Writing the New Berlin: The German Capital in Post-Wall Literature

A study of the "patchwork imaginary" that is postwall Berlin fiction and its significance for the new Germany.

The wall was still coming down when critics began to call for the great Berlin novel that could explain what was happening to Germany and the Germans. Such a novel never appeared. Instead, writers have created a patchwork imaginary — in the form of about 300 works of fiction set in Berlin — of a city and a nation whose identity collapsed virtually overnight. Contributors to this lit...