LIBRARY NOTES
Linda Fritzinger
Going to Berlin?
Wednesday, July 1, 1998
Berlin has a very special aura. On my first visit, I was convinced that it had a special smell as well. My Berlin friends told me that it was the blooming lindens, those same trees that once lined (and do again, just recently) its most famous street. On subsequent visits I have noticed the smell of the lindens less, the pungent atmosphere of the city itself more. Visually Berlin is idiosyncratic. Not lovely and seductive like Paris, grandly ancient like Rome, or proud in the monumental way of London, Berlin sits solidly (but not quietly) on the great northern European plain that stretches from the Ural Mountains to the Netherlands. Flat, quite green, laced with rivers and canals, and dotted with lakes around its edges, it is not "pretty". Even before it was so badly bombed it was not that. Stylish and sharp-edged, like Mack's knife, its impact is intensely subjective. Berlin is above all alive -- and kicking -- and always has been, as if in spite of itself and those who have tried to destroy it.
I have chosen the following books for the traveler to Berlin because I feel that by reading some of them, some part of them, even a little of any of them, one comes away with a sense of the history and the spirit of Berlin and also, occasionally, of the territory called Brandenburg which encloses it. The land, or state, of Brandenburg is not one of the largest in Germany but, as the heartland of the former Kingdom of Prussia, it has a long and complex history. Berlin, nearly dead center in Brandenburg, is a land unto itself in both senses of the word, a state and a state of mind. Its history, if measured by when it first became the capital of a united Germany in 1871, has been short but incredibly dramatic. It has been led by posturing emperors and gesticulating demagogues, filled with millions of marching men, home to revolutionaries and visionaries, a city of the avant-garde and of bourgeois rectitude, bombed to bits and saved by airplanes a few years later, and finally, divided and reunited with maximum theatricality.
- Ruth Andreas-Friedrich
Battleground: Berlin Diaries, 1945-1948
- Vicki Baum
It Was All Quite Different: The Memoirs of Vicki Baum
Born in Vienna, Baum was a musician, an editor, and a very popular author, best known for Grand Hotel. Her accounts of her life in Berlin from just before World War I until the 1930's begins on p. 213.
- Christabel Bielenberg
Ride Out the Dark
English, a niece of the British press czar, Lord Northcliffe, and married to an aristocratic German, she spent the war years in Berlin where she and her husband enjoyed the close attention of the Gestapo because of their intimate connections with the would-be killers of Hitler.
- Bertoldt Brecht
Journals, 1934-1955
Berlin covers the dates from 22 October 1948 to 18 July 1995. What Brecht says about Berlin, among other things, is that it is "an etching by Churchill after an idea by Hitler."
- Elias Canetti
The Torch in My Ear
Look at Part Four: "The Throng of Names." It is about Berlin in 1928.
- George Clare
Berlin Days, 1946-48
Clare served as an intelligence officer with the American army. Shortly after the war he returned to Berlin, this time as a journalist intent on witnessing the "after shock" of Nazi defeat in the capital
- Countess Marion Donhoff
Before the Storm: Memories of My Youth in Old Prussia,
A memoir by the formidable publisher of Die Zeit, mainly about life in East Prussia (the area that is now Poland), but from the point of view of a family intimately connected with Berlin's highest social and governmental circles in the early years of this century.
- George Grosz
An Autobiography,
Pre- and Post World War I in Pomerania and Saxony (Dresden) as well as Berlin.
- Edith Keen
Seven Years at the Prussian Court,
The memoirs of an Englishwoman who from 1907 to 1914 served as companion to the daughter of Prince Frederick Leopold of Prussia, a cousin of the Kaiser. A look at the Hohenzollern court from behind the scenes, below the stairs, and an English perspective on the years leading up to World War I.
- Harry Kessler
In the Twenties: The Diaries of ...
Kesler knew everybody ca. 1918-1937, and while this is not entirely about life in Berlin, he is interesting wherever he is.
- Hildegard Knef
The Gift Horse
Chapters 1-12 cover the actress's childhood in Berlin during Hitler's rise to power.
- Susan Neiman
Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin
An American graduate student living in Berlin and getting to know Berliners a generation after World War II
- Mary Annette Beauchamp Russell
Elizabeth and her German Garden
A charming account of aristocratic life in Berlin and Prussia before World War I as seen through the eyes of a young English wife to Graf Henning von Arnim-Schlagenthin. If you are charmed by "Elizabeth", there is in the Library an interesting account of her life by Leslie DeCharms, called Elizabeth of the German Garden (92 R9655D)
- William Russell
Berlin Embassy
This is about Berlin at war -- but before the U.S. entered. Needless to say, people are trying desperately to get out.
- William Shirer
Berlin Diary: Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1931-1941, &
End of a Berlin Diary
- Marie Vassiltchikov
Berlin Diaries, 1940-1945
A White Russian emigre who lived in Berlin through most of World War II and was close to many of the primary plotters against Hitler. Times are terrible, she is charming, and her account is fascinating.
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