Philip Hensher’s selection of stories reflects the ‘desperate modernity’ of Berlin as it make and remakes itself over a period of more than a hundred turbulent years. Theodore Fontane provides a window on privileged society under Kaiser Wilhelm II while Robert Walser records the vibrant social and cultural life of the bustling imperial capital. Alfred Doblin and Vladimir Nabokov join the creative ferment of the ‘Golden Twenties’ while in the darkening world of the early Thirties, Christopher Isherwood is seduced by Berlin’s decadent cabaret society, Erich Haffner explores the city’s seamy underside and the irrepressible heroine of Irmgard Keun’s The Artificial Silk Girl seeks fame and fortune in her stolen fur coat. Thomas Wolfe’s hero visits a city shadowed by Hitler’s rise; Hans Fallada’s working-class couple quietly resists the Nazis; Heinz Rein reports on the last days of the Third Reich. 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; Gunter Grass amd Uwe Timm examine German reunification from very different angles. Finally, more recent arrivals – from Chloe Aridjis’s Mexican-Jewish university student in Book of Cloud 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.
