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Abstract

The City in the Book: Materiality and Form in Irina Liebmann’s Documentary Portrayals of Berlin This article considers the relationship between urban materiality and literary form in three documentary portrayals of Berlin by Irina Liebmann: a book of interviews with East German tenants, Berliner Mietshaus (1982), the photo-essay Stille Mitte von Berlin (2002) and the autofictional novel Die Große Hamburger Straße (2020). I use and develop Andreas Mahler’s model for analysis of the “discursive constitution” of urban literature to investigate how various linguistic and formal expressions are used in the texts to represent the material properties of two urban entities: the tenement building and the street. My analysis shows how urban materiality is discursively constituted through referential elements and “material isotopy” (frequent use of materially connotated concepts), as well as through other linguistic means that can be connected to the materiality of the portrayed places such as the structure, layout, typography and interpunctuation of the text. In two of Liebmann’s texts, a further spatio-visual dimension arises through the inclusion of her own photographs of dilapidated buildings, closed-up shops and empty lots in East Berlin in the 1980s. The findings of my investigation demonstrate how Liebmann’s documentary portrayals of Berlin contribute to making visible the fluctuations in how different material circumstances – for example standard of living – are valued in different contexts, as well as to a renegotiation of hegemonic narratives about the city’s historic materiality. Finally, a diachronic comparison between the three texts shows that specific material entities such as streets and buildings in the old center of Berlin have been charged with new meaning after 1989 due to the fundamental alterations to the material conditions of the city through a rapid gentrification process.