Twenty years since the Fall of the Berlin Wall: it feels important and right to take this anniversary as an opportunity to stop a moment and reflect on what the subsequent years have brought, and also what came before. There is much excellent writing to be found on every aspect of the past sixty years of German history, both in journalism and in fiction, and we are honoured to welcome some very special writers to our pages in our own ‘1989’ section:
Jan Morris has been my bedtime literary companion ever since I first opened her book
Venice and discovered in its pages all the passion, peace, and emotional response to that magical City of the Doges and its art that many of us feel but none could give expression to quite in this way. I’m sure you’ll enjoy her evocation of that Berlin of the immediate aftermath of 1989, penned with characteristic warmth and humour, clarity and hopefulness.
It is also a pleasure to welcome
Timothy Garton Ash to NBG. Listening to him at this year’s Hay Festival, it was evident that he, curiosity personified, has been at the heart of many ‘revolutionary’ moments, and I know I wasn’t alone in feeling ready to join in any revolution to which he give the thumbs up. As many of our readers will know, he chose to live in the GDR for a time and to experience many of its facets at first hand. His book
The File makes fascinating reading, as does his piece in this issue in which he regards the hugely successful film
The Lives of Others through the lens of his own knowledge.
Some of us were fortunate enough to hear
Ingo Schulze live at the German Embassy here in London in April. His writing, be it his fiction or journalism, is consistently substantial and thought-provoking. We hope you will agree that his frank piece on his ‘West’ invites dialogue – urgently.
The anniversary also offers a welcome opportunity to focus on a writer who should be far better known in the English-speaking world than she is:
Monika Maron. We are delighted to print extracts from her acceptance speech for a major prize this summer, in which she makes the important point that it is time our perception of so-called ‘GDR literature’ was reassessed. And who better to introduce us to this writer, taking us on an elegant path that leads from Heinrich von Kleist to the lady herself, than that critic of critics
Marcel Reich-Ranicki. To welcome the ‘Literaturpapst’ to our pages is a thrill and adds another dimension to our own 1989 celebrations.
It is our pleasure, also, to remember three other significant, and utterly contrasting, writers in the pieces by
Paul Ingendaay on
Walter Kappacher,
Peter Thompson on
Ernst Bloch, and
John Guthrie on
Friedrich von Schiller. A short story by the marvellous Swiss writer
Peter Stamm, translated by
Michael Hofmann, and one by that Austrian master of the short story,
Alois Hotschnig, translated by
David Henry Wilson, are additional treats, while Ian Wallace invites us to focus on
Lion Feuchtwanger as our Forgotten Gem.
To return to the German capital, what’s your Berlin story, I wonder. Mine? My relationship with the city began in its 1995 guise and Kreuzberg was home to me for so many summers and Siberian winters that I missed the Turkish melodies when I left. Also missed were the lingering Sunday breakfasts, and the talking deep into the night over a leg of lamb and much red wine. In a way, it always felt as though a little part of the Berlin that was Christopher Isherwood’s was still alive, there in the embers: the ‘anything goes’ element and all the challenges that sentiment evokes.
You’ll forgive me then, I hope, if I quote Sally Bowles, at least as she was in Cabaret, as I take my leave from NBG with her words: ‘The continent of Europe is so wide, mein Herr/ Not only up and down, but side to side, mein Herr/ I couldn’t ever cross it if I tried, mein Herr’ as the time has come to turn my own energies elsewhere, greatly enriched as they have been by my four and a half years with the publication.
So, with many thanks for all the help and support I have received, particularly to my editorial consultant, Rivers Scott, and our brilliant designer, Suzanne Mobbs, and for the interest and excitement of the job itself, I say
Auf Wiedersehen, and may the magazine go from strength to strength.
Yours sincerely,
Rebecca K. Morrison
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