Wandering Berlin with Theodor Fontane

I had the pleasure of spending a few days trooping around Berlin, getting to know the city a little bit.  A lot more than the glimpse of it I got fifteen years ago, which was hardly any help at all.  Berlin has changed so much, and so quickly; been destroyed and rebuilt in cycles.  It is still rebuilding and shifting, perhaps not as rapidly as in the 1990s, although there are still construction cranes all over.

Many years ago I was in a book club that read Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest (1895).  Several readers noted that they had difficulties with the place names and settings (in Berlin and a Baltic coast town).  They had few referents for Berlin, almost none compared to Paris or London, cities we visit in literature so often that their landmarks take on meaning regardless of whether we have been there ourselves.  We create our own geography out of books, films, and news, much of it wrong but imaginatively functional.  For English-language readers, Berlin is more nebulous.

And then they keep changing it!  Literary Vienna may be unfamiliar, too, but the Vienna of Schnitzler still exists in some way.  Fontane’s Berlin is harder to find.

Commercial Councillor van der Straaten, of 4 Grosse Petristrasse, was incontestably one of the most substantial financiers in the capital, a fact scarcely affected by the circumstance that his solid reputation rested more on his business than on his personality.

L’Adultera / The Woman Taken in Adultery (1882), one of Fontane’s earliest novellas.  Title first (and for English readers that title needs a footnote), then surname, then address, as if I might send him a postcard.  The street has changed its name along with its character.  Their apartment has been replaced with either a parking lot or a Novotel. But he is right in the center of the city, on the Museum Island, in the middle of things, where a man of his stature ought to be.  Or so I understand now that I have looked into it.

The Penguin Classics edition, translated by Gabrielle Annan, that includes L’Adultera pairs it with the later, more exquisite, nearly plotless The Poggenpuhl Family (1896), about an aristocratic family in decline.  The address is delayed to the second sentence this time – “Since they had moved to Berlin from Pommersch-Stargard seven years ago they had lived in a corner house in the Grossgröschenstrasse, a new building only just completed and still damp in the walls when they arrived.”  I was not quite in the vicinity, but close enough to suspect that their apartment, if it survived the war, is now the home of a Turkish or Bosnian family.  Grossgröschenstrasse is definitely not in the center of things.

My guess, for what it’s worth, is that Pommersch-Stargard is now in Poland.

All of this would have been easy shorthand for Fontane’s readers.  Some of it is easy for current German readers.  But I have to, or at least should, look up every street and park.  Eh, once upon a time I did not know where Kew Gardens or the Bois de Boulogne were, either, or what it might mean if a character set foot in them, but that’s old stuff now.

With great sadness, with longing - the Berlin stories of David Bergelson

The Shadows of Berlin: The Berlin Stories of Dovid Bergelson (2005) is an attractive little City Lights collection of eight stories. The indefatigable Joachim Neugroschel is the translator and anthologizer. It's a tiny book - 116 petite pages - and a fine collection of Bergelson, with a bit more variety of mood then some of the other sources of Bergelson stories.

"The Boarding House of the Three Sisters" is, for example, a wry comedy. Three young women run a Berlin boarding house. Two have husbands who are, um, elsewhere. All three are, frankly, hotties. Dang fool men pay excessive rent because, because, you know, what if -. One boarder even confides to another that it's all a trick, that the husbands are here in Berlin.

"By now it is late. The two boarders separate and go to bed very sadly, but with latent hopes that perhaps... yes... perhaps... perhaps they are wrong. The two men draw up their accounts of how much the boarding house can cost them so far, and both of them muse about who will do something either now or later on..."

Mostly, I criticize writers for vagueness, but here it is psychologically acute. Those poor fools.

"For 12,000 Bucks He Fasts Forty Days: Scenes of Berlin" is a response or recasting, or, really, a Judaizing, of Kafka's "The Hunger Artist" (1922). It's all in good humor, too, except for the part about the destruction of Europe. Weird thing, this is the second Yiddish relative of "The Hunger Artist" I've read recently. I'll save the other for tomorrow.

The catastrophe of World War I and the Russian Revolution is in the background of every story in the collection. That's why Bergelson's characters (and Bergelson) are in Berlin. They're mostly refugees. These stories are the Jewish cousins of Nabokov's Berlin stories, set amongst the exiled Russians, except that Bergelson is not such a happy fellow.

"Two Murderers," for example. One murderer is a landlady's dog, one is a Cossack leader. They have both done horrible things. At the end of the story, they reach an understanding:

"Now the two of them were alone in the kitchen - Zarembo and Tell. One sat on a chair at the table, the other lay on the small throw rug, resting his head on his extended front paws. There was silence all around them. Both of them were peering into each other's eyes with great sadness, with longing."

Maybe that doesn't seem like much on its own. Knowing what the murderers have done, though - it's chilling.

The longest, and perhaps best, story is "Among Refugees." A young man discovers that the Russian officer who killed his grandfather, and many others, is living in the same boarding house, across the hall from him. He appeals to other Berlin Jews to help him acquire a gun, so he can assassinate the officer. They refuse, but because they lack will, not out of principle. This is a common problem in Bergelson stories - even when people do the right thing, it's for the wrong reason. So this story goes in the "bleak" pile.

The Shadows of Berlin is, I think, the best place to get to know this difficult, rewarding writer.