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A review by ridgewaygirl
Here in Berlin by Cristina García
4.0
I'm a little in love with Berlin. It's this modern, bustling, multi-cultural city, festooned with building cranes, that is also haunted by history in a way no other city is. It's full of art and grime and people getting on with their days. You can grab a döner, see an exhibition of pretty much any kind of art you like, encounter a gathering of Stolpersteine in front of a building you've passed a dozen times unaware, browse in an English-language bookshop and catch a train going anywhere in Europe all in the same afternoon. And so it happens that I will buy pretty much any book with Berlin in the title.
In Here in Berlin, a middle-aged Cuban woman goes to Berlin. She's looking for a new beginning, but finds herself lonely and without focus in this city she's unfamiliar with. But as she becomes more fluent in German, she begins talking to people, usually older people, usually living in nursing homes, about their pasts. And in short chapters, they tell their stories. So there are former Nazis and former Stasi agents justifying their pasts, women remembering their fear of the Russians, Cubans who fought for the Nazis on behalf of General Franco and who stayed behind after the war, circus performers and musicians, Stalinists and lesbians. It's an interesting format that is hampered only by its reliance on the voices of the elderly so that the novel feels more like an elegy for a disappeared city than a reflection of Berlin today.
In Here in Berlin, a middle-aged Cuban woman goes to Berlin. She's looking for a new beginning, but finds herself lonely and without focus in this city she's unfamiliar with. But as she becomes more fluent in German, she begins talking to people, usually older people, usually living in nursing homes, about their pasts. And in short chapters, they tell their stories. So there are former Nazis and former Stasi agents justifying their pasts, women remembering their fear of the Russians, Cubans who fought for the Nazis on behalf of General Franco and who stayed behind after the war, circus performers and musicians, Stalinists and lesbians. It's an interesting format that is hampered only by its reliance on the voices of the elderly so that the novel feels more like an elegy for a disappeared city than a reflection of Berlin today.