Berlin: Literary Tourism

Mariangela Traficante (freelance journalist and content editor, Italy)

The German Capital, Berlin, is an impressive place where history can be breathed and has always inspired stories. From U-Bahn stations hiding WWII shelters to the tremendous open-air street art gallery along the ex-Berlin Wall, from the iconic Alexanderplatz to the Golden 1920s Schöneberg or Teufelsberg as a perfect set for a spy story, Berlin can be visited as an open book following the paths of writers such as Alfred Döblin, Christopher Isherwood, Christa Wolf, and Thomas Brussig, among others. In addition to its literary legacy, the city still offers many places dedicated to literature and culture for both literary tourists and professionals. Once a divided city and the torn heart of Europe, Berlin has, since reunification, witnessed many significant changes in its urban landscape and social and economic fabric, which continue to enhance its charm. A change that has turned the city into an increasingly appealing tourist destination. Literature can play a pivotal role in city marketing (Weiss-Sussex, 2006) by promoting its contemporary literary scene as part of Berlin’s cultural diversity and by using Berlin literature to convey the city’s historically determined identity.

Literature is made and displayed at many places in Berlin nowadays, and it was also in the past, for instance, in literary cafes, many of which unfortunately don’t exist anymore. One was the Romanisches Café in Breitscheidplatz, among whose patrons were Bertolt Brecht and Alfred Döblin. It was destroyed during the WWII bombing. The Café des Westens opened in 1893 and became another meeting place for writers and artists (Culicchia, 2022). The tradition of literary cafés and clubs in Berlin (as well as in the rest of the country) dates back to the eighteenth century. Berlin’s literary scene could offer societies such as the Wednesday Club and independent literary salons that emulate French formats.

Among the first to write about the social reality of Berlin and Brandenburg was Theodor Fontane, in Ramblings through Brandenburg (1862) and in fictional works like Frau Jenny Treibel (1892). The same year, Mark Twain described the city as a Chicago on the Spree in an essay in his The Chicago of Europe (Sullivan & Krueger, 2016).

With the turn of the century, many cultural movements have influenced literature, such as Expressionism, Dadaism and Surrealism. Since then, writers and artists have depicted the transformation, historical challenges, and turning points in the city’s life, and of Europe, of course. This can be experienced by visiting sites that are key to understanding the changes the city has undergone and how they are conveyed in literature. Before turning into the heart of East Berlin, for instance, Alexanderplatz was a vibrant centre of city life already back in the ‘20s, a time when Berlin Alexanderplatz was written by Alfred Döblin, in 1929: the modernist novel follows the steps of Franz Biberkopf, who, once out of prison, is determined to live honestly and try to, before life sets a different fate for him. Alexanderplatz no longer exists, as it was completely rebuilt in the 1960s after being destroyed during World War II. However, by turning the pages of Döblin’s novel, one can trace its origins and compare it with the present day.

In the so-called Roaring 1920s, Berlin was home to several cabarets, jazz cafès, and queer clubs, and Schöneberg was one of the liveliest and most nonconformist districts. Those years, balancing between the bright and free mood of the Golden 1920s and the approaching decadence and darkness due to the financial depression and to the Nazis rising to power, were witnessed by English writer Christopher Isherwood. The author arrived in Berlin in 1929 and, in Goodbye to Berlin, first published in 1939, described the last years of the Weimar Republic on the verge of decay. Artists and bohemians used to spend the night in clubs like the well-known Eldorado, Marlene Dietrich’s favourite, as well as Goya’s. The novel has inspired the musical Cabaret.

Literature-related spots in Berlin that evoke the 1930s include the Versunkene Bibliothek (The Sunken Library, also known as The Empty Library). It is a spatial installation by the Israeli sculptor Micha Ullman. It is located on the ground – or better, under – in Bebelplatz, along Unter den Linden Avenue. It is a sort of underground room with empty bookshelves visible beneath the glass plate set into the paving stones.

It is a memorial dedicated to the tragic book burning that took place here on 10 May 1933. On that day, members of the Nazi German Student Union and their professors burnt as many as 20.000 books by authors on the blacklist, considered enemies of the German spirit. The list included Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Heinrich and Klaus Mann, Rosa Luxemburg, and Stefan Zweig, among others. Many of them had already left Germany and gone into exile. The memorial was unveiled on 20 March 1995.

From the twenties through World War II to the post-war years: many books by German authors – and not only – convey stories inspired by and related to the Wall and the Cold War years. Cold War Berlin was also a perfect set for spy stories and novels depicting those decades of tension.

The prominent Berlin landmark, The Wall, can be visited as a critical literary place in the city. It divided Berlin – and Germany – from 1961 to 1989 (Blakemore, 2019).  The short end of the Sonnenallee (Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee), first published in 1999, is a story set in the German Democratic Republic that explores what it felt like to be a teenager in East Berlin behind the Iron Curtain, told in a moving and ironic voice. Thomas Brussig (Berlin, 1964), the author, was born and raised in East Germany. The Wall divided families and lives and led to hard decisions. It is masterfully told by Christa Wolf (Landsberg an der Warthe, 1929 – Berlin 2011) in Divided Heaven (Der geteilte Himmel), first published in 1963, only two years after the building of the Wall. It tells the story of the love relationship between Rita and Manfred. Wolf lived in the GDR and initially endorsed socialist Germany, then shifted to criticism. Her novel tells the story of a couple who end up broken, like the city itself, as Manfred decides to flee to the West in search of freedom. After following him at first, Rita comes back to East Berlin instead.

There are several places in Berlin that recall the Wall, even though the Cold War years are hard to trace due to the radically changed urban landscape.

The most famous Wall landmark in Berlin is the East Side Gallery, along Mühlenstraße, where the remains of the concrete barrier stand for 1,3 km and, since 1990, have become an open-air street-art site, thanks to around a hundred murals painted by artists from all over the world. Among the best-known are The Mortal Kiss, by Dimitrji Vrubel, depicting Erich Honecker and Leonid Brezhnev kissing, or Test the Best, by Birgit Kinder, showing a Trabant – the car model of G – breaking through the Wall.

Ian McEwan has chosen the 1950s as a timeframe for his The Innocent (1990). The main character, Leonard Marnham, is a British technician assigned to a British-American surveillance team in Cold War Berlin, tunnelling under a Russian communications centre to tap the phone lines to Moscow.

A master of espionage novels, John le Carré, chose Berlin in the Sixties as a set for The Spy who came from the Cold (1963), in which the British author tells the story of Alec Leamas, a British agent being sent here and ordered to discredit an East German official. From fiction to reality: these espionage reminiscences can be found visiting places like Teufelsberg (literally Devil’s Mountain), a former US listening station on the top of a 114-metre-high hill made of rubble in Grunewald, former West Berlin. 

In the heart of the city, other interesting spots take you back to the Iron Curtain era and even earlier, thanks to Berliner Unterwelten (Berlin Underworlds), an association that organises guided tours tracing the Cold War underground. Participants may visit civil defence shelters, bunkers, and air-raid shelters. One of the core spots for literary Berlin is the University Library Jakob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm Zentrum (Geschwister-Scholl-Straße, 1-3). It is the central library of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and houses a collection of roughly 2 million volumes in the humanities, cultural studies, sociology, and economics, and is named after the two world-renowned German academics, linguists, and authors. It is not only a key educational and cultural institution – it brings together all the university‘s collections, previously housed in separate libraries across Berlin – but also an architectural landmark: the impressive building, opened in 2009, has been designed by Swiss architect Max Dudler.  Grimm’s traces in Berlin can be found in Alter St. Matthäus Kirchhof, in Schöneberg, where the two brothers are buried.

Berlin was also home to Walter Benjamin, who lived here before being forced to flee the country during the Second World War and committing suicide in 1940 while escaping the Gestapo. Information about his work, life and legacy can be found at the Walter Benjamin House, in Prinzregentstraße in Wilmersdorf.

Another writer forced into exile was Anna Seghers, a Berlin Jewish writer who escaped Nazi Germany to live in Mexico during the war years. Back in 1947, she gave an account of those gloomy years in novels like The Seventh Cross and Transit Visa. She was also the president of the East German writers’ association. Her former flat in Berlin Adlershof – where she moved with her family during the Fifties and stayed until her death in 1983 – is now home to the Anna Seghers Museum and houses her private library and many personal items (Anna-Seghers-Str., 81).

A wide range of venues dedicated to literary culture in Berlin host and organise presentations, readings, festivals and conferences and Berlin provides institutional funding to some of them. Near the Wannsee, on the southwest outskirts of the city, Literarisches Colloquium Berlin is the meeting place for writers, professionals, and readers. Founded in 1963, it hosts events, workshops, lectures, and conferences. A former brewery in Prenzlauerberg, now the multifaceted space KulturBrauerei, is home to another contemporary literary place in Berlin, the Haus für Poesie, the former Literaturwerkstatt Berlin, founded in 1991, where contemporary poetry and writing, as well as other arts like music and cinematography, find a home. It also organises the Poetry Festival.

Literaturhaus Berlin (Fasanenstraße, 23) is the first literature house in a German-speaking country and was founded in 1986. A publicly funded cultural and educational institution, it is dedicated to promoting world literature and hosts readings, panel talks, and exhibitions. It was initially built as a private residence in 1890. It has had many uses since then, serving as a military hospital during World War I and later becoming a clubhouse for international students in the 1920s and 1930s. 

The Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus is housed in the last Berlin address of Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel. It houses readings, talks, and theatre performances as well as the Brecht-Weigel-Museum and the Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv. Bertolt Brecht and his wife, the actress and artistic director of the Berliner Ensemble, lived in the Hotels Adlon and at Weissensee before moving to this 1840 house in 1953. They are buried close to the house, in the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery next door.  

As to literature-related events, Berlin hosts the International Literature Festival in Berlin every year. It takes place in September and presents an eleven-day program of readings, events, talks, workshops, and encounters revolving around literature and featuring unusual venues such as theatres, museums, concert halls, and even prisons.

How to cite this dictionary entry: Traficante, M. (2023). Berlin: Literary Tourism. In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.). E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University for Foreigners of Perugia.

References

Blakemore, E. (2019, November 8). Why the Berlin Wall rose – and how it fell. National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/why-berlin-wall-built-fell

Britannica (1998, July 20).  Christa Wolf. Britannica https://www.britannica.com/biography/Christa-Wolf

Brussig, T. (2023). The Short End of the Sonnenallee. Fourth Estate.

Culicchia, G. (2022). Berlino è casa. Editori Laterza.

Döblin, A. (2012). Berlin Alexanderplatz. Rizzoli.

Isherwood, C. (2000). Goodbye to Berlin. Random UK.

Kakutani, M. (1990, May 29). The Innocent. New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/29/books/the-innocent.html

Sullivan, P. & Krueger, M. (2016). Berlin: A literary guide for travellers.  I.B. Taurus.

Traficante, M. (2019). Luoghi e libri: Spunti letterari per viaggiare in Italia e in Europa.

Twain, M. (2009). The Chicago of Europe and other tales of foreign travel. Union Square Press

Weiss-Sussex, G. & Bianchini, F. (2006). Berlin Literature and its Use in the Marketing of the “New Berlin”’. In Urban Mindscapes of Europe (pp. 237–258). Rodopi. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401203623_017

Wolf, C. (2012). Il cielo diviso. E/O.