The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Berlin ed. by Andrew J. Webber

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Berlin ed. by Andrew J. Webber Hunter Bivens Webber, Andrew J., ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Berlin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017. Pp. xvii+279. CDN$101.95 hardcover; CDN$29.95 paperback; US$22.00 ebook. What is the literature of Berlin? Is it literature produced in Berlin? Literature somehow connected with Berlin in the cultural imaginary? Literature that takes place in or portrays the city? Andrew J. Webber’s introduction poses these questions, but frames the volume’s project as the survey of literature that takes Berlin as its object. Berlin is, however, not only a geographical place, but also a space of political, cultural, and historical constellations and uneven temporalities. Berlin is both a kind of “urban laboratory” (3) and a haunting ground for the violence unleashed by modernity, both a cradle of literary modernism and a place of memory, a place of movement and a place in notion. Webber’s introduction uses the Berlin novel par excellence, Alfred Döblin’s 1929 Berlin Alexanderplatz, as an example of how the literature of Berlin serves to portray the city as at once, in Henri Lefebvre’s terms, a “representational space,” where everyday life is negotiated and contested, and “an object of ‘representations of space,’ which are plans and visions for the conceptual organization of the city” (6). Like Döblin’s novel, the literature of Berlin, Webber argues, explores “the tension between a settled sense of place and forms of non-placement” (7), reflecting a city that is, materially, politically, and ideologically always in a state of construction. In this sense, as Yasemin Yildiz points out, Berlin is an essentially “migratory setting,” to quote Murat Aydemir and Alex Rostas, “installing movement within place” (208). The volume strikes a good balance between the settledness and unsettledness of its categories, be it in terms of the intermediality of modernist literature, the unsettling of identities and communities in a transnational or global city, or the palimpsestic, uneven character of temporality and memory in the literature of the postwar and contemporary periods. The contributions provide a useful overview of the literary movements, groupings, identities, and thematics of the archive that it stales out as the literature of Berlin. Moving from relatively chronologically sequential essays of the first half, the volume’s second half offers a series of contributions that map the complicated movements of memory, migration, and identity that shape the cultural imaginary of postwar and contemporary Berlin. Finally, the Companion features two essays by David Barnett and Gerrit-Jan Berendse, respectively, on Berlin’s importance to modern drama and poetry. All in all, this is a useful volume, offering a comprehensive overview of Berlin in the literary imaginary by leading scholars in German Studies. [End Page 425] The volume opens with Matt Erlin’s essay “Literature and Enlightenment,” which already lays out many of the key themes that shape many of the collection’s essays. Emerging as a centre of German and European Enlightenment around the 1780s, Berlin was viewed by contemporaries as a “quintessentially ‘modern’ space,” characterized by rapid change, social progress, and the fluctuations of fashion. Erlin describes Berlin in this period as both a sort of laboratory of Kantian Enlightenment and “as a kind of anthropological training ground, where mew modes of unscripted sociability are seen to foster tolerance as well as the experiential knowledge of man and the world so crucial to the Enlightenment ideal of self-cultivation” (30). An example of such unscripted sociality was the Berlin salon culture of this period, which fostered the specifically “cosmopolitan rationalist” style of figures such as Moses Mendelsohn, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Anna Louisa Karsch, and Friedrich Nicolai. Between 1790 and 1820, this salon culture became an important center of German Romanticism, and Jürgen Barkhoff’s essay “Romantic Sociability, Aesthetics and Politics” helpfully lays out that history and the trajectory from early to late Romanticism against the background of the political context of the Prussian Reforms of 1806 and the cultural nationalism of the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon. The aesthetics of Romanticism became increasingly, if ambiguously, political as it moved from the salons of...