Here in Berlin by Cristina García (review)

Individual and collective memories have a special resonance in Cristina García’s novels. Here in Berlin, her seventh and innovative novel, is set in contemporary Berlin. An unnamed Visitor who closely resembles the author, a flâneur, slowly gains the confidence of ordinary berliners when she learns the German language. She records random voices of older individuals who are burdened by the trauma of having witnessed—or have a close relative who has—the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Like ghosts gasping for air, they are eager to inscribe their voices in history before it is too late. Slowly, they trust her, realizing that when one does not belong to a place, or is a newcomer, things may reveal themselves. They might elude those who are accustomed to their surroundings.

Here in Berlin maintains the plurality of voices the reader had encountered in the author’s previous highly acclaimed novels such as Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters, A Handbook to Luck and King of Cuba. This postmodern device has become a trademark of the novelist; there is no single truth since the interpretation of historical events is contingent on lived experiences. The novel starts with a Prologue and is divided into four sections: The Flaming Common, Invisible Bodies, War Fugues, Last Rites, and ends with an Epilogue. It presents itself as a conversation with history. The Visitor, presumably, asks questions to ordinary berliners but the reader does not hear her, although the reader feels her presence. Having established a rapport they address her with terms of endearment such as “Kind Visitor,” “Dear Visitor,” “liebe” (love), “schatzi” (darling).

García’s Berlin is not populated exclusively by Aryans. The reader encounters a cadre of diasporic and displaced peoples who have found their way to the German city. They are outsiders due to their birth, race or religion. The author records primarily their stories about life under the Third Reich and the aftermath. One Jewish woman recounts her experience buried in a sarcophagus for thirty-seven days to avoid death. Others reminisce about their daily lives of fear and persecution during the war as they tried to hide their Jewish identities. One also finds gypsies—another persecuted group. There are as well references to concentration camps, such as Terenzin and Sachsenhausen. Occasionally, some recall the lives and actions of the ruling class such as the presence of Nazi’s sex clubs, the sinking by a torpedo of a lavish pleasure ship for Nazi loyals, or the kidnapping of Aryan-looking children from Poland and Russia to increase the master race. The fascination with this period in history carries on for some time in a character working at the KaDeWe department store with an uncanny resemblance to Eva Braun—a doppelgänger of Hitler’s mistress.

There is an abundance of allusions to losing or gaining vision, amnesia, and recalling. In fact, many of the individuals the Visitor meets are patients of an African ophthalmologist who treats those suffering of worsening eyesight, cataracts or glaucoma. Stories of the past hunt the city. Some cannot escape them; others respond with a deliberate amnesia choosing to move forward. Perhaps not surprisingly, García’s Berlin is populated by an inordinate number of Cubans. The reader has become accustomed to the author dealing one way or another with her native island. In this novel it is even plausible given Germany’s alliance with General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39 and, more recently, the Cuban Revolution’s affiliation with the Soviet Bloc. Other stories—such as that of Ernesto Cuadra, a Cuban who was kidnapped and spent five months as prisoner in a German submarine—seem to fall in the realm of fantasy. One night at age sixteen Cuadra was guarding a Cuban factory property of Dr. Faustino Buendía when he was taken to a brothel—at this point the reader starts making connections with García Márquez’ magical realism—and is captured by German seamen...