Berlin Stories

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

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

Spanning more than a century, this collection of stories reflects Berlin's rich and turbulent history, chronicling the creative ferment of the Weimar Republic, the devastation of wartime, the cruel divisions of the Berlin Wall, and the aftermath of reunification. Classics by Theodor Fontane and Robert Walser provide a window on privileged society at the turn of the century. Alfred Döblin, Erich Kastner, Vladimir Nabokov, and Christopher Isherwood illuminate the frenetic Golden Twenties and the ruinous crash that followed, while marginal youths roam the city's seamy underside in Irmgard Keun's The Artificial Silk Girl and Ernst Haffner's Blood Brothers. The hero of Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again visits a city shadowed by Hitler's rise, while in Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin a working-class couple quietly resists the Nazis. Cold War espionage enlivens works by Len Deighton and Ian McEwan; Christa Wolf's They Divided the Sky and Peter Schneider's The Wall Jumper depict the Berlin Wall's impact on a personal scale; and Thomas Brussig's Stasi officers engage in meaningless surveillance in Heroes Like Us. Günter Grass shows us German reunification through the eyes of an elderly Luftwaffe veteran while Uwe Timm does so through a writer's madcap wanderings in a bewildering post-Wall landscape. Finally, more recent arrivals--from Chloe Aridjis's Mexican-Jewish university student in Book of Clouds to the desperate African refugees in Jenny Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone--bear witness to Berlin's continuing evolution as an arena of the possible.

Foreword
 
Theodor Fontane, from Effi Briest
 
Robert Walser, The Little Berliner
 
Alfred Döblin, from Berlin Alexanderplatz
 
Vladimir Nabokov, from King, Queen, Knave
 
Erich Kästner, from Going to the Dogs
 
Ernst Haffner, from Blood Brothers
 
Irmgard Keun, from The Artificial Silk Girl
 
Christopher Isherwood, A Berlin Diary: Winter 1932 3
 
Thomas Wolfe, The Dark Messiah
 
Hans Fallada, from Alone in Berlin
 
Heinz Rein, Berlin, April 1945
 
Peter Schneider, from The Wall Jumper
 
Thomas Brussig, from Heroes Like Us
 
Len Deighton, from Funeral in Berlin
 
Christa Wolf, from They Divided the Sky
 
Ian McEwan, from The Innocent
 
Günter Grass, The Diving Duck
 
Wladimir Kaminer, Business Camouflage
 
Chloe Aridjis, from Book of Clouds
 
Uwe Timm, The Reichstag, Wrapped
 
Kevin Barry, Berlin Arkonaplatz My Lesbian Summer
 
Jean-Philippe Toussaint, from Television
 
Jenny Erpenbeck, from Go, Went, Gone