the city-lit cafe

#citypickNewYork: over 70 dazzling writers and over 270 pages - check out our contents!

 
 

Contents_____________________________________________

Editor’s  introduction 

 

I © New York_________________________________________

Edmund White, City Boy

Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

Lawrence Block, Small Town

E. B. White, Here is New York

Jonathan Franzen, How To Be Alone

Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler’s Planet

Vivian Gornick, Approaching Eye Level

Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s

John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer

Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

Ian Frazier, Gone to New York

Colette Rossant, Madeleines in Manhattan

Michael Cunningham, The Hours

 

Building the Big Apple__________________________________

Martin Amis, Money

Jay McInerney, Bright Lights Big City

Edward Rutherfurd, New York

Washington Irving, A History of New York

Gabriel Brownstein, ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt.3W’

Jed Rubenfeld, The Interpretation of Murder

Edward Rutherfurd, New York

Todd McEwen, Who Sleeps With Katz

Edward Rutherfurd, New York

Todd McEwen, Who Sleeps With Katz

Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

Adam Gopnik, Through the Children’s Gate

Marshall Berman, On The Town

Joseph O’Neill, Netherland

Don DeLillo, Underworld

Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan

Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

Marian Edmunds, ‘Blue, blue sky’

Benjamin Markovits, Either Side of Winter

Tania James, Atlas of Unknowns

Alistair Cooke, Letter from America

Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

Ian Frazier, Gone to New York

Beatrice Colin, The Songwriter

Alan Bennett, Untold Stories

Alexander Chancellor, Some Times in America

Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones

Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

Luc Sante, Low Life

Alistair Cooke, Letter from America

Gabriel Brownstein, ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt.3W’

Adam Gopnik, Through the Children’s Gate

 

On the waterfront_____________________________________

Jan Morris, A Writer’s World

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

Jed Rubenfeld, The Interpretation of Murder

John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer

Helen Keller, Midstream: My Later Life

Edgar Allan Poe, Doings of Gotham

Al Smith, Up To Now

Stephen Graham, New York Nights

Helen Keller, Midstream: My Later Life

Ian Frazier, Gone to New York

Al Smith, Up To Now

Teju Cole, Open City

Jan Morris, Manhattan ’45

Ed Pilkington, ‘Back on the Waterfront’ The Guardian 2 May 2011

 

I am a stranger here myself______________________________

Bernardo Vega, Memoirs

Edward Rutherfurd, New York

Alistair Cooke, Letter from America

Mario Puzo, The Fortunate Pilgrim

Henry David Thoreau, Letters from Staten Island

Gary Shteyngart, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

Wolfgang Koeppen, Amerikafarht (American Journey)

Tama Janowitz, Area Code 212

Ian Frazier, Here is New York

Junot Díaz, Drown

Anne Matthews, Wild Nights

Jurek Becker, ‘A New York Week’

 

Good times, bad times___________________________________

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

Edward Rutherford, New York

Jan Morris, Manhattan ’45

Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters

Philip Hone, Diary

George Templeton Strong, The Diaries

Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation

Lawrence Block, Small Town

Edward Rutherfurd, New York

Jan Morris, Manhattan ’45

Edward Rutherfurd, New York

Gabriel Brownstein, ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt.3W’

Edmund White, City Boy

Paul Auster, City of Glass

Alan Bennett, Untold Stories

Don DeLillo, Falling Man

Adam Gopnik, Through the Children’s Gate

Ian Frazier, Gone to New York

Adam Gopnik, Through the Children’s Gate

Todd McEwen, Who Sleeps With Katz

 

And all that jazz_______________________________________

Beatrice Colin, The Songwriter

James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

Langston Hughes, The Big Sea

Jan Morris, Manhattan ’45

Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones

Edmund White, City Boy

Todd McEwen, Who Sleeps With Katz

Vanessa Threapleton-Horrocks, ‘The Frick: from frivolous to fabulous’

Luc Sante, Low Life

Quentin Crisp, Resident Alien

Edmund White, City Boy

Teju Cole, Open City

Vanessa Threapleton-Horrocks, ‘Opera-Nation’

Edward Rutherford, New York

 

Big weather___________________________________________

David Leavitt, The Lost Language of Cranes

Joseph O’Neill, Netherland

Juliana Nash, ‘Snow’

David Leavitt, The Lost Language of Cranes

José Martí, ‘New York Under the Snow’

Helen Keller, Midstream: My Later Life

Benjamin Markovits, Either Side of Winter

Zoë Heller, The Believers

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Martin Amis, Money

Beatrice Colin, The Songwriter

 

Happy holidays________________________________________

Alan Bennett, Untold Stories

Teju Cole, Open City

Jan Morris, Manhattan ’45

Todd McEwen, Who Sleeps With Katz

Gabriel Brownstein, ‘The Dead Fiddler, 5E’

Todd McEwen, Who Sleeps With Katz

Alistair Cooke, Letter from America

Benjamin Markovits, Either Side of Winter

Philip Hone, Diary

Maxim Gorky, ‘Boredom’

 

Big yellow taxis etc_____________________________________

Wolfgang Koeppen, Amerikafarht (American Journey)

Alexander Chancellor, Some Times in America

Marshall Berman, On the Town

Ian Frazier, Gone to New York

Benjamin Markovits, Either Side of Winter

Ian Frazier, Gone to New York

Zoë Heller, The Believers

Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

Ian Frazier, Gone to New York

Gabriel Brownstein, ‘The Speedboat’

John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer

David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries

 

Village life____________________________________________

Suze Rotolo, A Freewheelin’ Time

Luc Sante, Low Life

Jan Morris, Manhattan ’45

Suze Rotolo, A Freewheelin’ Time

Suze Rotolo, A Freewheelin’ Time

Colette Rossant, Madeleines in Manhattan

Edmund White, City Boy

Todd McEwen, Who Sleeps With Katz

 

Celebrity city__________________________________________

Luc Sante, Low Life

Philip Hone, Diary

Jed Rubenfeld, The Interpretation of Murder

Jan Morris, Manhattan ’45

Edward Rutherford, New York

Alistair Cooke, Letter from America

Sherrill Tippins, February House

Stephen Clarke, Merde Happens

Joseph O’Neill, Netherland

Alexander Chancellor, Some Times in America

Sherrill Tippins, February House

James Thurber, The Years With Ross

Alan Bennett, Untold Stories

E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime

Leslie Stainton, Lorca: A Dream of Life

Marshall Berman, On the Town

 

New Yorkers__________________________________________

Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler’s Planet

Tama Janowitz, Area Code 212

Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler’s Planet

Alexander Chancellor, Some Times in America

John Updike, Odd Jobs

Quentin Crisp, Resident Alien

Jonathan Franzen, How To Be Alone

Melissa Bank, The Wonder Spot

Martin Amis, Money

Jan Morris, Manhattan ’45

Julia Blackburn, With Billie

Jan Morris, Manhattan ’45

Thomas Wolfe, Death to Morning

Edmund White, City Boy

Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler’s Planet

Jan Morris, Manhattan ’45

Ian Frazier, Gone to New York

Ian Frazier, Gone to New York

E. L. Doctorow, City of God

 

 

 

 

Chocolat author Joanne Harris's Top Ten Guide to Books on Paris

 

 

A rather splendid selection of novels, history books and travel books on Paris - including, yes, city-lit Paris - are included in Joanne Harris's very comprehensive choice for Philip Blackwell's innovative Ultimate Library. We wish the hotels we stayed in had libraries based on book lists like this!

Check it out here:

Download Joanne Harris Our France Top Ten

www.ultimatelibrary.co.uk

'city-lit Paris is a wonderful idea. Snippets of stories and writing set in Paris' Good Reads

 

Rachel Hawes rated it

Shelves: 2009, travel, anthology

I seem to have been reading this forever.

I read the first two thirds of it on the Eurostar back from Paris (I think I finished "Needful Things" on the way there) in June. And then I put it in a pile of books and kind of forgot about it.

I picked it up again this weekend and polished it off. It is a wonderful idea. Snippets of stories and writing set in Paris. As many of you know, I'm not Paris's biggest fan but this still sums up Paris beautifully as only ...moreI seem to have been reading this forever.

I read the first two thirds of it on the Eurostar back from Paris (I think I finished "Needful Things" on the way there) in June. And then I put it in a pile of books and kind of forgot about it.

I picked it up again this weekend and polished it off. It is a wonderful idea. Snippets of stories and writing set in Paris. As many of you know, I'm not Paris's biggest fan but this still sums up Paris beautifully as only the great writers can. It has reminded me of many books I need to revisit or visit for the first time.

There is one on London as well in the same series which I have added to my ever expanding Amazon Wishlist

www.goodreads.com

 

Are these the best books on Berlin written by locals?

The ten best books on Berlin written by locals

Last updated: Aug 29th, 2011 | By: Spotted by Locals

0

Image by Nigel’s Europe

1. Thomas Brussig, Heroes Like Us
translated by John Brownjohn

The riotous and laugh-aloud novel about Klaus Uhltzscht, the aspiring teenage Nobel laureate of East Berlin, who claims to be the man who breached the Berlin Wall.

‘She lived in Isländische Strasse, a side-street running off Bornholmer Strasse. Yes, that Bornholmer Strasse, the one with the checkpoint at the far end. Milling around in front of it were members of the so-called masses …and confronting them were a few border guards’

2. Tobias Rapp, Lost and Sound. Berlin Techno under der Easyjetset
translated by Katy Derbyshire

The brilliant and vivid portrayal of today’s Berlin clubbing scene – ‘where the reality principle of other cities is suspended in favour of a comprehensive lust principle.’

‘While you’re waiting to be served at the bar a French guy in his early twenties tells you he’s a techno DJ from Montpellier, come to Berlin like the Muslims go on a pilgrimage to Mecca. On the stair case you bump into a huge, half-naked skinhead who tells you that there’s no other club like this, “not even in Russia.” Next to the dancefloor you pick up the thread of a conversation in dub reggae you dropped there a couple of weeks ago.

And then you dance …’

3. Emine Sevgi Özdamar, ‘My Berlin’ in Berlin Tales
translated by Lyn Marven

Berlin’s largest group of residents of non-German origin are Turkish. German Turkish writer Emine Sevgi Ozdamar describes arriving back in the city.

‘At Zoo Station I waved to all the buses going past. I was in freedom and was pleased about the rain … It was as if back then when I had gone back to Istanbul Berlin had frozen like a photo to wait for me – with the long, tall trees, with the Gedachtniskirche, with the double-decker buses, with the corner pubs. Berliner Kindle beer, the crosses on the beer mats. Walls. Checkpoint Charlie. U-Bahn. S-Bahn. Cinema on Steinplatz. Abschied von gestern. Alexander Sluge. Bockwurst sausages. The Brecht theatre Berliner Ensembler. Arturo Ui. Canals. The Peacock Island. Tramps in the stations. Pea soup. Lonely women in Café Kranzler. Black forest gateau …’

4. Ralph Rothmann, Hitze (‘Heat’)
translated by Katy Derbyshire

Berlin winter’s are harsh, especially for the poor Berliners depicted in Rothmann’s powerful story of lives lived on the other side of the track.

‘Cold wind with the scent of brown coal on it drives sleet across the asphalt and generates a rustling in the trees, old oaks, giant horse chestnuts, the hollows and holes filled up with concrete. Where a street lamp stretches in the branches, the leaves have stayed hanging on and are still green here and there.’

5. Tobias Rüther, Helden, David Bowie und Berlin (‘Heroes, David Bowie and Berlin’)
translated by Katy Derbyshire

David Bowie’s Berlin period was legendary for its creativity and here Ruther reconstructs what his life was like during these years.

‘And how he threw himself upon Berlin and surrendered himself to the place! … He spent hours walking by the Wannsee lake, cycling, visiting Nazi sites and having his photo taken there. He crossed over to East Berlin over and again at Checkpoint Charlie to visit the Berlin Ensembler, Brecht’s old theatre. Around the corner from there, he ate on Schiffbauerdamm with Iggy Popp and Tony Visconti …’

6. Vladimir Kaminer, Russian Disco
translated by Michael Hulse

In Kaminer’s pulsating novel he shows us that life for Berlin’s students isn’t always about sitting around discussing philosophy.

‘My friend Sasha from the Ukraine, who has been reading Slavic studies at Humboldt University for two years, had a choice between dish-washing in an Australian crocodile steakhouse, cleaning the lavatories in the Beate Uhse Museum of Erotica, or helping with liposuction treatment at a beauty clinic. Though he is himself a vegetarian, Sasha opted for the crocodile restaurant and was revolted from morning till night.’

7. Anna Winger, This Must Be The Place

In the first novel of American Berlin resident Anna Winger, Hope newly arrived in the city, aims to get to know it through daily tours using the underground.

‘As the U-Bahn pulled up above ground, Hope blinked into the daylight thinking that it was possible to see every layer of the city’s history at once in every direction … In the other European cities, the past was glorified, the architecture spruced up for tourists to the point of caricature. But here, nobody seemed to be in a hurry one way of the other. Buildings had been bombed and the city had been ripped apart, but years later holes remained all over the place without explanation or apparent concern. The city moved forward with a lack of vanity that she found relaxing …’

8. Inka Parei, Die Schattenboxerin (‘The Shadow Boxer’)
translated by Katy Derbyshire

In the 1990s whole swathes of East Berlin were in a state of decay, memorably evoked in Inka Parei’s novel of survival in difficult times.

‘Two gay variety artistes live on the third floor with a four-metre-long brown and white spotted boa constrictor … I hear them arguing long and often over the great deal of housework their zoo requires. At night I see the glowing openings in their small stove, which has to be fed around the clock. They also keep tarantulas, a parrot and a docile-muzzled black mastiff. The dog follows them like a calf-shaped shadow when they carry their snake basket down the stairs towards the Friedrichstadtpalast on Mondays and Thursdays.’

9. Rayk Wieland, Ich schlage vor, dass uns kissen (‘I suggest we kiss’)
translated by Katy Derbyshire

In Rayk Wieland’s memorable novel the young narrator is summoned to one of the most feared places in communist East Berlin – the Stasi headquarters.

‘In Magdalenenstrasse, the Stasi headquarters, there were above all doors: doors before doors and doors behind doors, doors around doors, for the sole reason that no one was ever to see anyone or, as it was called in secret service jargon, declassify anyone. The corridors here were virtually sprinkled with doors and double-doors every few yards. No other building in the world had as many doors. It may have been the Stasi’s exorbitant demand for doors that brought the GDR to its knees.’

10.Yade Kara, Selam Berlin (‘Salaam Berlin’)
translated by Katy Derbyshire

When Hasan, a young Turkish-German, hears the Berlin Wall has fallen he heads straight back home from Istanbul. He starts to discover the East – at the now world-famous Tacheles bar.

‘East Berlin was like a whole different era. Dark streets, bullet-ridden facades, cobblestones; rusty signs reading ‘Lehmann’s Laundry’ or ‘Potato Erna’ hung on blackened buildings. It was as if time had stood still here. It was a bit like post-war Germany, like in the black-and-white films from the weekly news.’

Excerpts from all the books featured here are available in Oxygen Books’ city-pick Berlin (£8.99) Other titles in the series include Amsterdam, Paris, London, Venice and Dublin with New York out this autumn. www.oxygenbooks.co.uk

www.spottedbylocals.com/berlin/

 

The novel that's got young Venetian lovers declaring their passion with padlocks

Thousands are copying the protagonists of Federico Moccia's bestseller I Want You by attaching padlocks to bridges, including Venice's Rialto bridge, writes The Guardian's Tom Kington.

• 

Lovers hang padlocks on Rome's Ponte Milvio. Photograph: Eric Vandeville

City officials up and down Italy who are wondering why their bridges are being weighed down by padlocks have clearly not been keeping up with Italy's latest teen literature sensation. Federico Moccia's bestseller Ho Voglia di Te (I Want You) features a young couple attaching a lock to Rome's Milvian Bridge as a sign of eternal love.

The thousands of sweethearts who have decided to imitate this touching gesture are among the 2.5 million readers of the book, which charts the romantic entanglements of brooding young Romans who hang out in the upmarket streets of the Parioli district.

The 2006 book was a follow-up to Moccia's first blockbuster romance Tre Metri Sopra il Cielo (Three Metres Above the Sky), which bombed on its release in 1992, only to become a cult hit with Roman students 12 years later.

Tapping into the kind of tortured adolescent passion that has made the Twilight series so successful in the US and beyond, Moccia's career went stratospheric when Italian teen heartthrob Riccardo Scamarcio was cast to play the lead in the books' big- screen adaptations.

However, the critics were savage, damning both novels as insipid, clunky and clinical exploitations of teen angst, and poking fun at Moccia, now 49, for writing about Rome's beautiful youth despite being himself a plump, balding, middle-aged man.

But Moccia has had the last laugh with healthy global sales thanks to translations into Spanish, French, Russian and Chinese, although it is not yet available to an English-speaking readership. "These are universal stories," he said on Wednesday . "And that is why the padlocks are now appearing on bridges right around the world, including Brooklyn Bridge."

But not everyone is happy about this new fad, with Italian officials claiming that the love padlocks are damaging stonework, and daily newspaper La Repubblica calling the locks on the Rialto bridge in Venice "vulgar".

"That seems really excessive," said Moccia. "If you go to Venice, you'll find that they have bigger things to worry about."

www.theguardian.co.uk

 

Julia Roberts' Notting Hill bookshop fights closure with poets and writers

The Travel Bookshop was the backdrop for the romance between Hollywood actor Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) and bookseller William Thacker (Hugh Grant) in Notting Hill. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/POLYGRAM FILMED ENTERTAINMENT/Allstar Picture Library

Poets and writers are engaged in fighting to save a west London bookshop which served as the backdrop for the on-screen romance between Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant in the film Notting Hill.

The shop's staff have been told that they will be made redundant after its owners failed to find a buyer.

The 1999 film which starred Roberts as a Hollywood star who falls in love with the store owner (Grant), grossed more than $360m (£220m) and the bookshop remains a popular tourist attraction.

A campaign has been launched to save the store with a handful of writers and poets offering to volunteer a day a week to help run it if a new buyer can be found.

Poet and journalist Olivia Cole, 30, said that she had spent a great deal of time in the bookshop and didn't want it to close.

"It's an amazing specialist bookshop and it has the Notting Hill novelty but it is the same sad story that we're seeing in high streets all over the country. Loads of independent bookshop are having a bad time. With a bookshop like that beingso unique and so well loved, I was amazed when I heard it was closing," she said.

Cole, who said she also used the store "for work and day-dreaming" said she was willing to volunteer one day a week in the hope that lower running costs might attract a buyer.

"We [are] hoping to rally writers and poets and volunteers to the idea," she said. "The thought that you could run into a poet or writer while doing your book browsing would also add to the appeal."

On Tuesday, actor Alec Baldwin who played Roberts' boyfriend in the film added his voice to the campaign by tweeting about the store's predicament. "Save the Travel Book Shop," he wrote.

Saara Marchadour who managed the shop for two years until last month said that the economic downturn had hit the 32-year-old store hard and that she was saddened by its likely demise.

"I was shocked when the shop was threatened with closure. It's a great waste of talented staff and 30 years of history. It's another piece of what makes Notting Hill and Portobello interesting and I will be very sad to see it go. I hope new owners reopen it," she said.

Marchadour said the Travel Bookshop was rebuilt for the film with a different interior in an antique shop in nearby Portobello Road. She added that this would sometimes disappoint the hundreds of tourists who would visit the store every week.

"I often heard them say, 'This isn't the real one.'" Marchadour, 31, said local celebrities including the director of Notting Hill, Richard Curtis, also visited the store to purchase books.

www.theguardian.co.uk

The Travel Bookshop has been a fantastic supporter of our city-pick series and we support every effort to keep this brilliant bookshop open.

Guardian Travel says these are the 10 best books set in Berlin. Agree?

10 of the best books set in Berlin

Berlin has been at the epicentre of history for the last century, a fact reflected in its incredibly rich literary history. City-Lit's Malcolm Burgess picks 10 classics set in the city

• As featured in our Berlin city guide

•  
  • Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, 1939

Christopher Isherwood's compelling fictionalised autobiography defines the wild and wicked Berlin between the wars – and Hitler's rise to power.

"All along the Tauentzienstrasse, men, women and boys are hawking postcards, flowers, song-books, hair-oil, bracelets. Christmas trees are stacked for sale along the central path between the tramlines … In the side streets, lorry-loads of police are waiting; for any large crowd, nowadays, is capable of turning into a political riot."
• Tauentzienstrasse

Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, 1929

As Franz Biberkopf leaves prison, he vows to lead a decent life on the grimy streets of Weimar Berlin – in one of the greatest German novels of the 20th century.

"On the Alexanderplatz they are tearing up the road-bed for the underground. People walk on planks. The tram-cars pass over the square up Alexanderstrasse through Münzstrasse to the Rosenthaler Tor … House follows house along the streets. They are full of men and women from cellar to garret."
• Alexanderplatz

Cees Nooteboom, All Souls' Day, 2001

As the new millennium approaches, Arthur Daane is in a wintry Berlin trying to piece together his life in this extraordinary and atmospheric novel of the city, past and present.

"At the corner of Savignyplatz he was almost blown off his feet by a sudden snow flurry. This was getting serious. A continental climate. Another reason he liked Berlin. It always made him feel he was in the middle of a vast plain stretching deep into the heart of Russia."
• Savignyplatz

Thomas Brussig, Heroes Like Us, 1995

The riotous and laugh-out-loud novel about Klaus Uhltzscht, the aspiring teenage Nobel laureate of East Berlin, who claims to be history's "missing link", the man who breached the Berlin Wall.

"She lived in Isländische Strasse, a side street running off Bornholmer Strasse. Yes, that Bornholmer Strasse, the one with the checkpoint at the far end. Milling around in front of it were members of the so-called masses … and confronting them were a few border guards."
• Bornholmer Strasse, the checkpoint where crowds surged through on 9 November 1989

Chloe Aridjis, Book of Clouds, 2009

Chloe Aridjis's beautifully evocative novel is set in today's Berlin; a young Mexican woman flees her family only to find a city that cannot escape its past.

"We walked down Unter den Linden, the trees atwinkle with white holiday lights, and past the regally lit Brandenburg Gate … then turned left before arriving at a sea of upright concrete slabs, which I recognised immediately as the new Holocaust memorial."
• Brandenburg Gate and the Holocaust memorial

Philip Kerr, March Violets, 1989

Freelance detective Bernie Gunther works on the mean streets of 1930s Berlin, where Nazi excesses are never far from the surface.

"This morning at the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Jägerstrasse, I saw two men, SA men, unscrewing a red Der Stürmer showcase from the wall of a building. Der Stürmer is the anti-Semitic journal that's run by the Reich's leading Jew-hater, Julius Streicher."
• Friedrichstrasse

Ian McEwan, The Innocent, 1990,

After England, the cold war Berlin of 1955 is like no place Leonard Markham has ever experienced: surreal, complex and dangerous.

"Almost too soon he was on Adalbertstrasse … There were apartment blocks with facades drilled by small arms fire, especially round the doors and windows. Every second or third building had a gutted interior, and was without its roof. Whole structures had collapsed and the rubble lay where it had fallen."
• Adalbertstrasse

Hans Fallada, Alone in Berlin, 1947

In 1940, in the heart of Hitler's capital, Otto and Anna Quangel are alone in Berlin with a breathtaking campaign of resistance …

"The postwoman Eva Kluge slowly climbs the steps of 55 Jablonski Strasse. She's tired from her round, but she also has one of those letters in the bag that she hates to deliver, and is about to have to deliver, to the Quangels, on the second floor."
• Jablonski Strasse

Anna Funder, Stasiland, 2003

Not surprisingly the fall of the Berlin Wall caused panic at the Stasi headquarters, as described in Anna Funder's riveting portrait of East Germany's secret police and how it controlled a nation.

"At the Normannenstrasse headquarters, there was panic. Stasi officers were instructed to destroy files, starting with the most incriminating – those naming westerners who spied for them, and those that concerned deaths. They shredded the files until the shredders collapsed ... "
• Normannenstrasse

Malcolm Burgess is the publisher of Oxygen Books' City-Lit series, featuring writing on cities including Berlin, Paris, London, Amsterdam, Venice and Dublin

Berlin Wall 50 years on: families divided, loved ones lost

Half a century ago on 13 August 1961 the infamous German wall was built, The Guardian's Helen Pidd reports on two ex-East Berliners who saw their lives changed forever

 

Ursula Bach, who fled to West Germany at 18. She was six months pregnant at the time the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, and was never to see the father of her child again. Photograph: Ursula Bach-Puyplat

When she heard the news that would cause her separation from the father of her child for ever, Ursula Bach was 18 years old and six months pregnant. She was tired. The baby was using up all her energy so she was lying in bed with the radio on, trying to get some rest at the chaotic refugee camp in West Germany where she had fled a few months earlier, leaving her fiance, Fried, back on the east side. Suddenly her brain tuned in to what she was hearing.

She still remembers the broadcast word for word: "It is Sunday the 13 August 1961. You are listening to the news on Bavarian Radio. Early this morning in Berlin the border police and members of the operational combat troops started to erect barbed wire and a security fence between the eastern and western sectors of the city. Sixty-nine of the 81 border crossings have already been closed. Residents of the GDR and East Berlin are now only allowed to cross with special permission. The S-Bahn is no longer running…"

"I couldn't believe it – I never thought they would hermetically seal the border," Bach said this week, recalling the day 50 years ago when the East German government decided to stem the flow of refugees fleeing the German Democratic Republic (GDR) by putting up what they euphemistically called the "anti-fascist protection measure". She never saw Fried again. The first her son, Andreas, ever heard from his father was after the Wall fell in 1989. It was too late then for them to build a relationship.

By the time Bach and her mother, brother and grandmother escaped from Saxony Anhalt on 21 May 1961, 2,000 East German citizens a day were arriving in West Berlin. The 3.5 million East Germans who had left since the founding of the GDR in 1949 made up about 20% of the entire East German population. Enough was enough, decided Walter Ulbricht, first secretary of the Socialist Unity party and GDR state council chairman. Despite claiming publicly that "no one is planning to build a wall", Ulbricht gave orders for engineers to do just that.

Bach's mother decided to leave when the East German government started cracking down on private enterprise in their mission to turn a market economy into a centrally planned one. She ran a leather shop, and was finding it increasingly difficult to stay afloat after the GDR authorities stopped her deliveries. "They wanted to give her a nothing sort of job in the trade department instead," said Bach.

Bach was in love. She didn't want to leave Fried, but a division opened up when their teaching course turned more political. "We were asked to spy on each other and were told not to go to church. That meant that our child would not be able to be baptised, which was very important to me," she said.

Fried was a committed communist; Bach was not. She decided to leave and didn't tell him she was going, though she long hoped he would follow her. The last she saw of him was when she was on the train heading out of town forever: "He waved and motioned for me to open the window, but the window wouldn't open. I didn't see him again."

Torn teenager

When the border guards started unravelling miles of barbed wire across the border that Sunday in August 1961, Jan-Aart de Rooij was 14 and a long way from home, at a youth camp in West Germany run by a church charity aimed at giving city children a bit of fresh air.

Two weeks later, he was dropped off in West Berlin, where he lied to the camp organisers by claiming relatives would pick him up. His parents couldn't collect him. They were on the other side of the wall, in the eastern district of Köpenick.

"I remember thinking to myself, 'what do I do now?'" said De Rooij, now 64, in Berlin this week. "I actually quite liked living in the GDR. I was a young pioneer [the socialist scout-like movement] and had all my friends and family there. But I had always loved going to the west, largely because you could buy things there that weren't available back home – Mickey Mouse comics, oranges, cowboy stories."

Before the wall went up, he made regular trips to the West with his mother, a furrier, when she needed to pick up Persian furs that were unavailable in the GDR. "A lot of her customers were Russian soldiers who wanted the best for their wives, so we would make trips West to stock up. Importing from the West was illegal, so she would take me with her and strap furs around my waist, hidden under my jumper, so that the border guards wouldn't discover them on the train home. It was all very exciting to a young boy."There was a family friend living in the West Berlin district of Charlottenburg who had often put up De Rooij. But he didn't feel safe there amid the political turmoil. "After a few days the police came looking for me. Apparently my parents had reported me missing and admitted they had a friend in the west who might be looking after me. I ran away."

For three weeks, De Rooij slept rough, spending much of his days begging ("back then you could say, 'I'm from the east, can I have a mark?'") and monitoring the progress of the wall. "There was this one street we used to go to which was split down the middle by the wall. The street was in the west but the houses were in the east. The soldiers bricked up the front doors but people jumped out of the windows," he said.

"There was a group of us on the western side who used to all try to knock off the top level of the wall before the cement had time to try. We were a bit of a mob; we would all surge together and smash it. It was a very addictive game."

It was seeing the East German government walling in its residents which made De Rooij decide to never return. "I went to the American sector [of West Berlin] and asked an official to help me. He gave me a West German ID card and put me on a plane to West Germany."

Eventually, the family who ran the youth camp offered to foster him and he moved there until he was 21. He didn't see his mother again until 1970, when she made her first trip to the west after she retired – the GDR, so paranoid about its citizens escaping, positively encouraged older people to move to the west as soon as they were ready to draw a state pension.

Mother's guilt

Fifty years on, the scars have not properly healed for Bach, now 68. "The feeling of guilt has never gone away, of leaving my son with no father," she said. "I remember when he was about four years old, Andreas came up to me and said, 'I don't have a daddy.'"

For a long time, she kept quiet about what had happened. But 10 years ago she started writing down her story, which she lightly fictionalised in two novels – In the West and Forward, March. The first time she returned to the east, she felt "physical pain … It was as though I was being physically attacked. The memories still shake me now."

She despaired last month when a new survey showed that every third Berliner considers the building of the Berlin Wall to have been "not wrong". "It makes me crazily angry. They don't see the bad things," she said.

De Rooij, now a father of seven, said the nostalgia for the wall was "understandable but not logical". Yes, he said, certain things were perhaps better in the east – kindergarten provision, for example, and there was maybe more community spirit. "But those who excuse the wall are ignoring how wrong, how damaging it - and the political system behind it - was to so many people in society."

He said he doesn't object to what some have called the "Disneyfication" of the Berlin Wall: actors dressed as border guards posing for pictures with tourists by Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin and Trabant "safaris" whisking visitors around cold war sites in Berlin. "Young people cannot comprehend that just 22 years ago there was a wall dividing this city. Anything that helps them to understand how and why things were as they were has got to be a good thing."

The ten best books on Amsterdam written by locals? Checkout Spotted by Locals

 
 

 

The ten best books on Amsterdam written by locals

Last updated: Aug 9th, 2011 | By: Spotted by Locals

0

Image by joiseyshowaa

From Malcolm Burgess, publisher of Oxygen Books’ city-pick series, featuring some of the best writing on favourite cities, comes a new series for Spotted by Locals on the best city books written by local writers. He starts with Amsterdam …

Amsterdam: A Brief Life of the City, Geert Mak
Translated by Philipp Blom

The world-famous travel writer Geert Mak’s Amsterdam is an absolute must for anyone seriously interested in the place. Like many great cities, Amsterdam constitutes ‘a small nation made a larger one’, but is unlike so many others, says Mak, in being relatively ‘unmonumental’.

‘Amsterdam is not proud, indeed, it is even unproud in a proud sort of way. The wealthiest Amsterdammers have clung stubbornly to the sobriety of their seventeenth-century forefathers, with the result that the cityscape has emerged untouched by the grandeur of absolutism, and uncut by the broad avenues which might have been driven through the city in the nineteenth century.’

Joe Speedboat, Tommy Wieringa
Translated by Sam Garrett

In Tommy Wieringa’s coming of age novel, a young Joe tries something in Amsterdam a little stronger than he’s used to.

‘He took a deep breath, looked around and decided to stay in Amsterdam for a while and see how things worked out. … Joe took the train. He experienced giddying happiness – no one knew where he was, life could go any which way, there were as many possibilities as combinations on a fruit machine and every direction he chose was the right one, because it was time for the machine to pay out. P.J wasn’t home. Joe waited in Coffeeshop Baylon, sitting by the window where he might see her come by. Meanwhile he had plenty of time to feast his eyes on the economics of soft drugs.’

On the Water, H. M. van den Brink
Translated by Paul Vincent

One of the best novels on Amsterdam’s rivers and canals is On the Water, telling the story of two young rowers moving through the golden summer of pre-war Amsterdam, and into the Nazi occupation.

‘I took in everything: the freight barges on their way into the centre of town or on the contrary returning after delivering their cargo to the markets, the life on the houseboats, the flags on the larger ships, the washing hanging out to dry somewhere on board, a fisherman bent over his rod and in the distance the jumble of house fronts, masts and towers, the silhouette of the city.’

In Lucia’s Eyes, Arthur Japin
Translated by David Colmer

Set in the eighteenth century, Arthur Japin’s elegant novel reminds us that it isn’t just physical beauty that can make us love this city.

‘I had set my heart on Amsterdam. The city’s name as one of the first that Monsieur de Pompignac had taught me. I saw it many times in the books he gave me to read, the most important of which had all been printed in Holland, the place, he told me, where both Descartes and Spinoza had found refuge … I only had to think of that city to see before me a paradise where, amid all the flowers of the world, the liberated human spirit and all the branches of science blossomed.’

About Love, Doeschka Meijsing
(published in Dutch as Over de liefde)

In this wonderful Amsterdam novel, the narrator manages to escape an event she is far from enjoying by taking an unplanned swim in a canal …

‘The water of the Prinsengracht wasn’t too cold: the sun had beaten down on it all summer long. It should stink, but I smelled nothing. I wasn’t afraid of rats – they would be more afraid of me. I used the breast stroke to swim in between the two boats until I seemed to be in open water. It was too late at night for tourists on the water; the surface was as smooth as glass and reflected the moon. It was quiet and calm in the middle of the canal. I had the place to myself.’

The Philosopher Without Eyes, Cees Nooteboom
(published in Dutch as De filosof zonder ogen: Europese reizen)

From the greatest living Dutch novelist comes a collection of lyrical and meditative essays on the modern city.

‘The city is a book to be read; the walker is the reader …. The words consist of gables, excavations, names, dates, images. One house is called the Pelican, and would speak to us of distant voyages. Another is called the Spitsbergen and commemorates a particular wintering. A street is called Bokkinghargen, and without smelling anything you can recognise the odour of smoked fish.’

‘Harlequin on Dam Square’, Thomas Olde Heuvelt
(from the novel published in Dutch as Harten Sara)

The fashion for ‘human statues’ as a form of street entertainment is taken up by one of the most innovative and interesting young Dutch writers.

‘Today I’m a harlequin … I go to Dam Square and stand in front of the National Monument. I’m sure that the city’s aroma is lost on all these people, but I smell it, as always, because it’s mine. I’m capable of identifying every single aspect: last night’s rain, the vapours of the canals, the coffee and ventilated warmth at the entrance to the Bijenkorf department store and the salty, fishy smell because the fishmonger’s wife is cleaning oysters.’

May the Sun Shine Tomorrow, Abdelkader Benali
(Published in Dutch as Laat het morgen mooi weer zijn)

In this extract from May the Sun Shine Tomorrow, this Dutch Moroccan writer creates the unforgettable healer Malik Ben based in the centre of Amsterdam.

‘Malik’s office was in the heart of Amsterdam, in the basement of a nineteenth-century town house a stone’s throw from Leidseplein. Callers were obliged to ring a bell that jangled loudly. Even before they stepped inside, Malik could tell what was on their minds by the expression on their faces.’

H2Olland, Maarten Ascher
(published in Dutch under same title)

Maarten Ascher’s ingeniously titled book celebrates the history of Amsterdam and its waters.

‘Amsterdam, with its horseshoe-shaped, quadruple ring of concentric canals, is the most distinctive of all Dutch cities where you can live in close proximity to the water … In the early years, if I wanted to remember the order of the four main canals (from the outside in), I would often refer to the mnemonic Pier Koopt Hoge Schoenen (‘Piet buys high shoes’), the first letters of which correspond to the initials of the four canals. You soon learn that each of these sections of can forms something of a small neighbourhood and you discover landmarks: a church, a side canal, a shopping street, a distinctive corner building.’

City Eyes, Martin Bril
(published in Dutch as Stadsogen)

From a well-known Dutch writer comes a richly atmospheric celebration of the extraordinariness of the ordinary in the city’s streets

‘The Rozengracht lay there like only the Rozengracht can. It was the end of the afternoon. To the west the sun was setting in the bend the De Clercqstraat takes to the right, the sky was as pink as candyfloss … The man looked at his watch. A full tram 18 rattled past and stopped at the corner by the Marnixstraat. People got in and out. A few crossed over and walked towards the man. Two young women who passed him were discussing the fate of a mutual acquaintance. She’d just given birth.’

Excerpts from all the books featured here are available in Oxygen Books’ city-pick Amsterdam (£8.99) Other titles in the series include Berlin, Paris, London, Venice and Dublin with New York out this autumn. www.oxygenbooks.co.uk