Berlin, they say, is dead. Kaput. Over. Not what it used to be.
Then again, part of Berlin’s modern identity as Europe’s licentious, experimental, ultraliberal techno capital is that it has always been finished. A jaded, black-clad noise musician declared as much to me on my first visit to the German capital in my early 20s, two decades ago. Then, as now, Berlin existed in a perpetual state of disdain for its present in favor of a vanished, superior past — the precise years of which varied widely depending on whom you asked (and tended to coincide with the person’s youth).
Still, the consensus seems to be that Berlin is, if not quite over, no longer the anything-goes metropolis that, from the collapse of the wall to the 2010s, enchanted so many people seeking a freer, cheaper, less conventional way of living.
I lived in Berlin for several years starting in 2018, and continue to spend my summers there. I still find it inspiring, more so than my native Dublin (a capital that’s always felt like a village), but there’s no avoiding the facts: The city is fast becoming as expensive as London or Paris, and a new nexus of capital and property speculation is erasing what’s left of a bohemian utopia in its “poor but sexy” heyday.
Dark historical clouds once again swoop in. I regularly see footage of Berlin’s Polizei suppressing pro-Palestinian protests with disturbing brutality, while a state-sanctioned cancellation campaign against critics of Israel’s actions in Gaza has chilled the cultural sector. The sinister far-right party Alternative für Deutschland is on the rise. The other kind of party — the one represented by storied techno temples such as Berghain and Tresor — is now the stomping ground of tech and finance elites.
I’ve just read a batch of novels set in Berlin, all published this year. While fiction is an imperfect receptacle for history, it tends to capture the moods, textures and sensibilities of a period far better than official records can. Novel writing being a slow-motion affair, only one of these four books is set in our evil decade. The others take place in the decade prior — when an image of the city solidified just as the reality underpinning it began to dissolve.
Reading about Berlin at its most recent peak underscores the subtle manner in which a city can both vanish and endure — can be credibly declared dead even while retaining great promise and vitality to those who still flock there in search of a better life. The books speak less about the city itself than the desires, pretensions and last gasps of a 21st-century vanguard: the hedonistic cosmopolites and dropout creatives who once dominated the cultural discourse but now look very much like an endangered species within the current world order. While common themes emerge — gentrification, immigration, economic and political shifts — these four very different novels form something of a Cubist portrait of a place, and a people, receding into the mists of history and nostalgia.
The only one to have been written in German, ALLEGRO PASTEL (Granta Magazine Editions, 313 pp., paperback, $18.99), by Leif Randt, is a modest novel of romantic manners, depicting the love lives of Jerome, a Frankfurt web designer, and Tanja, a Berlin novelist, in the late 2010s. Tanja lives in the fashionably grotty neighborhood of Neukölln, and affects radical postures — contempt for heterosexual couples being one — while enjoying the solidly middle-class supports of someone whose parents’ three-story house has its own multimedia room.
The lukewarm, on-and-off lovers remain cynical about the capital — “in Berlin, the point was to have fun as publicly as possible” — while indulging in its pleasures in painfully sensible ways. Drugs — ketamine, cocaine, speed, Ecstasy, weed — are consumed in scrupulously prudent doses. Young or youngish people mindfully sleep around while chafing lightly at the strictures of bourgeois heteronormativity, suppressing desires that cramp their ideological self-image.
While “Allegro Pastel,” translated by Peter Kuras, features plenty of Berlin’s beloved clubs and bars (not all of them still open), the city it depicts is a bland safe space for the playing out of tepid romantic entanglements. Much of the Berlin action takes place in Neukölln and Kreuzberg, but the Turkish and Arab immigrant communities that are the beating hearts of those neighborhoods are conspicuously invisible.
Essentially a love story between two well-adjusted people too pragmatic for their passion ever to really combust, the novel is subtly depressing, and an unwitting reinforcement of national stereotypes: Love among modern Germans reads here as a matter of precision engineering, thoughtful logistics, meticulous self-optimization.
Another novel that lowered my spirits — this one in a more pointed, polemical way — is PERFECTION (New York Review Books, 125 pp., paperback, $15.95), by Vincenzo Latronico, an Italian novelist who lived in Berlin throughout the 2010s and chronicles those years in this arresting book. (The stylish English translation is by Sophie Hughes.) In “Allegro Pastel,” Tanja disdains international travel on the grounds that all cities are becoming the same; “Perfection” zeroes in on this oppressive homogeneity, decoding the gentrification of Berlin as a microcosm of the wider gentrification of the human soul in the age of social media.
As much a work of critical theory as of fiction, it condenses a great deal into its novella-length form, skewering the bleak insubstantiality of our present social order and the alienation of digital nomads in their deceptive economic bondage. A Berliner cover version of Georges Perec’s Parisian novel “Things: A Story of the Sixties,” “Perfection” backgrounds its cipherlike characters and ruthlessly curbs their interiority, focusing instead on the carefully curated objects by which they present the life they can’t quite comfortably live.
Anna and Tom, a young couple from southern Europe, rent (and occasionally sublet) an immaculate Neukölln apartment that is its own kind of gilded cage, and an emblem of their generation’s rootlessness. The couple are mere maintenance workers for an Airbnb-listed idealization of their home, spending hours “taming reality to make it fit the images they had sold.”
Latronico’s coolly dissociated prose renders the couple as laboratory specimens — if not as gormless idiots. From one angle, “Perfection” is an exercise in sustained narratorial condescension that at times seethes into contempt. Anna and Tom appear to read nothing beyond threads, comments and hot takes, and are clueless about their adopted city’s vertiginous history (“their awareness didn’t exceed a few anecdotes rattled off to make it look like their life there had more substance”).
We are told that the couple “spent much of their first year in Berlin carefully constructing this mythology” (i.e., that of erotically charged young web professionals living enviably in a sexy capital), and we’re given no choice but to take the narrator’s word for it. Would Anna and Tom see it that way? Might their actions and words reveal a more complex mesh of motivations? We’ll never know. I found myself wishing for the hapless pair to be given a fighting chance, if only to talk back at their supercilious narrator.
And yet, “Perfection” not only made me repeatedly wince in recognition, it haunted me thereafter with its acutely observed freight of generational sadness, its implicating vision of a frantic pursuit of authenticity that ends up exterminating its quarry — a perfect crime in which Tom, Anna and all of us Zuckerserfs are at once victims and perpetrators.
In Latronico’s telling, Berlin’s transition from sleazy-sexy bohemia to Instagram-saturated tech and finance playground was already a fait accompli by the start of the 2020s. SISTER EUROPE (Knopf, 195 pp., $28), the latest novel by the Berlin-dwelling American Nell Zink, is by comparison a cozily old-fashioned effort, replete with multiple generations and family tensions, that plays out over a single weeknight in 2023.
Zink’s subjects are not the gentrifiers but the established bourgeoisie — Germans and Americans living in the affluent western neighborhoods of Schöneberg and Charlottenburg. Demian, a socially gracious art-world fixer, lives with his wife and kids in a lakeside villa. We first meet his 15-year-old child, Nicole, as she attempts to sell sex to prove her feminine charms at a streetwalking spot on Kurfürstenstraße. She, it transpires, was until recently a he; “Sister Europe” sketches her “trans journey” in its hormone-roiling confusion. Her dad’s philandering friend Toto regards Nicole with humane indulgence: “Life is an excruciating phase in the life of everyone.”
Demian, Nicole, Toto and company make their way to a literary award ceremony celebrating the work of an elderly, Arab magical realist. The most promising character is the one trailing them: a 42-year-old right-wing vice cop who loathes flat-white-drinking gentrifiers even more than he does Arab immigrants, and who has come to believe that Islamification isn’t the gravest threat to Europe — wokeness is. I could have done with a whole novel or film about this guy (“Bad Lieutenant: Berlin Blue”?), but as the night wears on he devolves into a cartoon of incompetence and ideological confusion. Affably comic, “Sister Europe” is diverting enough as a lightweight entertainment, but I was left wondering what, beyond a modestly revealing glimpse into moneyed Berlin, the point of it all was.
More up my Straße was Aria Aber’s GOOD GIRL (Hogarth, 352 pp., $29). When I first moved to Berlin, I remember wandering around the Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg neighborhoods marveling at the shoals of strange, beautiful people who filled the clubs and parks, and lined the banks of the Spree. Who were they? What were their lives like? “Good Girl,” set in the early 2010s, provides one answer.
Its narrator is Nila, a 19-year-old Berliner born to Afghan exiles. At Berghain — the cavernous, dystopian-futurist nightclub where key scenes will play out (Nila calls it “the Bunker”) — she meets Marlowe, a 36-year-old American writer coasting on a reputation founded on his one novel, published well over a decade ago, and on epic quantities of speed and MDMA.
Wild-child Nila loves Kafka, drugs and the mysterious, solitary gay men who haunt the nightclub darkrooms and share their speed in the small hours. “I was ravaged by the hunger to ruin my life,” she says. Her heart is heavy with shame and secrets — her proud father’s stint flipping burgers at McDonald’s symbolizes the family’s estrangement in a land where anti-immigrant rhetoric slow-builds to a boil.
“Good Girl” has all the passionate, rough-around-the-edges charm of a good fiction debut, and a certain innocence even in describing life’s grimier details. In Nila’s world, these include the central paradox of the Berlin nightclubbing experience: Nowhere else can you more reliably attain mystical peaks of sensory rapture, but only at the cost of plunging into squalor, crammed inside fetid toilet cubicles snorting drugs with all notions of decency left in the distant dayworld.
Like Nila and her friends, you can still go dancing in Berlin for days and nights on end, even if what you’ll see in those techno dungeons isn’t as gloriously depraved as it was back in the day, and some Silicon stalwart might ask you to put out your cigarette. Have all the fun you can, because when you finally wander out onto the sidewalk you’ll be rubbing your eyes in stark 2020s daylight — the comedown will be cruel.
The post Goodbye to Berlin: New Novels Recall a City’s ‘Poor but Sexy’ Heyday appeared first on New York Times.
