In a recent article in the Journal of European Studies entitled “Berlin in English: The German capital in recent Anglophone fiction,” David Anderson writes Look examines how Berlin, the German capital, appears in recent English-language fiction – and asks whether this means more than “literary tourism”.

Anderson is thinking of authors who have published works set in Berlin in recent years, “including Amit Chaudhuri, Adrian Duncan, Helon Habila, Hari Kunzru, Lauren Oyler, Chris Power, Bea Setton and Matthew Sperling.”

Berlin novels used to be about Nazis and spies. But the newer version, says Anderson, strikes a very different tone: “The expat is lured by cheaper rents, generous scholarships and a simpler, perhaps cooler, English-speaking lifestyle here – a kind of extended slacker life” – and “deals with universal themes like bad relationships, paranoia, fragile masculinity and geopolitical tensions” as well as things like “Berlin’s evolving tech scene.”

Anderson distinguishes between “Berlin literature” and “German literature”. The novels that interest him are set in and are in some way to They were published in Berlin, but evidently in English, and so are not part of the German literary tradition (although they are linked to it – as Anderson notes, there has been an ‘uproar’ in the German press about the supposed decline of the German language, and, moreover, English is accepted in Berlin in a way that other foreign languages ​​are not).

“Noticeably absent”

Anderson moves through earlier periods of English-language Berlin literature – the “Roaring Twenties”, the Third Reich and the Cold War – and then turns to works from 2000 onwards, in which the characters are mostly not “wannabe sophisticated German native speakers” but tourists and expats.

In the past, Berlin novels revolved around Nazis and spies.

Their authors thus run the risk of engaging with the cityscape only superficially – although, as Anderson also notes, the unstable or constantly changing psychology of characters is often of particular interest to writers of contemporary Berlin literature, in a way that they sometimes write as if it were reflected in the city itself. But the divisions between the history of Berlin and Germany – these, Anderson says, are “conspicuously absent” from today’s English-language Berlin novels.

In all novels, the protagonists have recently moved to Berlin, but they “address migration in different ways” and their protagonists (and, some would argue, authors) have varying degrees of self-awareness.

Anderson ultimately concludes that “these novels do indeed have valuable things to say, particularly in terms of the way in which the literary imagination of the city is being adapted to the digital age.” Digital technologies “both accelerate and complicate” the characters’ adaptation to the city, creating in them a sense of connection but also of isolation.

Perhaps this is as significant as engaging with the history of the city’s division, or at least in a different way: as Anderson writes, “digital technologies shape the experience of urban space, producing an urban experience that is both local and global, sometimes contributing to acute experiences of disorientation, and relevant to understanding the contemporary city as such and Berlin in particular.” And he suggests that literary topography, even outside a city’s native language, can also be helpful in understanding its contemporary urban space.