Berlin Now
The Rise of the City and the Fall of the Wall
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
In Berlin Now, and on the 25th Anniversary of the fall of the Wall, a legendary Berliner tells the inside story of the city.
Over the last five decades, no other city has changed more than Berlin. Divided in 1961, reunited in 1989, it has morphed over the last twenty-five years into Europe's most vibrant melting-pot of artists, immigrants and entrepreneurs. Pieces of the wall are collected around the world. Blending memoir, history, anecdote and reportage, this legendary Berliner takes us behind the scenes - from wrenching stories of life under the Stasi, to the difference between East and West Berliners' sex-lives, to a present-day investigation of its arts scene, night-life, tumultuous politics and hidden quirks - revealing what makes Berlin the uniquely fascinating place it is.
Peter Schneider makes the city come alive. He knows his stuff and shares it beautifully, elegantly, generously and informatively. Berlin has found its bard'Breyten Breytenbach, author of 'Notes from the Middle World'
Praise for The Wall Jumper:
'Marvelous . . . creates, in very few words, the unreal reality of Berlin' Salman Rushdie, New York Times Book Review
'Schneider's description of the Berlin wall from both sides . . . is the ultimate depiction of this structure. Nothing more need be said' Werner Herzog
'Wonderful' Ian McEwan
Peter Schneider was born in Lübeck, Germany, in 1940, and has lived in Berlin on and off since the 1960s, when he was a key spokesperson for its radical student movement. Renowned as a novelist and essayist, he is now the author of more than twenty books, including the Penguin Modern Classic The Wall Jumper. He has taught at many universities, including Stanford, Princeton and Harvard, and written for many international newspapers, including Der Spiegel, The New York Times, Le Monde and La Repubblica.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this enlightening collection of essays, Berlin resident Schneider unearths the city's charms and hazards. Journalist Schneider (Eduard's Homecoming; The Wall Jumper) first came to Berlin from Freiburg as a student in 1962 and has since seen enormous changes, the most shattering of which was the tearing down of the Berlin Wall after the earthshaking events of November 1989. Apart from the subsequent building projects that have transformed the city, such as the development of Potsdamer Platz and the shifting of the historic Mitte (middle) toward what was once East Berlin, Schneider is intensely focused on the East-versus-West dynamic. He describes East Berliners as dragging their Communist ideals and Stasi legacy, and resenting Western democratic standards, and he says that East Berlin women are "self-confident and divorce-happy," as more of them have been forced to work than their Western counterparts. Moreover, the once-ostracized Turkish "guest workers" now make up a largely assimilated minority, with Vietnamese, Russians, and Jews nestled in far-flung neighborhoods, despite lingering episodes of racist violence. Covering the city's grim history as well as its current night clubbing, these essays reveal an authentic city that does not bother being more lively than beautiful.
