the city-lit cafe

Reading the German cities ... 14 cities and dozens of amazing writers are here

Fancy getting a taste for the real Germany - as seen by its writers?

The UK Goethe Institute has a great micro-site  Text and the City that does just this, with samples of writing (much specially translated in English) by German writers for 14 German cities:

* Berlin

* Bremen

* Dresden

* Frankfurt

* Hamburg

* Cologne

* Bonn

* Mainheim

* Heidelberg

* Munich

* Rostock

* Ruhr Metropolis

* Stuttgart

* Weimar

Just click on their literary map of Germany and sample the cities from the literary perspectives of German writers.

We love the selection that's as diverse and varied as the cities themselves, sometimes critical but always with the freshness and orginality of great writing.

Enjoy!

 

Run Dem Crew's Berlin Half Marathon: Simon Cole's Running History Lesson (+ 10 things you must do in Berlin)

Berlin's famous squat network in East Berlin's Friedrichshain.

When I heard my running partners and East London legends Run Dem Crew were heading to one of my favourite cities to complete today’s Berlin Half Marathon, I had to write something. I’ve written about my passion for this incredible city in the City-Lit anthology and for several magazines.

I was also lucky enough to be the only Briton to run the internal German border which split East and West Germany from 1945 to 1989. I hope this short piece will give fellow Crew an idea of why this is one of Europe’s most exciting cities and help you max out your time in this amazing space.

First, you have to understand Berlin’s crazy history. A communist revolution in 1919 was bloodily suppressed in 1919; the decadence of the Weimar Republic followed in the 1920s (see the Cabaret movie) was squashed by the Nazis though their spiritual home was Munich and they received the least votes here in this party city.

But modern Berlin history really begins in 1945 when the city was split in half. Britain, France and the US controlled the part that eventually became West Berlin while the Soviets controlled the portion which became East Berlin. After millions headed West to escape Stalin’s rule, the border was closed in 1952 but not fortified.

Under the gaze of the Alexanderplatz TV tower, East Berlin's East Side Gallery is the longest preserved stretch of the Wall, home to a mass of mostly-political murals.

So it was a massive shock to everyone when, during the night of 13th August 1961, a wall suddenly went up across the whole city. Husbands were separated from wives, parents from children – some forever. Not until 1989 would this wall open up (during the collapse of the USSR) and it became hugely symbolic, an open wound in the German psyche.

This was where East and West border guards faced off at Checkpoint Charlie, where spies were exchanged at dawn on empty bridges that were barred to East Berliners unless they were old. If you were too old to work, then you could go West and see those grandchildren you had only heard about.

The border was a 3.3m wall with a ‘death strip’ where machine guns, trip mines and attack dogs waited for anyone foolish enough to attempt escape. And the biggest irony? They called it an ‘anti-fascist protection barrier’; it was there to protect you. Oh, and they had the most effective secret police of any Eastern Bloc state, the Stasi.

I met someone whose file was one of the thousands and thousands kept on anyone who might be ‘subversive’. Her crime? She had a penpal in the West when she was in primary school. A visit to the Stasi museum is a sobering experience.

In 1989 the Wall finally came down. No Man’s Land and the underdeveloped East became the haunt of squatters and alternative types. Berlin had defined the ‘pop-up’ decades before it hit East London.

The city became known for cutting edge culture where anything – and I mean anything – could be found. From weekend-long techno raves in abandoned army bases to world famous gay bars and commune living – Berlin’s party reputation is well deserved.

Now, it’s changing. East Berlin is still the hippest place to be and if you look carefully you can see the remnants of the German Democratic Republic.

By all means marvel at the TV tower, but remember it was also a big “F*** you” to West Berlin and jammed tv signals from the free world. And isn’t it unnerving how it’s always there, watching you, just like the network of informers that the Stasi used to keep tabs on everyone?

The squat bars and pop-up galleries are still here; you can still do great things for free every night of the week; and creative types from all over the world still flock here for its cheap cost of living and empty spaces whose only limit is the imagination.

But Berlin is changing, very slowly and business abhors a vacuum. So you’ve picked a great time to come before the star of this ‘open secret’ rises too far. The race starts in Stalinist showpiece Karl Marx Allee, where western diplomats would be shown the only shops that were always full and where construction workers tried to revolt in 1953.

But those angry brickies lost out to Soviet tanks. As you pass the Brandenburg Gate, take a second to remember this symbol of Berlin stood in No Man’s Land for nearly half a century. Where you’re running, nobody was even allowed to stand.

I once saw some graffiti written on the inside of an old border bunker. It said the biggest walls today are not in Berlin, but in our heads. The Wall is in the head of every German over 30. But it gets lower every year.

Top things to do in Berlin:

1) Visit the (free) Bernauer Strasse centre where the horror of the Wall is recorded

2) Stand at Checkpoint Charlie where US & Soviet troops faced off

3) Grab a spicey sausage currywurst from an Imbiss (snack bar)

4) Drink a Hefeweizen beer in a Kneiper (corner bar)

5) Drink a bottle of beer on the subway legally; stay out all night; then come back on the all weekend-night subway

6) Sit in an über-cool cafe in Mitte and play ‘spot the artist/museum/hipster’

7) Go to a Sunday fleamarket in Friedrichshain’s Boxhagener Str. or Prenzlauerberg’s Mauerpark and pick up a Soviet hat

8) Visit the Stasi museum with its 1970s furniture and marvel at the lengths they went to, to control their people

9) Pop into former art squat Tacheles on Oranienburger Str while you still can for edgy art

10) Walk along the Unter den Linden and marvel at how lucky we are to be free, as you approach the Brandenburg Gate. Life is good.

http://hackneytours.wordpress.com

 

© Simon Cole (Hackney Tours/Bookpacking) 2012

From Bauhaus to Pina Bausch - it's the year of German culture in the UK

Big names in line-up for summer of music, dance and art to celebrate the Goethe-Institut's 50 years in London writes Alex Needham in The Guardian

•  

• Alex Needham

guardian.co.uk, Sunday 4 March 2012 17.26 GMT

Article history

Members of the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch performing at the Opera House in Cairo in 2009. The company is appear at Sadler's Wells and the Barbican in London. Photograph: Mohamed Omar/EPA

Until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the popular British perception of German culture involved either a stout opera singer in a horned helmet warbling Wagner, or Nena on Top of the Pops singing about 99 Red Balloons.

Much has changed in the intervening two decades, not least Berlin's coronation as a "poor but sexy" international capital of cool. Now the range of Germany's cultural influence, and the extent to which it has been embraced in the UK, will be revealed with a number of high-profile projects in London this summer.

In June, the late choreographer Pina Bausch's revered dance company Tanztheater Wuppertal is coming to Sadler's Wells and the Barbican. The next month, Tate Modern's Turbine Hall will be filled with an installation by Tino Sehgal, a Berlin-based artist whose works involve performers interacting with viewers, which Tate Modern's director, Chris Dercon, describes as "almost like a mental and bodily exercise".

From May, the Barbican will show Bauhaus: Art as Life, the biggest UK exhibition of the German modernist design school's work for 40 years. Later in the year the Serpentine gallery will exhibit the work of German artists Thomas Schütte and Hans-Peter Feldmann.

All five projects have been supported by the Goethe-Institut, founded to promote German culture, to celebrate its London branch's 50th anniversary and the reopening of its headquarters.

Yet they are far from the only Teutonic heavyweights hitting the UK. In the last few days alone, Saturday saw composer Heiner Goebbels play the Southbank Centre in London , while on Friday Nottingham's Capital FM arena reverberated to the sounds – and pyrotechnics – of Rammstein, the heavy metal band. Even Paul Weller, once a quintessential Britrocker, is getting in on the act: his forthcoming album Sonik Kicks is partly inspired by 70s Krautrock band Neu!

The rest of the world's growing preoccupation with German art was demonstrated in the title of an exhibition in New York last year curated by Anke Kempkes and the British critic Michael Bracewell: Germany is Your America.

For Sabine Hentzsch, director of the Goethe-Institut London, such an influx of German culture is the culmination of a process that began with unification, when clubbers and fans of electronic music from the east and west came together to give Berlin its pounding techno soundtrack. The other factor, she says, is Berlin's cheapness and thriving subculture, which has made it the adopted home of artists from around the world, including Britain's Douglas Gordon and Tacita Dean.

German artists have also settled in the UK, for instance Wolfgang Tillmans, who studied in Bournemouth and went on to win the Turner prize. In 2006 he told Butt magazine: "I liked the smell of English homes and bathrooms, the mix of a damp carpet and apricot scented potpourri … Marmite, the repressed but omnipresent sexuality, weak milky tea on a rainy afternoon by the sea, the spongy bread – basically all the things people don't like, and what one would see as signs of how pathetic and backwards England was, or is, I liked."

Dr Anja Baumhoff, lecturer in history of art and design at Loughborough University, who worked on the Barbican's Bauhaus show and has lived in the UK for eight years, believes the 2006 World Cup helped popularise German culture beyond artistic and intellectual circles.

Now, she says, "the fact that Germany is playing such a big political and economic role means that people are interested in what we're doing. It's not just a globalised world, it's a mobile world, and people are moving from the UK to travel back and forth from Berlin – it's not a big deal."

However, the artists themselves are less interested in representing Germany than exploring the ambiguities of being at the meeting point of several cultures. "If you travel a lot you feel a certain proximity to every culture but also a kind of distance," says Sehgal, who was born in London to a German mother and Indian father.

He points to his 2005 installation in the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale. There, three guards jumped out of their chairs and hopped around chanting in English: "This is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary!"

"In the German pavilion a heavy, relatively dark piece is expected. I decided to do something quite light, in English, with a touch of humour," Sehgal said. Not that this means his Turbine Hall installation will be German in tone: "We've been thinking a lot about English culture, but not in a direct way influencing the piece. I experience London as a crossroads. The Turbine Hall belongs to this increasingly global moment more than the Centre Pompidou, which opened 30 years ago – that's my feeling."

"London has been celebrating German art since Anthony D'Offay," says Dercon, referring to the gallerist who in the 80s represented some of the country's most significant artists, from Joseph Beuys to Gerhard Richter. "We are very well informed about what's going on in Germany and that's why the Geothe-Institut is saying let's go deeper and let's see where it's heading."

However, there are some aspects of German culture that still have little traction in the UK. Hentzsch says it is still difficult to find German contemporary authors in English translations in the UK. Baumhoff says that "the Brits don't like modernism – just look at Prince Charles".

Finally, there's pop music. "The Germans have embraced British culture for the last 50 years – big time," Sehgal says. "German pop music is on a much lower level of reception in Germany. There's no German Adele."

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/

 

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 best book on London, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam and Dublin? Check out city-pick in Culture Critic.

Guest Guide to City Literature...

CultureCritic | 18.July.2011 | 14:08

This week's guide offers a flash tour of some of the best fiction written about a few of Europe's biggest cities, courtesy of the folks behind the fantastic City-Lit series...

Malcolm Burgess and Heather Reyes run Oxygen Books and are the publishers of the city-lit titles, a series of books offering selections of the finest writing on their favourite world cities; a sort of literary travel guide, if you will. Taking in Woolf's Westminster, Christopher Isherwood's sordid Berlin underworld and Joyce's Dublin odyssey, they talk us through the impetus behind the series and their favourite books from their first five titles.    

Words: Malcolm Burgess & Heather Reyes

We were on the slopes of the Acropolis in the blazing heat three years ago and desperate to read a selection of contemporary writing about Athens. We had the heavy and slightly out-of-date guide books but there was nothing in them, or, we discovered later, in Athens' bookshops. There wasn't anything in London bookshops either. And so Oxygen Books and our city-pick series began, finding some of the best writing on cities we love, from fiction and non-fiction to journalism and blogs. Current titles include Berlin, Paris, London, Venice, Amsterdam and Dublin with New York out on 20 October and Istanbul and St Petersburg appearing next year. 

LONDON

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)

No matter how many times I read Mrs Dalloway, I enjoy it and find some new detail to wallow in. Finding oneself in London on a lovely summer's morning, the whole novel floods back and increases the pleasure of it all.

When we step out into the London streets on a brilliant June morning with Clarissa Dalloway, we begin a rich day (like Ulysses, the novel observes the classical 'unity of time' rule) that draws many aspects of the city and its people into the narrative. While it is a wonderful – and often very funny – celebration of the capital, Woolf doesn't ignore its darker side. Set in 1923, the aftermath of the First World War casts a shadow both in the character of the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith and in Mrs Dalloway's own state of health. The sound of Big Ben haunts the novel, suggesting human mortality but also a kind of joyous pride in London. The party at the novel's close feels like a celebration of city life and brings together the characters we have met or whose minds we have entered during the course of the day. Tragedy arrives in the midst of it all, but the overwhelming impression is of a deep appreciation of people in all their failings and complexities, and of the city itself, which is equally complex but elicits love too.

BERLIN  

Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (1939)

No matter how well you know the film Cabaret, going back to the book on which it was based is essential if you really want to get into those pre-Second World War years in Berlin. On the first page, Isherwood declares himself to be "a camera", and while this suggests a cool, objective take on events, one mustn't forget that a camera is selective and able to make us 'feel' through focusing on particular details. For me, it is this balance between the objective and subjective that makes the book work so well. Who can forget, once we have met her, the landlady of 'Herr Issyvoo', Fraulein Schroeder. While poking gentle fun, Isherwood treats her with an underlying generosity of spirit which he also applies to the "hopeless" Sally Bowles (not quite as striking and energetic as Liza Minelli in the film). Yes, there's plenty of good fiction set in Berlin, but I always go back to Isherwood when I want that satisfying blend of truth and pleasure.

AMSTERDAM  

H. M. van den Brink, On the Water translated by Paul Vincent (1998)

This is a short but truly memorable novel and reflects Amsterdam's deceptively quiet, considered nature, which conceals turbulence beneath. It is the story of two adolescent boys from very different backgrounds who find a deep friendship partly through their shared passion for being "on the water" during an ideal summer before the war. With the rise of fascism and the occupation, their world is destroyed and the more fortunate of the two boys, David, disappears. The focus on water helps one appreciate the various manifestations of this essential element of Amsterdam, but the historical setting reminds one of just what was lost to Europe as a whole through the spread of the Nazi regime. It's a quiet but powerful read that deserves to be better known – as do many Dutch writers of whom we remain shamefully ignorant.

DUBLIN  

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

No, I'm really not being pretentious when I say this is my favourite book on Dublin. I had made several (unsuccessful) attempts to get through it, but then came across the most marvellous Naxos recording (22 CDs), read by Jim Norton with Marcella Riordan as Molly Bloom, which simply made it work. And it really is one of the funniest, most touching, tragic, wide-ranging, thoroughly enjoyable books ever. But you have to hear it in an Irish voice. It deserves its reputation as one the great books of all time not only for its close observation of early 20th-century Dublin, but of human relationships of many kinds, and the great joys and sorrows that shape our lives. Yes, there's a brilliant (and often referred to) description of Leopold Bloom on the loo, but details often not mentioned include the fact that he and Molly lost their only child, little Rudi, as a baby. The subtle anti-semitism of Dublin society is also something Bloom has to deal with continually. And Joyce isn't just good on people: the description of the Bloom's cat is just brilliant.

PARIS 

Emile Zola, Ladies' Delight (1883)

Ladies' Delight (Au Bonheur des Dames), published in 1883, tells of the rise of Octave Mouret, and a new kind of Paris department store, based on the Left Bank's Le Bon Marche. But at its loudly throbbing heart – and this is the real story – is the rise of modern capitalism and consumerism on a scale never seen before. Although a man of the Left, Zola is able to give us the visceral feel of seemingly unlimited products and materials there for our delight, delectation and moral ruin, and our moral approbation if we can remember it.  Think Selfridges on a Saturday afternoon a week before Christmas and you'll get the picture.

Read more on the City-Lit series and order titles at www.oxygenbooks.co.uk.

Keep up to date on the latest City-Lit news, including upcoming titles here and by following the series on Twitter.

www.culturecritic.co.uk

 

'city-lit Berlin is a fantastic concept ...really gets you under the skin of a place' says Trains on the Brain

 

In tandem with my virtual trip planning buddy, I drew on Oxygen Books’ Berlin City Lit Guide. These guides are a fantastic concept, as they compile many short pieces of writing about a city, both fiction and factual, which really gets you under the skin of a place and can be easily read and digested while you’re actually exploring it.

The Berlin one includes accounts of David Bowie and Christopher Isherwood’s time in the city, reports from the frontline at the fall of the Wall and the oppressive lives of ordinary ‘Ossies’ when the Stasi seemed sinisterly omnipotent and omnipresent, alongside more recent accounts of the city’s multicultural flourishing from Ian Walker, Chloe Aridjis and Simon Cole. My only minor quibble with the book is that some of the passages are a little too short, but it definitely offers a great, immersive introduction to this very vibrant city.

www.trainsonthebrain.com

 

 

Check out the latest city-pick 2011-12 catalogue here (includes our new titles New York, Istanbul and St Petersburg)

Oxygen Books new catalogue has just arrived from the printers and we think it looks brilliant! All our current titles, plus city-pick New York, Istanbul and St Petersburg in special postcard-style format.

Do check it out here: Download Oxygen Books catalogue 2011-2012

If you'd like a copy sent to you please send your name and address details to: malcolm.burgess3@btopenworld.com

 

 

 

 

 

It needn't be chain store hell: let the European Bookstore Guide restore your faith in bookselling!

Berlin's always wonderful Marga Schoeller bookshop

Our web discovery of the month has to be The Bookstore Guide, an amazing labour of love A – Z city-by-city guide to European bookshops.

If you’re like us (and we think a lot of city-pick readers probably are) it’s not  long after arriving in a new city that you make a beeline for the bookshops. Always the English-language bookshops which are a fascinating world in themselves – these brave souls selling books in a language that many local residents don’t even read – and of course each city’s own native stores.

The Bookstore Guide, run by Sonja and Ivan, and updated regularly, lets us into the secrets of stores from Dublin and Paris to Moscow and Istanbul. Each one different, each one full of the subtly different flavours of that particular city. And what a treasure trove it is! Reading about the Marga Schoeller bookshop in Berlin is a good substitute for not looking through its shelves, while Paris’s Shakespeare and Company entry just encourages full blown Parisian nostalgie at the click of a button.

Bookstore visiting in foreign cities is an important part of anyone’s itinerary; it just feels a little less touristy with a chance to meet real locals and émigrés who like you are mad and passionate about books. It’s about digging deeper into the real life and soul of a city. Someone somewhere should start running  bibliographic tours of cities, most of which are deeply embedded in the history of their city. Marga Schoeller, for example, refused to sell Nazi literature; Shakespeare and Company, as well all know, has been the stuff of legends since it was first opened by Sylvia Beach. When we complain about the chain hell state of UK bookshops we can cheer ourselves up by seeing more thriving varieties, that are intellectual powerhouses into the bargain!

 Sonja and Ivan also provide reports on their recent visits to many of these cities; their Paris one, for example, is a wonderful companion for anyone visiting the city and who is keen to check out Paris bookstores.  If Sonja and Ivan aren’t book representatives perhaps they should be – or could add this to their portfolio of skills. They have Europe’s most unforgettable bookstores well and truly mapped!

Over the next couple of months we’d like to visit the bookshops of these cities on-line with you and hope we can all share our European bibliographic insanities together!