caring about what happened everywhere, lending added significance to works like “The Wall Jumper” or the Wim Wenders film “Wings of Desire.”
Now, 25 years after the fall of the wall, the city is once again the object of intense fascination — not because of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s influence over European fiscal policies but because bohemian young people are moving to the city from every part of the globe and clubbing all night. It’s Berlin as Ibiza or Cancun, but with bad weather.
In “Berlin Now,” Schneider seeks to explain why the city became “the capital of creative people from around the world today,” attracting artists, D.J.s and software developers from Tokyo, Tel Aviv and all points in between. He also tackles the interconnected question of how, once Berlin “burst out of the shackles of reinforced concrete, barbed wire and iron bars . . . the severed veins and limbs of the divided city fused back together.” (...)
Schneider identifies “the weirdness, perpetual incompleteness and outlandishness of Berlin,” not as a failing but as an attraction. A jewel of a city like Dubrovnik or Venice feels like a closed circuit, a finished book. “Imperfection, incompleteness — not to say ugliness — afford a sense of freedom that compact beauty never can,” he writes.
For centuries Berlin has had something of a chip on its shoulder. It lacks the ancient ruins of Rome or the sophisticated beauty of Paris. It is landlocked and flat, with a climate that can be frigid, gray and unpleasant up to eight months out of the year. “Imagine Geneva, lost in a desert,” Balzac wrote in 1843, “and you have an idea of Berlin.”
President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 Berlin speech is best remembered for the phrase “Ich bin ein Berliner,” but before his indelible German declaration he said more broadly, “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin.” Caring about what happened in Berlin meant caring about what happened everywhere, lending added significance to works like “The Wall Jumper” or the Wim Wenders film “Wings of Desire.”Now, 25 years after the fall of the wall, the city is once again the object of intense fascination — not because of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s influence over European fiscal policies but because bohemian young people are moving to the city from every part of the globe and clubbing all night. It’s Berlin as Ibiza or Cancun, but with bad weather.
In “Berlin Now,” Schneider seeks to explain why the city became “the capital of creative people from around the world today,” attracting artists, D.J.s and software developers from Tokyo, Tel Aviv and all points in between. He also tackles the interconnected question of how, once Berlin “burst out of the shackles of reinforced concrete, barbed wire and iron bars . . . the severed veins and limbs of the divided city fused back together.” (...)
Schneider identifies “the weirdness, perpetual incompleteness and outlandishness of Berlin,” not as a failing but as an attraction. A jewel of a city like Dubrovnik or Venice feels like a closed circuit, a finished book. “Imperfection, incompleteness — not to say ugliness — afford a sense of freedom that compact beauty never can,” he writes.
For centuries Berlin has had something of a chip on its shoulder. It lacks the ancient ruins of Rome or the sophisticated beauty of Paris. It is landlocked and flat, with a climate that can be frigid, gray and unpleasant up to eight months out of the year. “Imagine Geneva, lost in a desert,” Balzac wrote in 1843, “and you have an idea of Berlin.”
by Nicholas Kulish, NY Times | Read more:
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