The insiders’ perspective on Berlin
by Katy Derbyshire
Berlin is a city that has fired writers’ imaginations, especially in the twentieth century. Even now, the place attracts droves of would-be and established writers, drawn to this 'poor but sexy' literary Mecca of low rents and high culture. Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Ian McEwan, Rachel Seiffert and Philip Hensher have all spent time here and written about Berlin. Writers like John Le Carré and Len Deighton – and above all Christopher Isherwood – have had an indelible influence on our image of the city.
You could almost publish an anthology of writing on Berlin made up entirely of British and American writers. Or perhaps with the addition of previously translated writing such as Joseph Roth and Wladimir Kaminer, Hans Fallada and Daniel Kehlmann. But the people at Oxygen Books don’t do things that way – and they put out a call for suggestions and translations.
Being rather evangelical about my love of Berlin and German literature, I swamped them with material, and the upshot was that they asked me to co-edit the Berlin edition of their City-Lit series. Born out of frustration at not finding literary guidebooks to holiday destinations, the books feature 'perfect gems of city writing' on various different places. From travel writing to historical reportage, evocative literature to blog entries, pretty much anything goes.
So now it was my task to find a number of German pieces for the anthology, and to translate them. After living, eating and breathing Berlin literature for a couple of months I sat down to fill in the gaps. What can German writers tell us about the city that visitors can’t?
It soon emerged that certain things are equally fascinating for both Germans and visitors alike. We could probably put together an entire book of writing about crossing the Berlin Wall – overground through the checkpoints, underground through the ghost stations, legally, illegally. But it was only the East Germans who crossed it purely in their imaginations, as in Monika Maron’s piece from Animal Triste, in which her narrator imagines a colleague floating above dinosaur skeletons in a hot air balloon.
And although we have Anna Funder’s excellent book looking back on the GDR’s secret service, Stasiland, few English writers ever saw the inside of the Stasi headquarters – unlike the narrator in Rayk Wieland’s debut novel Ich schlage vor, dass wir uns küssen. Twenty years on, the Germans now have a more relaxed attitude to the whole subject matter, and this is reflected in Wieland’s satirical tone. The narrator has forgotten his past as a frustrated poet in love with a woman from the West, and gradually recalls it as he reads his Stasi file with amazement. Where an English writer might adopt a more earnest and horrified approach, the Germans are free to poke fun at the former system, perhaps using humour as therapy.
One of the most terrifying experiences that the likes of Isherwood clearly never had was of being a German Jew in 1930s and 40s Berlin. Which is why I felt the very courageous Inge Deutschkron warranted two passages in the collection, describing two days after: exploring the destruction of Jewish property after Kristallnacht and going to work after Berlin’s last Jews were rounded up. Deutschkron survived the Nazis by assuming a false identity and provides a link to today’s city, as one of the initiators behind the Museum Otto Weidt Workshop for the Blind – the small brush manufacturer where she and many other Jews worked under the protective wing of Otto Weidt.
Coming right up to the present day, the Berliners still obviously have plenty to say about their city. And it takes a real insider to tell us about one thing that now attracts thousands of tourists: the clubs. Coming full circle from the Kit-Kat Club to the heights of today’s hedonism, Tobias Rapp’s Lost and Sound segues interviews, background information and narrative into a tale of techno and the 'easyjetset'. I loved his ecstatic portrayal of a night out at the Berghain club and only hope it will stand the test of time in this fast-moving culture. This was probably the greatest challenge for me as a translator too; I’ve never been to the place and am unlikely to get past the notoriously choosy bouncers, so it was tough to get the details and the tone of the piece right. But try finding someone who’s been there and can put the experience into words, let alone tell you what material the cords for the cloakroom dog-tags are made of.
In general, I love living in Berlin. For a translator, the advantages of being surrounded by the source language are huge – we hear the language every day as it develops, come into contact with endless different variations and possibly understand what we translate more easily. For City-Lit too, it was great that I was in Berlin. It meant I could go to readings by writers I was considering, come across reviews in the newspaper by coincidence – and of course judge at first hand how accurate literary portrayals of the city are.
But there’s always that nagging fear of losing your native language, or getting stuck in a linguistic rut in which your body ages but your English doesn’t. Short of constantly trawling the net and analysing every article read and every radio programme listened to, there’s little I feel I can do about this, although I do occasionally try and pick the brains of English-speakers who haven’t been here as long as I have. So I just hope the advantages to having an insider as co-editor outweigh the linguistic disadvantages. And I hope the book itself and my translations will convey some of my enthusiasm for this fantastic city.
Katy Derbyshire is a London-born translator and has lived in Berlin since 1996. She has translated pieces by Julia Franck, Ingo Schulze, Clemens Meyer, Werner Bräunig, Selim Özdogan and other German-language writers, and regularly shares her opinions at http://lovegermanbooks.blogspot.com
