Here in Berlin is portrait of a city through snapshots, an excavation of the stories and ghosts of contemporary Berlin; its complex, troubled past still pulsing in the air as it was during the years of World War II. Critically acclaimed novelist Cristina Garcia brings the people of this famed city alive, their stories bristling with regret, desire, and longing.
An unnamed Visitor travels to Berlin with a camera looking for reckonings of her own. The city itself is a character—vibrant and post-apocalyptic, flat and featureless except for its rivers, its lakes, its legions of bicyclists. Here in Berlin she encounters a people’s history: the Cuban teen taken as a POW on a German submarine for five months, only to return home to a family who doesn’t believe him; the young Jewish scholar whose husband hides her in a sarcophagus until he can find them safe passage to England; the female lawyer haunted by a childhood of deprivation in the bombed-out suburbs of Berlin who still defends those accused of war crimes, setting personal guilt against the larger flow of history; a young nurse with a checkered past who joins the Reich on the Russian front, at a medical facility more intent to dispense with the wounded than to heal them; and the son of a zookeeper at The Berlin Zoo, fighting to keep the animals safe from both war and an increasingly starving populace.
A meditation on war and mystery in the spirit of Christopher Isherwood and Robert Walser’s classic Berlin Stories, this an exciting new work by one of our most gifted novelists, one that seeks to align the stories of the past with the stories of the future.
Reviews
- Long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence
- 1 of the 10 Best Books of 2017 (BBC Culture)
- The New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
- An ALA Notable Book of 2018
From The New York Times Sunday Book Review:
A Capital City, Still Haunted by Its Past
O.K., granted I’m a sucker for anything to do with Berlin, so you may want to weigh my opinion with that in mind. But it strikes me that Cristina García’s “Here in Berlin” is one of the most interesting new works of fiction I’ve read.
It’s billed as a novel, but there are few (if any) novels that take a similar form. In 35 separate monologues, plus five italicized sections describing the unnamed Visitor who elicits these interview statements, García presents a portrait of the city that is at once true and imaginary. The Visitor herself — a middle-aged Cuban-American woman who has gone through two divorces, has a grown daughter, intensely dislikes her own mother and has acquired German during a previous stay in Frankfurt — bears an acknowledged resemblance to the author, but this book is not a personal travel diary. Referring to herself in the third person, the narrator chooses, as she says, to “indulge the luxury of a more distant perspective.” Only the Berliners she speaks with have an explicit “I,” and it is through the mosaic of their perspectives that we learn the true character of Germany’s ghost-filled capital, in which the remembered or purposefully forgotten past seems as alive as the present.
The voices are remarkably distinct, and even their linguistic mannerisms — with interpolations of bits of German, multiple ways of rendering or evading the facts and direct addresses to someone who is variously referred to as “Kind Visitor,” “Dear Visitor,” “Liebe” and “Schätzchen” — mark them out as separate people. They include a tango-dancing lesbian, a flower-seller from Vietnam, a nurse, a lawyer, an antique dealer, an ophthalmologist born in Africa, a number of former Nazis, several women raped by Russian soldiers, a limping ballerina, an East German cultural official assigned to invent a pop-dance craze and a photojournalist with amnesia. There are overlaps among their stories — three or four are patients of the Angolan eye doctor and many of them seem to inhabit the same old-age home or haunt the same cemetery — so the novel does begin to cohere as the stories accumulate. But it never arrives at a fixed definition, either of the city or its inhabitants, and that is partly what makes it so accurate a portrait of both.
García’s version of Berlin contains perhaps a disproportionate number of Cubans, brought to Germany mainly through the Havana/East Berlin Communist nexus and introduced to the narrator through her own Cuban connections. But that too is characteristic of the general experience. Arriving in this city of exiles, the foreign visitor inevitably encounters a number of erstwhile compatriots, so it is no surprise that this Cuban-born writer should find others of her kind. And in fact she was led to Berlin in the first place by a fellow Cuban she calls A., an appealing character in his own right:
“A. had been gratefully (his word) married to the same German woman for 20 years. Her family hailed from Hoyerswerda, and never forgave A. for taking their daughter away. They called him ‘the Negro’ and ‘the Mexican’ and once sang the Horst Wessel Song in his presence. ‘The family is a police state,’ the Visitor said, describing how minuscule stages lit up inside her, repeating key scenes from her life. ‘Do people remember only what they can endure, or distort memories until they can endure them?’ After a long silence, A. said: ‘Childhood is a city you never leave. In Berlin’s past, we seek our own.’ ”
We can none of us ever get entirely free of our ghosts, either personal or national, and Berlin, with its peculiar history of destruction and division, seems designed to bring that realization to the fore.
Given that García began her professional life as a journalist, a reader might imagine that the whole book consists of near-literal transcriptions of actual interviews. But about a third of the way through we are introduced to Maganhildi Koertig, a 2-foot-10 woman living in an insane asylum; she claims to have been matched up (“on the basis of vertical compatibility alone”) with the diminutive Oskar Matzerath, a fellow inmate who owned a set of “battered tin drums.” I know far less about German literature than García evidently does, so I can’t say how often in the book this happens, but here, at least, I recognized that we had left the real Berlin and entered the realm of Günter Grass’s fiction. And that, in turn, made me wonder how many of her other characters were either made up entirely or borrowed from novels and stories — an uncertainty that only added to my admiration.
García’s much-praised earlier works, which dealt with her Cuban background, were published by major New York presses; yet this more ambitious novel, in which she transcends her own life story to tread delicately on the turf staked out by Christa Wolf and W. G. Sebald, has been released by a small press in California. Is this because big-time literary publishing can no longer tolerate seriousness of purpose? Or is it that a Cuban writer is expected to remain a Cuban writer, locked into her assigned box so as to reach her target audience? This novel, in any case, bears none of the obvious trappings of commercial success. It is not suspense-filled. It is not heartwarming. It is simply very, very good.
“An exhilarating orchestration of competing voices and temporalities . . . Here in Berlin is a marvelous palimpsest.” — San Francisco Chronicle
“Garcia’s new novel is ingeniously structured, veering from poignant to shocking . . . Here in Berlin has echoes of W.G. Sebald, but its vivid, surprising images of wartime Berlin are Garcia’s own.” — BBC Culture, 1 of the 10 Best Books of 2017
“With the vividness―and unreliability―of a fevered hallucination, [the characters] tell haunting, and occasionally intersecting, stories that last only a few pages but linger much longer . . . The novel’s many excellent characters and their stories combine to create a sense of a city where, as an amnesiac photojournalist puts it, the ghosts ‘aren’t confined to cemeteries.’” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“García . . . is a skilled writer, crafting a complete story from the threads of many glimpses. In the assembly of these glimpses, she has created a vivid portrait of a decimated yet surging Berlin since World War II, of individuality and humankind, of terror and resilience. It is beautifully written in a fluent and evocative prose. It is the story of how people live with their pasts. A stunning collection of memories, snippets, and specters.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“This novel touches on complex themes such as exile, memory, and life in wartime.” — Library Journal
“Here in Berlin is a bold, innovative novel. García gives each speaker just enough space to illuminate lives and choices that might seem shocking in the present, but however uncomfortable they may be, she proves that these stories of war and belief and the failure of moral clarity are ultimately too important for the reader to look away.” — Dallas Morning News
“Ingeniously structured, veering from poignant to shocking, Here in Berlin couldn’t be more relevant.”— BBC Culture
“A vivid portrait of a city in flux, Here in Berlin follows an unnamed visitor as she encounters a host of characters, from a young Cuban POW and the son of a Berlin zookeeper to a Jewish scholar who hid in a sarcophagus for 37 days.” — PureWow, 1 of 50 Best Books for Fall
“The stories that comprise Here in Berlin are beautifully related with a perfectly pitched sense of melancholy and pathos, bound into a delicate yet powerful whole by The Visitor’s own struggles to preserve and renew her sense of self while forming a new perspective to live by . . . García successfully projects this truth by grounding extraordinary stories within the fabric of the everyday, while also defamiliarizing territory we presume to know well.” — Chicago Review of Books
“A compulsively readable, kaleidoscopic novel depicting a multicultural Berlin in the shadow of World War II, transformed by history as well as newcomers from Cuba, Angola, and Russia.” — The National Book Review, 1 of 5 Hot Books of the Week
“Here in Berlin is an impeccable linguistic exercise in narratology and a brilliant exploration of the various identities we adhere to in metropolitan environments. García successfully rehumanizes a German postwar trauma of a populace that for so long coped with the making anonymous of people through genocide, the deadening speed of its capitalist structures, and the oppressive world of East Berlin. As for her readers, García adeptly passes them the torch, giving them a little nook in which they can sit and watch the characters go about their lives, spectating and writing, in the intransitive, the city of Berlin.” — Los Angeles Review of Books
“A strong achievement of diversity―the gradual painting of a mural with many masterful brush strokes, and an expert parroting whose characters’ egotism, recriminations, and melancholy all feel authentic.” — Literal Magazine
“A quilt of a novel that creates a hypnotic portrait of the former East German city during and after World War II . . . A poetic pastiche of rationalizations and regrets, and a testament to the challenge of reconciling a difficult past.” — BookPage
“A well-written book on people, war, and mystery, each encounter the unnamed visitor, and the reader, has is wonderfully human: equally gritty, hard to bear, joyful, and fascinating.” — BookTrib
“A jarring and haunting choral work of remembrance and pragmatism, pride and regret. The characters, subtly linked by past deeds . . . reveal a staggering array of war and postwar experiences. García, a transcendentally imaginative, piquantly satiric, and profoundly compassionate novelist, dramatizes the helter-skelter of lives ruptured by tyranny, war, and political upheavals with sharp awareness of unlikely multicultural alliances . . . With echoes of W. G. Sebald and Günter Grass, García has created an intricate, sensitive, and provocative montage revolving around the question: “Do people remember only what they can endure, or distort memories until they can endure them?” — Booklist, Donna Seaman (starred review)