Berlin полностью

Berlin had long been Germany’s theater capital, and West Berlin retained this status inasmuch as it boasted the largest number of theaters and the highest theatrical budget in the country. By the 1980s it harbored one-seventh of all the private stages in the Federal Republic and accounted for one-fourth of the nation’s private theater audience. Yet quantity did not necessarily translate into qualitative dominance. West Germany’s theatrical world was now highly decentralized, and many of the best directors preferred to work in cities like Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, and Stuttgart. A notable exception was Peter Stein at the Schaubühne. A kind of Bert Brecht of the West, Stein took over the Schaubühne in 1970 and turned it into Germany’s foremost venue for experimental, socially critical theater. This being Berlin, Stein’s Marxist-oriented theater “collective” had the luxury of biting the hand that generously fed it: 75 percent of its budget came from West German taxpayers. In 1982 the ensemble moved into a state-of-the-art new home amidst the auto showrooms and upmarket boutiques of the Kurfürstendamm.

Herbert von Karajan directs the Berlin Philharmonic, undated photo

Like its dramatists, West Berlin’s novelists and poets had plenty of opportunity to sup at the public trough. The Berlin Senate, with support from Bonn, established the Berlin Literary Colloquium, which awarded grants to local writers. The German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, DAAD) ran a similar operation, the Artists and Writers in Residence Program, for foreign writers who chose to work in West Berlin. According to the French critic François Bondy, such “subsidized internationalism” effectively reconstituted “Berlin’s once spontaneous internationalism.” This is doubtful. West Berlin was neither the magnet for writers from abroad nor the national literary capital that it had once been. All kinds of foreign writers passed through the city, but few stayed for long. Many of Germany’s own literary luminaries, including Heinrich Böll, Martin Walser, Peter Weiss, and Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, lived elsewhere. In 1980, when the leftist publisher Klaus Wagenbach issued an anthology of cutting-edge German prose for use in German schools, only seven of the thirty authors included in the collection resided in West Berlin.

A scene from the Schiller Theater’s production of a musical review based on Hans Fallada’s novel Jeder Stirbt Für Sich Allein (To Each His Own Death), directed by Peter Zadek, 1981

Among the seven, at least for a time, was Günter Grass, postwar Germany’s best-known writer. He chose to live in the walled city because, as he put it, Berliners were “perhaps the only people in Germany to have developed a political sense since the war.” Grass’s own political sense led him to explore the ways in which Nazism had seduced and corrupted the German petite bourgeoisie. However, his most incisive works—The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, and Dog Years—were set not in Berlin but in his native city of Danzig. Only in later works, most notably The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, Local Anaesthetic, and Too Far Afield, did he use his adopted town as the setting for an examination of postwar Germany’s flawed reckoning with the legacy of Nazism and the more recent challenges of Stalinism and terrorism.

The writer Uwe Johnson, who moved to West Berlin from East Berlin in 1959, became more strongly identified with the walled city than Grass. His central topic was the psychological impact of the German division, for which Berlin provided an excellent laboratory. Johnson offered no solutions to the problem of division. In his most famous novel, Mutmassungen über Jakob (Speculation about Jakob), an East German writer is killed by a train after visiting his fiancee in the West. Left unclear is whether he committed suicide or was murdered, and from which direction the fatal train came. In an essay entitled “Berliner Stadtbahn,” Johnson captured the growing estrangement between the “two cities of Berlin,” where the inhabitants of each half regarded the other half as more “foreign” than a genuinely foreign country. Never feeling entirely at home in West Berlin (which he always wrote in the East German fashion, “Westberlin”), Johnson abandoned the city in 1974 for self-imposed exile in England. After German reunification, the question arose whether his presence in the once and future capital should be acknowledged with a plaque on his former dwelling in the Stierstrasse. One critic urged that it should, adding: “The city is not so rich [in its recent literary heritage] that it can consign Johnson to oblivion.”