Berlin Stories

Informationen zum Autor Philip Hensher's novels include The Northern Clemency, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize; Kitchen Venom, which won the Somerset Maugham Award, and The Mulberry Empire , which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Chosen by Granta as one of its Best Young British Novelists, he is professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University and a columnist for The Guardian, The Spectator, and The Independent . He lives in London. Klappentext A gorgeously jacketed hardcover anthology of classic stories set in Berlin, by an international array of brilliant writers. Berlin has long been a magnet for writers and artists from all over. Since the nineteenth century, when Dostoevsky sought inspiration in the city, to the creative ferment of the 1920s Weimar Republic, when German Expressionism flourished and expats like W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood found a haven there, Berlin has served as a leading cultural capital with an international reputation. Leveled during World War II and then divided by the Berlin Wall for decades, it is a city that has experienced multiple rebirths, and the stories collected here reflect that rich history. Classic German writers like Theodor Fontane, Robert Walser, Alfred Döblin, and Christa Wolf sit alongside writers from elsewhere, including Vladimir Nabokov, Christopher Isherwood, Ian McEwan, Len Deighton, and Kevin Barry.Foreword by Philip Hensher Compared to Paris, London or Rome, Berlin has a short history. There are no signs of habitation before the 12th century, and it remained a relatively insignificant place until the 18th century. At the end of the 17th century, Berlin's population was around 10,000, when Paris and London both had over half a million inhabitants. After that, the city grew explosively. It is substantially a creation of the nineteenth century, with all that era's addiction to modernity, technology and novelty. Its most celebrated contribution to urban architecture, the Wall, was only erected in the early 1960s. That was demolished thirty years ago in any case. It has always been a city of desperate modernity. The physical substance is reflected in its characteristic ways of behaving and interacting. It has been a city dedicated to discovering new ways of living. In most decades of the twentieth century, Berlin has produced whole classes of people very conscious that they are living lives that nobody has ever attempted before. It is an arena of the possible, where the imagination carves out cities of the future. The first social housing projects are here. Gay men and lesbians started to live their lives openly in large numbers in the 1920s. The postwar division of the city and the Wall, too, created multiple possibilities, few foreseen, some explosive. In the aftermath of unification, the city was cheap and rundown; it quickly became a hub for creative artists. The sense of making it up as you go along is never far away in Berlin. The fiction of Berlin exemplifies much of this excitement. Unlike most capital cities, it imposes no obligation on writers to come to terms with it. There are very many great German and German-language writers with absolutely nothing to say about Berlin. Those who do write about it, I suspect, are those who were drawn to it. Such writers may be of a particular type. Despite the different settings, and the totally different nature of each new experience described, a mood recurs. It is a mood of wonder and astonishment, lightly veiled in an affectation of chic boredom. We have seen all this before, suggests each writer, uncovering scenes that have never been dreamt of until this moment. A layer of period nostalgia has settled over Fontane, but in his time, he was an artist of the present moment, even of modernity. Erich Kastner's Fabian, behaving according to his most animal instincts and finding no res...

Autorentext
Philip Hensher's novels include The Northern Clemency, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize; Kitchen Venom, which won the Somerset Maugham Award, and The Mulberry Empire, which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Chosen by Granta as one of its Best Young British Novelists, he is professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University and a columnist for The Guardian, The Spectator, and The Independent. He lives in London.

Klappentext

A gorgeously jacketed hardcover anthology of classic stories set in Berlin, by an international array of brilliant writers.

Berlin has long been a magnet for writers and artists from all over. Since the nineteenth century, when Dostoevsky sought inspiration in the city, to the creative ferment of the 1920s Weimar Republic, when German Expressionism flourished and expats like W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood found a haven there, Berlin has served as a leading cultural capital with an international reputation. Leveled during World War II and then divided by the Berlin Wall for decades, it is a city that has experienced multiple rebirths, and the stories collected here reflect that rich history. Classic German writers like Theodor Fontane, Robert Walser, Alfred Döblin, and Christa Wolf sit alongside writers from elsewhere, including Vladimir Nabokov, Christopher Isherwood, Ian McEwan, Len Deighton, and Kevin Barry.

Leseprobe
Foreword by Philip Hensher
 
      Compared to Paris, London or Rome, Berlin has a short history. There are no signs of habitation before the 12th century, and it remained a relatively insignificant place until the 18th century. At the end of the 17th century, Berlin’s population was around 10,000, when Paris and London both had over half a million inhabitants. After that, the city grew explosively. It is substantially a creation of the nineteenth century, with all that era’s addiction to modernity, technology and novelty. Its most celebrated contribution to urban architecture, the Wall, was only erected in the early 1960s. That was demolished thirty years ago in any case. It has always been a city of desperate modernity.
 
      The physical substance is reflected in its characteristic ways of behaving and interacting. It has been a city dedicated to discovering new ways of living. In most decades of the twentieth century, Berlin has produced whole classes of people very conscious that they are living lives that nobody has ever attempted before. It is an arena of the possible, where the imagination carves out cities of the future. The first social housing projects are here. Gay men and lesbians started to live their lives openly in large numbers in the 1920s. The postwar division of the city and the Wall, too, created multiple possibilities, few foreseen, some explosive. In the aftermath of unification, the city was cheap and rundown; it quickly became a hub for creative artists. The sense of making it up as you go along is never far away in Berlin.
 
      The fiction of Berlin exemplifies much of this excitement. Unlike most capital cities, it imposes no obligation on writers to come to terms with it. There are very many great German and German-language writers with absolutely nothing to say about Berlin. Those who do write about it, I suspect, are those who were drawn to it. Such writers may be of a particular type. Despite the different settings, and the totally different nature of each new experience described, a mood recurs. It is a mood of wonder and astonishment, lightly veiled in an affectation of chic boredom. We have seen all this before, suggests each writer, uncovering scenes that have never been dreamt of until this moment. A layer of period nostalgia has settled over Fontane, but in his time, he was an artist of the present moment, even of modernity. Erich Kastner’s Fabian, behaving according to his most animal instincts and finding no resistance in those around…