My Improbable Berlin Trilogy
The Feuilletonist has been on vacation for the past month, but has now returned to regale his devoted readers with more adventure-laden tales from the frontline!
First off, here's an excerpt (with link) to a piece that appears on the Op-Ed page of tomorrow's International Herald Tribune about being a young writer in Berlin:
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In fact, "The Berlin Stories" only consistuted a fraction of an impromptu trilogy that I designed during my first weeks here. So, let me tell you about the Berlin-related works that flanked it.
My Improbable Berlin Trilogy
Several days after returning to Berlin, I finished reading Joseph Kanon’s “The Good German.” The mass-market trade paperback fit nicely into the pocket of my pea coat, which had made it a perfect companion while zigzagging around town during my last week in New York, during my delayed flight out of Newark and eventually while struggling with the bad cold that had attacked me as soon as my plane landed at Tegel.
The book had been recommended to me by a German journalist friend almost five years back. Were it not for the slickly-advertised film adaptation that came out last year, I probably would have never remembered to try it out. As it were, the badly received film did nothing to resurrect my interest in the book – in fact, seeing the promotional tie-in copies at Barnes & Noble acted as a deterrent. It was this edition, however, that wound up on the 50-cent rack of the Morningside Branch of the New York Public Library.
I was coming out of a months’-long ordeal of slogging through a long contemporary work set in Japan (and recommended to me by numerous friends) and was looking for a change of scenery and pace. I was also bound for Berlin in a week’s time and could use something to help reacclimatize me to life in the Hauptstadt.
At the center of the grim, noir-colored world of this carefully plotted neo-pulp tome is an American newspaperman who returns to Berlin in 1944, shortly after the Soviets stick a red flag on the Reichstag. He is searching for his lover amid the lies, secrets and rubble of the incinerated capital. Kanon’s knowledge of the city is dead on, and one of the book’s greatest pleasures for me was tailing the characters mentally as they wound their way around the sprawling wasteland: Mehringdamm, Hallesches Tor, Wittenbergplatz, Grünewald – these are places that I know only in their present-day incarnations.
Less convincing that the geographical precision is the climax of stock high-octave devices: a tense showdown during a parade followed by a lengthy car chase.
Somewhat let down by this chaotic finale to a lengthy, involved crime-drama, I wasted no time in choosing what next to tackle: “The Berlin Stories” (see above).
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My idiosyncratic trilogy came to an end on Christmas Day with a screening of “The Serpent’s Egg,” set in an even older Berlin of 1923. This was Ingmar Bergman’s sole English-language effort, a Hollywood production he embarked on with Dino De Laurentiis while evading the Swedish tax authorities in 1977.
Shot on location in West Berlin, this puzzling film stars David Carridine as a thoroughly unappealing out-of-work acrobat in Berlin during the inflation crisis. His character, Abel Rosenberg, is interrogated by the police after his brother’s suicide. It seems that the police commissioner suspects him of committing a string of homicides. Rosenberg, who has witnessed police men walk calmly by as SA men beat Jews, chalks the commissioner’s suspicions up to anti-Semitism. He resorts to boozing and violence to cope with his depression and paranoia, and repeatedly abandons his brother’s ex-wife (Liv Ullman), a nightclub singer who is the only person who cares about him.
The film is full of wildly twisted and surreal touches: kinky cabaret numbers, horrific Nazi violence, evil Aryan doctors, coked-up prostitutes and an Orwellian dénouement. But the nightmarish noir promised by all these elements never takes full form. The script is full of loose threads and the ambiguous ending seems an act of desperation. Stylistically and thematically, it also seems to lack Bergman’s imprimatur. One of the only indications comes in a scene where an American priest asks a fearful suffering Liv Ullman to forgive him for his apathy. Are we expected for forgive Bergman for this same fault?
First off, here's an excerpt (with link) to a piece that appears on the Op-Ed page of tomorrow's International Herald Tribune about being a young writer in Berlin:
Living up to Isherwood
A.J. Goldmann
BERLIN
"I recently returned to Berlin to live in a spirit of comfortable frugality and to write. Prior to this trip, I'd only known the city in the summer. I was unprepared for the harshness of winter in Berlin, where the cold itself has a color: gray.
"The gloom outside my window has made me into something of a bookish hermit. On my second night back, I decided it was time: I leaped to my amply-stocked bookshelf and removed my copy of Christopher Isherwood's "The Berlin Stories," an unaesthetic edition from the 1960s whose badly cracked spine resembles a broken accordion..."[READ COMPLETE ARTICLE]---
In fact, "The Berlin Stories" only consistuted a fraction of an impromptu trilogy that I designed during my first weeks here. So, let me tell you about the Berlin-related works that flanked it.
My Improbable Berlin Trilogy
Several days after returning to Berlin, I finished reading Joseph Kanon’s “The Good German.” The mass-market trade paperback fit nicely into the pocket of my pea coat, which had made it a perfect companion while zigzagging around town during my last week in New York, during my delayed flight out of Newark and eventually while struggling with the bad cold that had attacked me as soon as my plane landed at Tegel.
The book had been recommended to me by a German journalist friend almost five years back. Were it not for the slickly-advertised film adaptation that came out last year, I probably would have never remembered to try it out. As it were, the badly received film did nothing to resurrect my interest in the book – in fact, seeing the promotional tie-in copies at Barnes & Noble acted as a deterrent. It was this edition, however, that wound up on the 50-cent rack of the Morningside Branch of the New York Public Library.
I was coming out of a months’-long ordeal of slogging through a long contemporary work set in Japan (and recommended to me by numerous friends) and was looking for a change of scenery and pace. I was also bound for Berlin in a week’s time and could use something to help reacclimatize me to life in the Hauptstadt.
At the center of the grim, noir-colored world of this carefully plotted neo-pulp tome is an American newspaperman who returns to Berlin in 1944, shortly after the Soviets stick a red flag on the Reichstag. He is searching for his lover amid the lies, secrets and rubble of the incinerated capital. Kanon’s knowledge of the city is dead on, and one of the book’s greatest pleasures for me was tailing the characters mentally as they wound their way around the sprawling wasteland: Mehringdamm, Hallesches Tor, Wittenbergplatz, Grünewald – these are places that I know only in their present-day incarnations.
Less convincing that the geographical precision is the climax of stock high-octave devices: a tense showdown during a parade followed by a lengthy car chase.
Somewhat let down by this chaotic finale to a lengthy, involved crime-drama, I wasted no time in choosing what next to tackle: “The Berlin Stories” (see above).
---
My idiosyncratic trilogy came to an end on Christmas Day with a screening of “The Serpent’s Egg,” set in an even older Berlin of 1923. This was Ingmar Bergman’s sole English-language effort, a Hollywood production he embarked on with Dino De Laurentiis while evading the Swedish tax authorities in 1977.Shot on location in West Berlin, this puzzling film stars David Carridine as a thoroughly unappealing out-of-work acrobat in Berlin during the inflation crisis. His character, Abel Rosenberg, is interrogated by the police after his brother’s suicide. It seems that the police commissioner suspects him of committing a string of homicides. Rosenberg, who has witnessed police men walk calmly by as SA men beat Jews, chalks the commissioner’s suspicions up to anti-Semitism. He resorts to boozing and violence to cope with his depression and paranoia, and repeatedly abandons his brother’s ex-wife (Liv Ullman), a nightclub singer who is the only person who cares about him.
The film is full of wildly twisted and surreal touches: kinky cabaret numbers, horrific Nazi violence, evil Aryan doctors, coked-up prostitutes and an Orwellian dénouement. But the nightmarish noir promised by all these elements never takes full form. The script is full of loose threads and the ambiguous ending seems an act of desperation. Stylistically and thematically, it also seems to lack Bergman’s imprimatur. One of the only indications comes in a scene where an American priest asks a fearful suffering Liv Ullman to forgive him for his apathy. Are we expected for forgive Bergman for this same fault?
