One of the more trenchant portraits of expat life in contemporary Berlin I’ve encountered in the 11 years I’ve lived there is “Perfection,” by the Rome-born writer Vincenzo Latronico. Anna and Tom, two “creative professionals,” move from a “large but peripheral city in Southern Europe” to a late-19th-century flat in Berlin’s hippest neighborhood, Neukölln, sometime during Angela Merkel’s second term, when the city emerged from a regional metropolis to the de facto capital of Europe.
Despite its setting, the novel is more of an update to Georges Perec’s critiques of 1960s-era consumer culture than a replay of Henry James’s Gilded Age cosmopolite dramas. With ethnographic precision, Latronico taxonomizes the tastes, attitudes, vanities and blind spots of the people we now call digital nomads, a class and subculture made possible by the innovations of American tech and media conglomerates and policymakers in Brussels.
The opening chapter describes a picture Anna and Tom — whose work includes graphic design and online brand strategy — have taken of their flat to advertise it for a short-term rental. Every item, from the limited-edition Radiohead record to the Danish armchair on the Berber rug, functions as a prosthetic selfhood. The same could be said for their adopted city: Berlin is “their main pastime. … In many ways it defined them much more than their profession did.”
Anna and Tom are referred to by a collective pronoun, “they,” representing at once a couple and an “invented community” of expats. Latronico, in a translation from the Italian by Sophie Hughes, makes heavy use of the conditional tense (“they would remember the supermarkets, closed on Sundays, their client calls scheduled for Monday, the work due by Friday”) to describe their activities, highlighting both their generic character and their evanescence. Anna and Tom slowly learn, to their peril, that a lifestyle, no matter how “curated” and “rarefied,” does not a life make, and that cosmopolitanism without politics is a dead end.
Anna and Tom’s social circle is drawn from countries around the continent, with the notable exception of Germany. Like all invented communities, it is structurally unstable. People leave after their first experience of Berlin’s bleak winters. They get job offers or fellowships in other cities. They develop drug addictions or have children. Or they simply miss home more than they expected. Every spring, a new crop of expats, most of them just as transitory, blooms in their place.
Their common culture is made not in Germany, but online. Anna and Tom use all the platforms — Instagram for work, Facebook to keep in touch, Twitter for infotainment — and “they would often end up discussing things they had seen online, which was to say somewhere else in the world, which usually meant in California or New York.” The “intellectual horizon” they share with their fellow Belgians or Poles or Italians is “largely formed from headlines in The Guardian or The New York Times.” As a result, “Barack Obama’s speeches and high school shootings existed far more vividly than the laws passed just a few U-Bahn stations away, or the refugees drowning two hours’ flight south.”
Trouble arrives in 2014 with the first large wave of Americans and Brits, who can more authentically lay claim to the language and culture Anna and Tom scroll through. Along with them comes a familiar litany of complaints: rising rents, evictions, housing shortages, price spikes and social homogeneity, as their friends’ art spaces are taken over by people with degrees from Bard and Goldsmiths.
When the refugee crisis — along with the sovereign debt crisis, the most significant political event in post-unification German history — comes to a head the following year, Anna and Tom are finally moved to participate in some other aspect of city life than its arts and culture scenes, only to discover that their shaky German and graphic-design skills render their well-meaning presence at humanitarian aid shelters more of a nuisance than a help. Soon, like so many of their acquaintances before them, they cast an exploratory glance at the exit: first to Lisbon (another sociologically accurate throw of the dart) and then to Sicily.
The strength of “Perfection” is that it never succumbs to the temptation of ridiculing its protagonists. Whether or not they live in Berlin, many of its readers will belong to the same class and generation as they do, and bald contempt is generally less effective at inducing the discomforts of recognition than keen, tactful observation. Part of what happens to Anna and Tom is simply the damage done to youthful aspirations and illusions by the passage of time; part of it is what happens to even the relatively privileged pawns of economic and social forces beyond their control.
Yet, all told, “Perfection” remains an insider’s critique: a young, left-wing European’s view of what was probably the high-water mark of European cultural integration. Far from perfect, the tasteful, urbane life Anna and Tom lead is nonetheless not without its charms. In many ways, it represents an ideal, however illusory. To this day, the capital of Germany trades on its century-old image as a city of exiles, libertines and artists, while in campaign speeches its politicians treat its current expatriates as boogeymen in a populist Kulturkampf whose real targets are the more vulnerable immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa. From a future vantage point, Latronico’s subtle satire of Anna and Tom’s Berlin may appear like another lost paradise.
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