Review by New York Times Review
WHEN THE GERMAN WRITER Peter Schneider published "The Wall Jumper," his celebrated elliptical novella about the divided Berlin of the Cold War, in 1982, the city's central importance to the 20th century was unquestioned. First the kaiser and then the Führer had touched off world wars from Germany's capital. And when the world was split between Soviet and American blocs, Berlin could rightly claim to be the front line. The concrete barrier zigzagging through its streets stood as the tangible symbol of that division. President John F. Kennedy's 1963 Berlin speech is best remembered for the phrase "Ich bin ein Berliner," but before his indelible German declaration he said more broadly, "All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin." Caring about what happened in Berlin meant caring about what happened everywhere, lending added significance to works like "The Wall Jumper" or the Wim Wenders film "Wings of Desire." Now, 25 years after the fall of the wall, the city is once again the object of intense fascination - not because of Chancellor Angela Merkel's influence over European fiscal policies but because bohemian young people are moving to the city from every part of the globe and clubbing all night. It's Berlin as Ibiza or Cancun, but with bad weather. In "Berlin Now," Schneider seeks to explain why the city became "the capital of creative people from around the world today," attracting artists, D.J.s and software developers from Tokyo, Tel Aviv and all points in between. He also tackles the interconnected question of how, once Berlin "burst out of the shackles of reinforced concrete, barbed wire and iron bars ... the severed veins and limbs of the divided city fused back together." The most famous line from "The Wall Jumper" was Schneider's statement that "it will take us longer to tear down the wall in our heads than any wrecking company will need for the wall we can see." Indeed, Schneider finds himself following round-about routes through the reunified city defined by the path of the now absent wall, "taking the old detours. Nothing seemed more difficult to me than driving straight from west to east." He recounts the debates over how to rebuild the central but long-abandoned square known as Potsdamer Platz, and describes the fight over destroying the East German Parliament building and replacing it with a facsimile of the old Prussian palace that preceded it. Even a quarter-century after the wall's demolition, the city has a strikingly unfinished quality, full of gaps and absences. Schneider identifies "the weirdness, perpetual incompleteness and outlandishness of Berlin," not as a failing but as an attraction. A jewel of a city like Dubrovnik or Venice feels like a closed circuit, a finished book. "Imperfection, incompleteness - not to say ugliness - afford a sense of freedom that compact beauty never can," he writes. For centuries Berlin has had something of a chip on its shoulder. It lacks the ancient ruins of Rome or the sophisticated beauty of Paris. It is landlocked and flat, with a climate that can be frigid, gray and unpleasant up to eight months out of the year. "Imagine Geneva, lost in a desert," Balzac wrote in 1843, "and you have an idea of Berlin." THAT QUOTATION SURFACES in another book timed to the 25 th anniversary of the fall of the wall by the Canadian travel writer Rory MacLean. With a few exceptions, "Berlin: Portrait of a City Through the Centuries" is a series of loose biographical sketches of both famous and everyday Berliners, past and present. The very first concerns a 15th-century poet and singer, Konrad von Cölln, who was prone to debauchery. He had his tongue cut out for defying Prince-Elector Irontooth, and was then executed. MacLean sees the dualities of sex and violence, freedom and fascism as central to the city's character and its appeal. A worker in a factory kitchen inadvertently kills herself trying to induce a miscarriage by eating the tips of 160 phosphorous matches. A courtesan becomes the model for the golden angel at the top of the Siegessäule, or victory column, featured prominently in "Wings of Desire." Leni Riefenstahl, Albert Speer and Joseph Goebbels are juxtaposed with Christopher Isherwood, Marlene Dietrich and David Bowie. MacLean acknowledges Alexandra Richie's comprehensive doorstopper of Berlin history, "Faust's Metropolis" (worth the time of any dedicated student of the city's history), and his book reads at times like a breezy companion to that work. But what is real and what is not in MacLean's stories is often unclear. He tells of a Vietnamese immigrant to East Germany and in the notes writes: "The truth of the story - although not its facts - was checked by author and translator Nguyen Ngoc Bich." The British edition of the book was called "Berlin: Imagine a City," which better alerts readers to the blend of fact and fiction. Both MacLean and Schneider restore a sense of the importance of Berlin's vanished industrial might, crippled by Allied bombing, stripped by the Soviets as reparations after the war and finally starved by the wall surrounding it. The makeshift galleries and pop-up clubs of recent vintage are staged on its ruins. "The landmarks of Berlin are old gasometers and water towers, deserted hospitals, disused airports, onetime docks, vacant train stations, abandoned C.I.A. surveillance facilities and Stasi prisons," Schneider writes, "moldy bunker and tunnel complexes from two dictatorships and warehouses of all kinds." On a visit to the converted bunker of the art collector Christian Boros, Schneider recalls his own time in bunkers as a boy during the war, "the absence of sounds: the anxious silence among hundreds of women and children, loud screams when bombs strike nearby, the wait for a sign that danger has passed." Seventy years later he finds himself "unsettled" by a sound installation where microphones amplify the hum of "coldly glowing fluorescent tubes." Too often, however, Schneider settles for pontificating - on subjects ranging from the sexual differences between East and West German women to the perils posed by Muslim immigrants. He quotes a study that he says revealed "a clear relationship between Islamic piety and the propensity toward violence," and repeats a Berlin politician's assertion that "there are also Turks and Arabs who aren't stupid. It's these kids that we need to help against their parents." Schneider praises his straight talk, calling him a "natural-born tribune." One turns to MacLean for an apt rejoinder. He points out that "Berlin was never an ethnic German city. Its poor land and isolated location had made its survival dependent on incomers," citing the waves of Franks, Flemings and Rhinelanders, of Danes, Jews and Poles. Frederick the Great "even mooted building a mosque to attract Muslims, 250 years before the arrival of the first Turkish Gastarbeiter." Today, as global economies continue to sputter through the aftereffects of the Great Recession, the German capital has come to feel like a day care facility for college-educated Americans and Europeans. The nightclub lines ring with brash Spanish chatter and lilting Irish accents. Gallery openings are packed with New Yorkers playacting a vision of the city filtered through the novels of Isherwood and the music of Bowie. Most will go home, provisioned with a few outré stories to be told later, in stolid, responsible middle age. Those who remain will contribute to the city's mutable legacy and its enduring character. NICHOLAS KULISH, formerly the Berlin bureau chief for The Times, is now a correspondent in New York. His most recent book, written with Souad Mekhennet, is "The Eternal Nazi: From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 2, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* How might one portray in one book both the history of a city and its presence upon one's imagination? Can the dynamic spirit of a city in this context, the German word, Geist, seems appropriate ever be captured with mere words? For Berlin, the scarred nucleus of twentieth-century Europe, the challenge may seem nearly impossible to meet yet somehow irresistible. For MacLean, the solution is to draw upon both the historian's and the novelist's faculties and describe this city of fragments and ghosts with imaginative glimpses into the lives of twenty-three Berliners from five centuries of history. Some are household names Frederick the Great, Käthe Kollwitz, Christopher Isherwood, Marlene Dietrich, Joseph Goebbels, and David Bowie (with whom MacLean collaborated on films in the 1970s). Others, like the forgotten poet violently silenced by a despot called Irontooth in the fifteenth century, are more obscure but, MacLean suggests, no less instrumental in shaping the city's character. As their stories weave into one, patterns and commonalities emerge, and the reader, too, is invited to inhabit Berlin with them, taking part as the city reinvents itself, reconciling a mythic idea of itself with its bitter, bloody, buoyant past. The result is sprawling, experimental, and in certain moments, ungainly but also deeply enthralling, much like the city itself.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Review. The admiration and love travel writer and filmmaker MacLean ( Stalin's Nose ) has for Berlin is evident throughout this history of the city, which begins in the 17th century. His careful arrangement of detail and far-reaching scope make for a perfect description of e one of Europe's most enigmatic and controversial cities. When Berlin was just a small town, isolated from the busier marketplaces in what is now Germany, it was a city incapable of tenderness, one that only ran fiery hot or bitter cold. As he moves through the years, depicting the horrors of the Thirty Years' War and the establishment of the Prussian state, the narrative's tempo picks up. MacLean visits new eras in each successive chapter (assigning all of them with a theme and representative figure), engulfing readers in the atmosphere of the city and the lives of Berliners both ordinary and noteworthy. It's when he explores the minds of Berlin's modern masters--particularly Marlene Dietrich and David Bowie, with whom the author made films --that MacLean reveals his prowess as a storyteller, flawlessly weaving together history, facts, and folklore. Moreover, MacLean's treatment of Berlin under The Third Reich and during the Cold War perfectly reflects the tension of the city's own attempts at remembrance. MacLean brings this city of fragments and ghosts, with its fractured and volatile past, to life. Photos. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
MacLean tells the story of Berlin through a collection of essays about its people, past and present. He captures the city's fortunes and spirit by including the stories of artists, activists, authors, scientists, soldiers, and political leaders. The author's love for Berlin and its multifaceted history is demonstrated by his expressive and entertaining storytelling. In the afterward, MacLean explains his approach to his book thusly, "Berlin is a city of the imagination" and uses creative nonfiction throughout to expand upon both truths and misconceptions that have haunted the city throughout the years. The bibliography allows readers to "unpick the parts which have been combined to create the whole" but does not clearly distinguish which sections are fact and which are more akin to historical fiction. VERDICT The mix of historical fiction, nonfiction, and personal narrative will frustrate the serious historian seeking scholarly material on this enigmatic German metropolis, but it will engage readers who welcome MacLean's use of different writing forms to propel the account.-Beth Dalton, Littleton, CO (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Berlin's greatest hits, from the age of the medieval troubadour to David Bowie's "Heroes." Canadian travel writer MacLean (Gift of Time: A Family's Diary of Cancer, 2011, etc.) walks through Berlin's fluctuating, unstable past and plucks personalities that best represent the spirit of the city, good or evil, reaching all the way back to the 15th century. He seeks "to map this place, divided as it is between past and present, conformity and rebellion, the visible and the invisible." Berlin, writes the author, "was never an ethnic German city," but it always attracted newcomers; during times of plague, there were influxes of Franks, Flemings, Rhinelanders and Danes, as well as Jewsthe oldest Jewish gravestone is from 1244. The accession of the austerely militaristic Calvinist Hohenzollern dynasty transformed Berlin from a garrison to a great and beautiful city under the enlightened despot Frederick the Great, who was able to lure Voltaire there to live and work in 1750. MacLean's minibiographies underscore the highly idiosyncratic temperament these characters imparted to the city, and in his own fictionalized, stylized portraits, he offers the artistically brilliantsuch as 19th-century architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, whose Altes Museum, among other fantastically neoclassical creations, helped forge a sense of a capital cityas well as the obscure and mythical, such as Silesian factory worker Lilli Neuss, a terrible casualty of the mid-19th-century industrial revolution, whose husband deserted her and took their son, leaving her to an impecunious and miserable fate. The city nurtured plenty of evil, as welle.g., Fritz Haber, the chemist who won the Nobel Prize and offered effective chemical warfare to the Kaiser in 1915 in the form of chlorine; and Hitler's fanatical mythmakers, including Leni Riefenstahl, Albert Speer and Joseph Goebbels. A series of imaginative and fanciful narrative segmentsa history that is not all gloom and doom. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
