Tales of Berlin in American Literature up to the Twenty-First Century by Joshua Parker (review)

Few attentive readers of American fiction will have failed to observe that since the fall of the Berlin Wall dozens of American authors have chosen the German capital as the setting for their tales and have used its cityscape in their narratives to also address issues related to their own country. In his comprehensive survey of “Berlin tales” Joshua Parker analyzes this trend and discusses the plots of numerous narratives, including young adult and pulp fiction, and argues that many writers in this field render Berlin not as the “Other” but present “the US’s gaze at its own projected fears and desires” (3), and use it as a heterotopia for evoking the divisions and conflicts experienced in a globalized society.

Parker’s kaleidoscopic picture of Berlin in American texts, offered in twenty-five chapters, is preceded by a prologue, in which he cites spatial theories ranging from Henry Lefebvre to Bertrand Westphal. A chapter on “American space” follows, in which he reviews reflections on landscape and space from the last 100 years. Parker briefly sketches the social and political developments as the context for the numerous narratives, and in an appendix of ten pages (381–389) lists scores of pertinent texts, arranged according to the decades in which they were published. However, Parker does not offer a chronological delineation of shifts in the American imaginary of Berlin. Instead of discussing the texts in detail, he attempts to illustrate “themes resonating across periods, sometimes intentionally played against each other, at other times arising with seemingly accidental synchronicity” (45).

While his focus is on the “boom” in Berlin tales during the Cold War and the post-Wall eras, he inevitably revisits novels and stories depicting different historical phases, especially the interwar years, ranging from Robert McAlmon’s and Sinclair Lewis’s fictional works to narratives by Thomas Wolfe, K.A. Porter, and Upton Sinclair. In doing so he also refers perfunctorily to earlier substantial studies of the continuities and transformations of images of Germans and Germany, but draws more on psychoanalytical theories than on imagological investigations. Considering his avoidance of a chronological presentation of the “tales of Berlin,” it may seem paradoxical that he claims that many motifs and plot elements in contemporary fiction centered on Berlin are anticipated in a little-known mid-nineteenth–century novel, Theodore Sedgwick Fay’s Princess Ida: A Tale of Berlin (1840), which he discusses in considerable detail. He makes no attempt to provide evidence for such potentially striking cases of intertextuality but leaves it open whether to ascribe remarkable foresight to Fay, or whether, in conformity with a semiotics of a geography of identity, to assume an inherent quality in the landscape of Berlin, including it districts, parks, and lakes. Drawing on biographical research, Parker offers a persuasive explanation of Fay’s critique of dueling as a particularly harmful American—rather than a German—vice. His reading of Fay’s novel as a storehouse of motifs and themes for five generations of writers, however, will be met with skepticism, in spite of Parker’s indefatigable adducing of parallels in many later tales.

Parker’s main concern is with post-World War II narratives, which fictionalize the divided and then the politically reunited Berlin, but also capture earlier phases of the city’s history, like Arthur R.G. Solmsson’s A Princess in Berlin (published in 1980 but set in the 1920s), or Vladimir Nabokov’ grim tales reflecting the Berlin of the interwar years (their English versions appeared long after his stay there). Using narratological concepts sparingly, Parker relates many narratives to the confrontation of tens of thousands of GIs with the capital of Nazi Germany reduced to rubble (e.g., W.G. Smith’s Last of the Conquerors [1948] or Thomas Berger’s Crazy in Berlin [1955)) and analyzes examples of the spy fiction genre, which inevitably proliferated in the Cold...