Berlin in English: The German capital in recent Anglophone fiction

Abstract

This article examines the representation of Berlin in a cluster of recent English-language novels by writers including Amit Chaudhuri, Adrian Duncan, Helon Habila, Hari Kunzru, Lauren Oyler, Chris Power, Bea Setton and Matthew Sperling. Showing how the use of English in Berlin has been at the centre of contemporary German debates about migration and cultural identity and explaining how the image of Berlin in English literature has often been balanced between pulp and literary fiction, it asks if this body of contemporary Anglophone writing amounts to something more than literary tourism. Examining its representation of Berlin as both a mnemonic and touristic space, the acuity of its depiction of the city three decades after reunification, and the ways in which it represents different forms of migration to the city, the article contends that these novels do have valuable things to say, particularly concerning the ways in which an urban literary imaginary is being reconfigured for a digital age.

Introduction

In November 2021, Financial Times correspondent Frederick Studemann observed that

English-language Berlin novels used to have a familiar ring to them: Nazis, Weimar, spies. Or even all of the above. But the past few years have brought a steady stream of tales set in Berlin that strike a new note.

These novels replace SS and Stasi with ‘a new pattern: the expat lured by cheaper rents, generous stipends and an easier, perhaps cooler, English-spoken-here lifestyle – a sort of extended slacker existence’ – and ‘engage with universal themes of bad relationships, paranoia, fragile masculinity and geopolitical tensions’ as well as things like ‘Berlin’s evolving tech scene’ (Studemann, 2021).

To date, there has not been any substantial discussion of this body of writing – perhaps because of an implicit assumption that, even if it does present ‘a new pattern’, it cannot really be serious literature: just the jottings of transient expat ‘slackers’. The present article tests this assumption by reconnoitring a cluster of Anglophone Berlin novels published since 2020, including Amit Chaudhuri’s Sojourn (2022), Adrian Duncan’s Love Notes From a German Building Site (2020), Helon Habila’s Travellers (2020), Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill (2020), Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts (2022), Chris Power’s A Lonely Man (2021), Bea Setton’s Berlin (2022b) and Matthew Sperling’s Viral (2020). It takes seriously the idea that such writing might have interesting things to tell us about contemporary life in and migration to the German capital; that it might even suggest ways to break open the cage of ‘national’ literatures and tackle the inseparability of the global and the local in a connected world. At the same time, it is alert to the idea of a literature that appears to cross borders while in fact offering only a superficial engagement with locality: perhaps not ‘world literature’ so much as the ‘multinational literature’ diagnosed by Mark McGurl in his recent study of ‘the novel in the age of Amazon’ – writing that is less a basis for the ‘appreciative maintenance of cultural difference than an easily consumable agent of global cultural standardisation’ (2021: 104).

The article begins by sketching a context for the use of English in Berlin, before excavating a loose tradition of English-language Berlin writing: a heritage that has often been balanced between ‘pulp’ and ‘literary’ fiction. Sifting out common motifs and shared preoccupations in this recent body of Anglophone writing, it first interrogates its relation to the city as a mnemonic and touristic space, the experience and representation of which is partially predetermined by the ‘pulp’ tradition. It then considers its depiction of Berlin three decades after reunification, reflecting in particular on the discourse of ‘gentrification’, before assessing its accounts of different forms of migration to and from the city. Finally, it suggests that these novels offer insights to how a polyglot urban literary imaginary is being reconfigured for a digital age, when immediate experience of place coexists with its mediated representation and the presence of numerous elsewheres.

English in Berlin

In a recent article on ‘Anglophone Practices in Berlin’, Theresa Heyd and Britta Schneider draw attention to the fact that ‘at present, no systematic account exists with regard to the historical role of English in Berlin’ (2019: 147). They sketch a series of waypoints in the ‘sustained rise of English as a privileged repertoire’ (148), running from the occupation of two-thirds of ‘Westberlin’ by British and American forces after 1945, through the appearance of an Anglophone ‘creative class’ associated with figures like Nick Cave and David Bowie in the 1980s, to today, when ‘English linguistic practice plays a pivotal role in different scenarios with different functions – as a lingua franca, as a community code, as a repertoire that represents both global prestige and reservations about Berlin’s changing cityscape’ (148).

Heyd and Schneider’s analysis crystallises around two case studies – ‘Third-Wave Coffee Culture’ and the ‘New African Diaspora’ – where multilingual hybridity can be seen in an immediate way through visible traces in the city (posters, menus and so on), including cases where the balance between ‘orthographic errors’ and ‘purposeful code-mixing’ (154) is not precisely clear. They also delineate four key groups of English speakers in Berlin: native German speakers; tourists; ‘expats’; and ‘more precarious immigrants, workers and refugees’ (150). The first and last of these groups might be aligned with two recent German-language Berlin novels. Leif Randt’s Allegro Pastell (2020) is set between Frankfurt and Berlin; protagonists Tanja and Jerome represent a comfortable or Bildungsbürgerlich milieu, approaching middle age. Tanja herself lives in the rapidly gentrifying borough of Neukölln. Their German is peppered with Anglicisms, particularly in relation to matters of style, fashion and the jargon of relationships and sociability, as well as digital platforms and communication. Verbs like ‘mingle’, ‘vape’ and ‘trigger’ are germanised (‘mingeln’, 170; ‘vapen’, 112; ‘triggerte’, 148), while other Anglicisms are imported directly: characters worry that the ‘design’ of a ‘Homepage’ is too ‘clean’ (87); Tanja and Jerome narrange ‘Dinners’ (125); celebrate things as ‘nice’ (95) and ‘cute’ (24) or dismiss them as ‘superboring’ (145) and ‘out-of-character’ (34); they assemble ‘Tracks’ in ‘Playlists’ (16, 19), attend ‘Screenings’ and post ‘Stories’, while reflecting on their ‘Love Interests’ and ‘Policies’ (51, 30). ‘Das klingt so future’ (236) says one (German) character when hearing of Tanja’s plan to complete her new novel in 2020, while other conversations take place fully in English, within the German text. As a statement of cultural prestige, denoting worldliness and sophistication, this English usage maps squarely on to Heyd and Schneider’s description of ‘educated and upwardly mobile milieus’ where ‘a high English proficiency is endowed with prestige and is perceived as beneficial and necessary for academic and employment success, for participation in entertainment, culture, and public life’ (149).

Jenny Erpenbeck’s 2015 novel Gehen, ging, gegangen, meanwhile, aligns with Heyd and Schneider’s fourth group of English speakers – the ‘precarious immigrants, workers and refugees’ – as well as their case study of the ‘New African Diaspora’, showing how English proficiency can allow for the development of empathic bonds between German speakers and the ‘multitude of English-based speakers and speaker communities involved in global migration under more austere socioeconomic conditions, in particular legal and illegal migrants and refugees in search of liveable conditions’ (150). In Erpenbeck’s novel, retired widower Richard – a former university professor – becomes an advocate for a group of refugees rehoused from Oranienplatz in Kreuzberg to a disused Seniorenheim near to his home in the northern suburbs of the city. Erpenbeck finds various ways of staging the fact that their conversations occur in English, whether by directly remarking on multiply-translated speech at events or simply by including fragments of English within the German text, often in a way that amplifies moments of difference or incomprehension while also presenting Richard with the possibility of personal reinvention that might form part of a wider sociocultural reinvention, even atonement. When Richard asks Osarobo, from Niger, if he has heard the name ‘Hitler’, Osarobo’s reply of ‘Who?’ (149) prompts Richard to daydream that through this ‘Ahnungslosigkeit’ he might reconstruct for himself a Germany ‘vor alldem’ – ‘before all of that’ (150). ‘Weißt du, dass hier früher Osten war? Osarobo schüttelt den Kopf: East?’ (149). Perhaps unavoidably, the presence of English in passages like this is occluded in Susan Bernofsky’s translation: ‘Did you know that this used to be the East?’ ‘Osarobo shakes his head: East?’ (119) An English translation of Randt’s Allegro Pastell is not due until May 2025.

If these examples indicate ways that English has appeared within recent German-language representations of Berlin, the present article is interested in something like their obverse: a body of recent English-language writing that is set in Berlin but, by its nature, has a less obvious relation to German-language culture. It is prompted partly by Yasemin Yıldız’s observation that ‘“Berlin literature” need not be coterminous with “German literature”. For “Berlin” is written in many languages, in many different places, and circulates at times far from the city itself’ (Yıldız, 2017: 206). Yıldız focuses on writers ‘who have migrated to and settled in the city’, since they ‘offer a different challenge to the conception of what Berlin is and of who counts as a Berliner than do authors who see themselves and are seen by others as mere transient guests’ (208). Yet the question of what to make of those less embedded ‘visitors’ to the city – ‘mere’ transient guests whose work has had its impact ‘primarily elsewhere’, and who may align to varying degrees with Heyd and Schneider’s ‘tourists’ and ‘expats’ – remains on the horizon. Yıldız’s own account offers some tantalising examples of the way that the city has appeared in non-German literatures: Japanese writer Mori Ogai’s 1890 story The Dancing Girl, for example, a text that recounts a Japanese man’s affair with a German servant girl, and which while considered a modernist classic in Japan has remained largely unknown in Germany. Or Turkish author Sabahattin Ali’s 1943 novel Kürk Mantolu Madonna (Madonna in a Fur Coat), which was only translated into German in 2008. These two examples suggest the possibility of urban literary topographies existing outside of a city’s ‘mother tongue’ – pointing to an approach that might be productively traced forward – perhaps even telling us something about the specific tensions between the global and the local in a major contemporary metropolis. Such an approach might tessellate with Heyd and Schneider’s aims of ‘looking beyond language as tied to territorially bound, culturally homogeneous social units’ and ‘bringing new light to understanding the relationship between language and community in an age of globalisation’ (145).

English, as the language of American popular culture and corporate capital, and as a global lingua franca, obviously presents a special case here. The extent of its usage in contemporary Berlin has even led to occasional flare-ups in the German press about the supposed decline or absence of German. In 2017, Finance Minister Jens Spahn (2017) made headlines when he complained about waiting staff not understanding German, saying that the equivalent in Paris would be unimaginable. His comments appeared to testify to a sense of English as the linguistic counterpart to a blandly corporate internationalism, as well as more deeply rooted anxieties about the threat posed by Anglophone cultural hegemony to more local constructions of identity. More recently, artist Moshtari Hilal and writer Sinthujan Varatharajah (2022) have offered a different take on the same phenomenon. In an Instagram-Live ‘conversation’ recorded during the Covid-19 pandemic and later adapted into a (dual-language) book, they draw attention to the way that monoglot English speakers are accepted into Berlin society where speakers of other languages have suffered exclusion and stigmatisation as members of supposed ‘Parallelgesellschaften’ unable or unwilling to ‘integrate’. In their reading, it is the privileging of English above other non-German languages that is the problem: as they point out, English is often prioritised over other ‘Fremdsprachen’ despite being far from the most common non-German language of the city. Turkish, Polish, Russian, Arabic and Vietnamese all have far better claims to that – as attested by Patrick Stevenson’s 2017 study of language and migration (Stevenson, 2017). For Hilal and Varatharajah, English is deployed by German speakers and cultural institutions (from art galleries to the Berliner Zeitung newspaper), as a cypher of cosmopolitanism that actually forecloses potentially more productive intercultural engagements closer to home: the linguistic counterpart, that is, of a pretended internationalism that reinforces rather than disrupts established structures of cultural authority and eases the flow of (American) capital. Insights like these must inevitably inflect any attempt to make sense of contemporary Anglophone writing in and about the city.

The Anglophone tradition

Just as there has been no systematic account of English usage in Berlin, few attempts have been made to address a specifically Anglophone tradition of Berlin writing. Joshua Parker’s study Tales of Berlin in American Literature up to the 21st Century is one rare example, but it misses British and other contributions, examining the city in terms of how it reflects ‘the United States’ gaze at its own projected fears and desires’ – an inversion of D.H. Lawrence’s idea of the United States as a ‘monstrous reflection of Europe’ (2016: 3). A more comprehensive sketch of Berlin’s place in English literature might be traced through a series of works on the cusp of pulp and literary fiction, folding together coming-of-age stories of foreign adventure and self (re-)invention – the city as intoxicating ‘Rausch’ – with more sober reflection on twentieth-century history.

Perhaps the most famous Berlin text in English, Christopher Isherwood’s 1939 Goodbye to Berlin, later adapted as the musical and film Cabaret, supplied the canonical account of the Weimar Republic’s twilight years. ‘I am a camera’, Isherwood’s narrator famously tells us, ‘with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking’ (1989: 9). Yet his descriptions are in fact loaded with noirish pathos. In one passage, even the garish furniture and knickknacks in his rented room appear to foretell the violence to come. The narrator wonders:

What becomes of such things? How could they ever be destroyed? They will probably remain intact for thousands of years: people will treasure them in museums. Or perhaps they will be melted down for munitions in a war (Isherwood, 1989: 10).

Isherwood’s Berlin books obscure the author’s real interests in a city that Wyndham Lewis called ‘the Hauptstadt of Vice’ (White, 1989: 133). The sexual – let alone the homosexual – remains firmly parenthetical, and as John J. White has put it, ‘the Berlin of Mr Norris and Sally Bowles is in many respects a bowdlerized version of the city which actually attracted their creator and many of his contemporaries’ (1989: 127).

After 1945, the city became an established setting for Cold War thrillers like Len Deighton’s 1964 Funeral in Berlin, in which British spy Harry Palmer is sent to facilitate the supposed defection of a KGB officer. A drift towards pulp can be traced forward to works like 1980s The Boy Who Followed Ripley, the fourth instalment of Patricia Highsmith’s most famous series. This novel sees its eponymous hero appearing in drag in a Schöneberg gay bar to rescue Frank, the boy of its title, playing up the frisson of sexual permissiveness gestured at by Isherwood. A decade later, Ian McEwan’s 1990 thriller The Innocent reprises the Cold War setting as young British radio specialist Leonard Marnham is posted to the city as part of the historically factual ‘Operation Gold’, in which British and American intelligence operatives burrowed into the Soviet sector to tap into Moscow-bound phone lines. McEwan – who revisited his actual experience of 1980s Berlin in his 2022 novel Lessons – hangs a taut narrative of lost innocence and Cold War anxiety around real-life spy games, before spending an improbable amount of time over Marnham’s dismemberment and burial of his lover’s estranged husband after a half-accidental murder. Like Ripley, Marnham attends a transvestite cabaret with his lover and partner in crime Maria, but he lacks Ripley’s taste for transgression: ‘When they got home, Maria, still tipsy, wanted Leonard to squeeze into one of her dresses. He was having none of that’ (McEwan, 1998: 108).

Into the 1990s, despite the reunification of the real-life city, its representation in English literature stuck with more well-trodden contexts – even if these came unmoored from actual historical referents. Philip Kerr’s ‘Berlin Noir’ trilogy, in which the hard-boiled private investigator Bernie Gunther reads like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe relocated to Germany, probably formed a model for Robert Harris’s more famous detective Xavier March, hero of the seminal ‘alternate history’ novel Fatherland (1992). Set in an imagined 1964 Berlin where Hitler is still in power and the city has been rebuilt after Albert Speer’s bombastic plans for ‘Germania’, Fatherland draws heavily on a ‘noir’ aesthetic that comes via Hollywood but has its roots in Weimar expressionism. Though seeming to ignore German reunification, Fatherland was openly prompted by it: the nightmare vision of an undefeated Third Reich reflects a British anxiety that the reunited Germany was little more than the same thing in a different costume. Harris even transposes waypoints in the history of the EU, like the 1957 Treaty of Rome, into his fictional construct. The literary topos ‘Berlin’, meanwhile, retains its association with geopolitical tensions in the past and present.

The ‘new note’

The ‘golden twenties’; the Third Reich; the Cold War. These historical, and ahistorical, settings continue to supply the waypoints of Berlin’s representation in much English-language writing: works like Joseph Kanon’s 2022 The Berlin Exchange, which mostly fall unambiguously into the category of pulp fiction. So what of the novels that ‘strike a new note’? Since 2000, this parallel strand of English-language literary fiction has been written by, and mostly depicts, people who are not aspirational, would-be worldly native German speakers, or precarious refugees ‘in search of liveable conditions’ (150), but rather fall somewhere between Heyd and Schneider’s other two groups of English speakers in Berlin: ‘tourists’ and ‘expats’. More specifically, a type of ‘(active, experiencing) “traveller” [that] has replaced the persona of the (passive consuming) “tourist”’, and members of ‘the global expat community’, a group made up of both ‘temporary’ and ‘long-term residents of the city’, and ‘often portrayed as a hypermobile elite associated with jobs/activities in arts and culture, digital media or other post-industrial industries’ (149).

One significant early example of this genre is Chloe Aridjis’s 2009 novel Book of Clouds, which recounts a period of time spent in Berlin by its Mexican narrator Tatiana, who is Jewish. The novel counterpoints Tatiana’s first visit to the city as a child on a family holiday with a longer-term residency there in her early 20s, and reckons with the idea of Berlin as both the ‘omphalos of evil’ and a city where the past is palpably under threat from touristic banalisation (Aridjis, 2010: 25). Its title refers to Tatiana’s relationship with an amateur meteorologist as well as to Aridjis’s use of fantastical pathetic fallacy. Yet the idea of a sediment of literally ‘underground’ history is also key. Of a bunker in the Mitte district that has been repurposed as a party venue complete with ‘phantasmagoric’ bowling alley in its basement, where Tatiana accidentally gets left behind in a terrifying sequence, there’s some debate about what the space was actually used for. The ‘Gestapo bowling alley’ might in fact be a relic of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Tour guide Jörg sums up the prevailing mood: ‘“Nazi, Stasi, what’s the difference”, Jörg answered. “We’ve always called it the Gestapo bowling alley but no one knows for sure”’ (Aridjis, 2010: 114).

Aridjis’s novel has little to say about Berlin’s famous nightclubs, which were fundamental to its reinvention in the 1990s and early 2000s, and were granted formal status as ‘Kulturstätten’ by the Berlin Senate in 2020. The lack is amply attended to in Irish writer Rob Doyle’s 2021 novel Threshold, whose title refers to both the threshold of narratable experience vis-a-vis the euphoria brought on by certain drugs, as well as the idea of the narrator-writer Rob’s life itself having hit the ‘threshold’ of middle age. Sitting amid a globe-trotting itinerary that also takes in Dublin, Paris, Bangkok, Sicily and Catalonia, just as it meditates on the effects of magic mushrooms, DMT, LSD and a dizzying cocktail of other stimulants and depressants, the Berlin section of Threshold is entitled simply ‘Nightclub’. Rob tells a friend of his desire ‘to write the great Berlin techno novel’, an ambition that serves, if nothing else, to justify his dissolute lifestyle. This projected novel’s ‘notional existence gave a sense of purpose to my intention of hanging out in grotty clubs every weekend, buying drugs in the toilets while friends in Ireland started having kids and buying houses’ (Doyle, 2021: 208–9). When asked about his project, Rob extemporises ‘about the sedimented psychic histories of Berlin, layers of meaning and hallucination’ (Doyle, 2021: 209) – showing us something like Aridjis’s idea of a ‘whole topography that lay, forgotten, twenty or thirty feet down’ (2010: 112) reduced to the level of cliché. What Rob is really interested in is the experience of drugs – of dancing and techno as a kind of drug. And, more subtly, the afterlife of the 1990s party scene: his middle-aged friend Linda and her ‘stylish, not-so-young techno friends’ (Doyle, 2021: 209–10), who are the same generation as the post-reunification city itself.

Threshold’s Berlin sequence is written through with an ironical sense of the autofictional absurd, sending up the idea of a perfect confluence between writing and life. Rob always has his notebook handy, even if only to use pages from it as toilet paper when he is caught out by a sudden MDMA-induced bowel movement. The novel includes visits to some key ‘sedimented psychic histories’ like the former airport, now public park, at Tempelhofer Feld and the National Security Agency listening station at Teufelsberg: a huge geodesic phallus built on the rubble of the Second World War. In this way it sketches something like a touristic itinerary for a visit that is itself merely one stop on a larger, international circuit. It describes quite straightforwardly some important contexts for the other recent English-language Berlin fiction considered more closely below. One is the idea that the city might in fact have already passed its ‘best’, existing (like Rob’s ‘not-so-young techno friends’) in a state of inertial hangover from the heroic period of the 1990s, and perhaps having entered a period of stagnation. Another is the fact that Rob’s move to Berlin seems to be bound up with his desire to expend minimum effort on his writing: his project for the ‘great Berlin techno novel’ is based on the tantalising idea that such a work would require no plot as such. Instead, ‘the book would carry itself on pure tone, buoyed by my happiness at living in the city that, as Nietzsche had once said of Paris, was the only home for an artist in Europe’ (Doyle, 2021: 212). With thick irony, Doyle here spells out the key risk run by contemporary English-language Berlin writing: that it should either be written or perceived as the superficial document of a superficial engagement with the city, lent spurious meaning merely by virtue of those ‘sedimented psychic histories’ weighing things down.

Mnemonic Berlin

In 1997, Andreas Huyssen wrote that Berlin, ‘owing mainly to its decenteredness and vast extension’, was ‘much less liable to turn into an urban museum space such as the centers of Rome, Paris, or even London have become in recent decades’ (2003: 51). 27 years later, Lauren Oyler compared the problem posed by ‘the clichés of Anglophone writing about Berlin’ to trying to cycle safely across tram-lines (both cycling and trams being novelties to an American in the city): ‘you might be thinking about maneuvering at a strong enough angle to avoid getting stuck, and then somehow you find yourself explaining that the place ‘has always been a city full of exiles’’ (Oyler, 2024: 105). The sense is of unstable, disorderly and uncurated historical traces congealing into a prewritten itinerary such as that set out, and sent up, in Doyle’s Threshold.

Other recent Anglophone Berlin novels have thematised this idea in different ways. Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill unfolds as an account of its narrator’s midlife crisis and psychological breakdown while he is a guest fellow at the fictional ‘Deuter Center’ in Wannsee, researching a project about ‘the lyric I’. The novel shows real sensitivity to this locality, which is based on that of the American Academy in Berlin, where Kunzru himself took up a residency in 2017. The text mixes in the real presence of Kleist’s grave nearby (the narrator’s project on ‘the lyric I’ as a model of ‘modern selfhood’ begins to go awry when he identifies Kleist as a modern ‘incel’ avant la lettre) with the loaded presence of the ‘Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz’ on the other side of the bay. The waiter at the Deuter Center, ‘a local history enthusiast’, points out the villa before adding, unnecessarily, ‘Where the final solution to the Jewish question was planned in 1942’ (Kunzru, 2020: 26). The reference is blunt, but the narrator’s own visit to the villa, which really was used as a hostel for schoolchildren until 1988, only then becoming a Gedenkstätte, permits some reflection on what he sees as the failures of official remembrance culture. He finds it to be ‘an empty shell, completely without character. I knew at once that I would find nothing to help me’. The site’s putative purpose is undermined by ‘the absence of any meaningful connection with the past’ and visitors proceed around it in a state of dumb solemnity, simply ‘receiving the terrible information’ and moving on (Kunzru, 2020: 187–188).

In her novel Berlin, Bea Setton draws a similar link between her protagonist Daphne’s damaged psychology and the urban space she occupies: ‘On good days I loved everything about Berlin’; on bad days, she ‘could only see how poor and wrecked it was’ (Setton, 2022b: 162). ‘Monuments’ come in the form of the famous ‘Stolpersteine’ installed by artist Gunter Demnig since the late 1990s to commemorate victims of Nazi persecution, and which are now a feature of every major German city except Munich. Daphne notices the ‘small brass plaques’ among the cobblestones outside her apartment and Googles them to find an explanation. She soon sees them everywhere: ‘It was jarring, at first, to see Berlin’s lively streets filled with so many little graves, but after a few weeks they became part of the scenery and I stopped noticing them altogether’ (Setton, 2022a: 12). The formulation is ambiguous: its blitheness either conveys a certain unease at how these plaques cause the memory of historical violence to slip from foreground to background, or it is straightforwardly indifferent. This tension – and the attached question of good taste – is perhaps tested to the limit in Matthew Sperling’s Viral, when one character refers to a sexual encounter had in the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe – which was completed in 2005 and is referred to simply as ‘the Denkmal’ in the text: ‘We were walking in there and you know how it’s very intricate, a bit like a maze where you can get lost among all the blocks? Anyway, it was all dark and atmospheric in there, and one thing led to another’ (Sperling, 2020: 39).

Amit Chaudhuri’s Sojourn takes a different approach: as its narrator drifts through Berlin, his detached state is mirrored and reinforced by an oneiric quality ascribed to the city itself, moving between the campus of the university where he is a guest fellow, through department stores, restaurants and his house in Dahlem, an area ‘known for its dullness’, having been ‘created by the Americans to exemplify suburban tranquillity’. (Chaudhuri, 2022: 17). He is sometimes guided by an exiled Bengali poet named Faqrul, enabling a choreography which permits Chaudhuri to reflect on the idea of certain sites’ emotive power at arm’s length: Faqrul seems to be directly moved by locations’ historical charge, the narrator less so. At one point, as Faqrul contemplates a bullet mark in a Prenzlauer Berg façade, the narrator reflects: ‘To access history in this way, you also had to access him’ (Chaudhuri, 2022: 38). The dynamic also permits a more intricate reflection on the banalisation of historical traces, even when they are not explicitly commemorated. At one point, as they eat canapés at a reception at the World Bank on Potsdamer Platz, Faqrul points out the site of the so-called ‘Führerbunker’: ‘‘From there’, he said, scratching the air’s surface, ‘they’d go to that hotel opposite to eat. Otherwise, the food would travel across the stretch, which was being shelled’’. Chaudhuri foregrounds his narrator’s uneasiness with the carefree description: ‘He sounded like he was recounting arrangements made for a holiday’ (2022: 34).

One striking absence in these novels is the history of German division. This is actually thematised by Chaudhuri and Kunzru. In Chaudhuri’s Sojourn, in another tall building at Hohenzollernplatz, the narrator is invited by a colleague to look east across the Tiergarten and consider the sense of a limited horizon when the city is divided. Back downstairs later on, the narrator ‘was now in the world I’d seen from the top floor’ and reflects on how, for him, the pre-Wende division of the world ‘had been time itself. Then the clock had stopped on reunification’. (Chaudhuri, 2022: 66) Chaudhuri’s narrator has difficulty integrating his idea of the GDR with what he sees around him in the present; as in Kunzru’s Red Pill, the only character actually from ‘the East’ is the cleaner, who lives in an unspecified area ‘beyond Kreuzberg’ (Kunzru, 2020: 29). Their mutual incomprehension leads to some comic sequences of non-dialogue, but the concept of ‘East’ after reunification remains strange, not reconcilable by the visiting observer into the reality of the contemporary city – an echo, perhaps, of Osarobo’s uncomprehending ‘East?’ in Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen.

In Red Pill, this sense of irreconcilability is even more pronounced: a dialogue between the narrator and the cleaner, in which she recounts her violent persecution by the Stasi, appears as a self-contained section entitled ‘Zersetzung (Undermining)’. The sequence was originally published as a standalone short story in the New Yorker. Its discreteness might appear to stand for the narrator’s difficulty integrating this history with the rest of what he sees, even if there is a clear thematic link with the extreme surveillance culture at the Deuter Center, which feeds the narrator’s escalating paranoia. At the same time, its jarring presence within the larger narrative structure might be seen as marking the way that the ‘new note’ of recent Berlin fictions has not always replaced the older tonality of ‘Nazis, Weimar, spies’ (Studemann) but rather coexisted and cohabited with it. Indeed, the idea of a provocative mixture of the solemn and the superficial might be seen as having a formal analogue in the way that a number of these novels, though presented as ‘literary’ fictions, carry conspicuously ‘pulp’ elements within them. In Viral, Sperling embroils his protagonist Ned into a noirish world of organised crime that has much in common with the 2017 television series 4 Blocks, a crime thriller set within the Lebanese community of Neukölln. Sperling’s knowingly self-aware jokes about noir tropes like the Doppelgänger are taken even further in Chris Power’s A Lonely Man, an ingeniously metatextual narrative about a struggling literary writer living in Prenzlauer Berg and his encounter with a hack ghostwriter who is apparently on the run from his former employer, a London-based Russian oligarch. In Power’s (2021: 81) depiction, settings like the Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park offer a sense of Cold War atmospherics that are always already ironic – ‘Le Carré stuff’, as his protagonist puts it. The novel thus alludes to the tradition of Anglophone Berlin writing outlined above, in such a way that the topos ‘Berlin’ here is not only the city itself, but the city as it has been depicted in English-language fiction; indeed, the city as an English-language fiction.

Changing Berlin

In one sequence of her novel Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler’s narrator cycles past the Topography of Terror (the exhibition complex on the site formerly occupied by the Gestapo and other parts of the Nazi state apparatus). She continues along the line of the wall, following ‘the double row of memorial cobblestones that charted its past course down the street’. Approaching Potsdamer Platz, ‘the glass windows and gridded sky were a disappointing familiarity, the realisation that Europe wasn’t all my idea of Europe but also sometimes an idea of America, or of the future’ – a future that now itself seems outmoded (Oyler, 2022: 292–3). The sequence stands out as an isolated reflection on changes to have taken place in Berlin since reunification, and even since the 1990s, when Huyssen called it ‘the most energized site for new urban construction anywhere in the Western world’ (2003: 51).

Although these novels depict protagonists living in various distinct areas of the city, including Charlottenburg (Travellers), Wannsee (Red Pill), Prenzlauer Berg (A Lonely Man) and Dahlem (Sojourn); their topographies often overlap. Fake Accounts, Viral and Berlin are each focused almost entirely within the districts of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg and Neukölln identified by figures like Hilal and Varatharajah as flashpoints of ‘gentrification’ – the term coined by urbanist Ruth Glass in 1964 to describe demographic changes taking place in inner London. Their reflections on this process are inconsistent. When Oyler’s narrator in Fake Accounts returns to Berlin after her first visit, she lives near Richardplatz in Neukölln. She reflects on the Anglophone character of her immediate area. Weserstraße, as she remarks of the same street identified by Hilal and Varatharajah in English in Berlin, ‘was almost entirely Anglophone in the evenings’ (Oyler, 2022: 206). For her this is less a prompt to any self-critical reflection on demographic change, and her place within it, than it is merely ‘distracting’ (Oyler, 2022: 206). Although she is highly self-conscious about having been ‘a white woman living in Brooklyn’, she sees others’ complaints about gentrification in Neukölln as hypocritical. An online ‘ten-minute video rant’ on the theme turns out to have been made by a man who ‘opened one of the first ‘hipster bars’ in the neighbourhood’ (Oyler, 2022: 155), later forced to close by the process it had itself apparently started. Oyler’s narrator responds to friends’ questions about how she is herself contributing to this process by insisting that ‘I wasn’t necessarily moving there, I was just going there’ – a specious attempt to justify what she sees as the passé or ‘kind of tired’ act of moving from New York to Berlin (Oyler, 2022: 132). She is more concerned about being embarrassingly unoriginal than acknowledging her role in a problematic social process. In fact, her insistence on her own temporariness (and therefore non-culpability) is almost a performance of Hilal and Varatharajah’s (2022: 42) critique of Anglophone expats’ disavowal of the links between anglicisation and gentrification in English in Berlin.

In Setton’s Berlin, narrator Daphne’s experience of the city is inseparable from her narrator’s cushioned sense of home in London, insulated by family wealth, working a cafe job she doesn’t actually need. Living first near Kottbusser Tor in Kreuzberg and later on the fictional ‘Huberstraße’ in Neukölln, she puts up with Berlin’s hardships for the sake of gathering ‘experience’ and makes sense of what she perceives as the city’s slothfulness through the lens of her own lack of a need for paid work. ‘Idleness’ we read, ‘was a city-wide phenomenon and was part of the strange, disorienting social fabric of Berlin. Weekends and weekdays had much the same texture; the streets were always full of people with no place to be and nothing to do’ (Setton, 2022a: 29). This matches up with Oyler’s narrator’s view of Neukölln, where ‘Many people seemed to have no schedule, or responsibility to anyone’ (2022: 155). Neither of these narrators delves deeper into this perception or really attempts an analysis of the apparently ‘idle’ population – they certainly don’t seem to take issue with it. In an article that coincided with the publication of her novel, Setton emphasised how ‘I’ve always loved novels with a sense of place’, adding that ‘when I wrote Berlin, I really wanted to give my readers that travelling experience’, but her novel struggles to move beyond this touristic gaze (Setton, 2022b). The city as a lived space recedes: the people who work in places like the biscuit factory whose aroma is mentioned by Daphne as she runs around Tempelhofer Feld presumably live elsewhere.

Power’s A Lonely Man indicates the possibility of a more nuanced approach. It is set largely in Prenzlauer Berg, one of the first districts of the former east to be occupied by wealthy incomers after 1989. Protagonist Robert and his family moved from London to Berlin ‘because it was cheaper, greener, less crowded’; so that he can quit his job in advertising and his wife Karijn can run an upholstery workshop. Older than Oyler’s and Setton’s narrators, Robert is alert to the changes in the city’s, and his particular area’s, fabric in the 15 years since his first visit. ‘Berlin then’ he says, ‘was a nightscape of waste ground he stumbled across, moving between the cavernous dark of Tresor and Berghain, clubs in high rises, in drained swimming pools, in confusing warrens beside the Spree’ (Power, 2021: 22). Back in the present, his old clubbing friend Heidi ‘complains about ‘Prenzlberg’ (her Southwest-German styling of Prenzlauer Berg) becoming ‘Little Swabia’:

Robert regretted being part of the same process that drew affluent southerners north and made neighbourhoods increasingly sedate: just another newcomer who didn’t want three-day parties in his basement. Like a lot of people who had arrived in Berlin since the millennium, he wanted the city he had first loved to continue existing, but not in his Kiez. (Power, 2021: 74)

Robert here conspicuously uses the German term ‘Kiez’ for ‘quarter’ or ‘neighbourhood’ – a habit connected to his rejection of London, which seems antiquated, hostile and provincial when he returns for the funeral of his friend Liam. The use of ‘Kiez’, a word associated specifically with Berlin, becomes a marker of the cosmopolitan identity to which he aspires. In this way, the sequence offers a counterpoint to Heyd and Schneider’s identification of the use of English by native German speakers as a marker of cosmopolitan prestige and intercultural fluency. The description also plays up the connection between Anglophone migration and population movements within Germany. At the same time, the comparison between ‘Berlin then’ and the present echoes Rob Doyle’s interest, in Threshold, in the ‘not-so-young’ techno enthusiasts who are about as old as the reunified Berlin itself. The fact that Berlin’s club scene is barely touched on in any of the other novels is probably significant here, suggesting that their formal recognition as ‘Kulturstätten’ in 2020 has coincided with a decline in their interest, or at least novelty, to Anglophone writers like these.

Migratory Berlin

Each of these novels presents an English-speaking protagonist who has recently moved to Berlin. In two cases (Kunzru’s Red Pill and Chaudhuri’s Sojourn) this is to take up academic fellowships – attracted by the ‘generous stipends’ referred to by Studemann. In a third – Habila’s Travellers – the narrator is researching a PhD on the 1884 Berlin Conference, but initially travels to Berlin in order to accompany his wife, a painter who has taken up the fictional ‘Zimmer Fellowship for the Arts’ – even though he does end up staying on longer than her. In a fourth, Setton’s Berlin, Daphne is presented as being on what amounts to ‘a prolonged gap year’ (2022a: 163) and does indeed spend fewer than 12 months in the city. In other cases, the protagonists’ tenure is open-ended, as they aim to refashion their identities, their relationships or both.

The novels thematise migration in very different ways. At one point in A Lonely Man, Robert recalls taking his daughters to see the refugee encampment at Oranienplatz in Kreuzberg, which was on the site from 2012 to 2014. Robert’s concern is that the encampment ‘had become an exhibit of sorts’: he worries ‘that it was being treated like another stop on the Berlin tourist trail, slotting in between Checkpoint Charlie and Tempelhof, and that they were part of that process just as they were part of the gentrifying wave’ (Power, 2021: 113). Seeing things in these terms marks his own self-consciousness as a very different kind of migrant to the city: an awareness of his own privileged position as a comparatively wealthy, white European man. This kind of awareness does not come through in a text like Oyler’s Fake Accounts. For all her insistence on temporariness (not ‘moving’, but ‘going’), one of the few times Oyler’s narrator leaves the areas of Neukölln, Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain is to apply for a visa at the foreigners’ office. Anxious about potential communication problems, she is ultimately met by an official who is only too happy to speak English. The scene is uncannily similar to Hilal and Varatharajah’s (2022: 56) complaint about the histrionics of English-speaking migrants to the city whose visa applications are in fact highly likely to be successful and for whom even failure would only mean a return to ‘some suburb of Portland or Sydney’ – hardly a matter of life and death. For Hilal and Varatharajah, the inflated anxiety experienced and performed by these migrants (through posts on social media, for example) sits uneasily with the real anxiety of those fleeing war zones or other horrors, for whom this office is the site of often traumatic experiences of genuine incomprehension and a real likelihood of deportation.

The narrators of Red Pill, Sojourn and Travellers – none of whom are white – might not be planning to stay in the city, but they do offer a more nuanced reflection on migration to and from Berlin, and the presence of diasporic groups within it. Chaudhuri’s (2022: 73) Sojourn, set in the late 1990s, includes some narrative reflection on the presence of migrant communities in Kreuzberg, framing the kind of prejudice he encounters at the university where he is a guest fellow: ‘The Turkish don’t integrate’ he is told flatly by a lecturer in comparative literature. The novel also depicts interaction among migrant figures, with greater success. The narrator speaks a mixture of Bengali and English with the exiled poet Faqrul. Conscious of his own transient presence in the city, he is also self-aware about what he perceives to be his status as ‘an ornament to an internationalism initiative’ (Chaudhuri, 2022: 43); in a similar way, he is romantically pursued by a white German woman who fetishises him as an Indian man (‘I love India’, 76; ‘I love kurtas’, 102). Although his interaction with the state bureaucracy appears painless, lubricated by the university bureaucracy, in these other, perhaps more sinister ways, Chaudhuri’s narrator navigates through layers of objectification, revealing a city not quite as worldly as it might aspire to be.

Kunzru’s Red Pill is set in the midst of the 2015 ‘migration crisis’, with ‘more than a million refugees crossing Europe’ (2020: 155). The narrator’s only time out of Wannsee is a trip to Mitte for an art-world fundraiser to support refugees, and the presence of a refugee camp near the Deuter Centre permits a reflection on the situation. The camp even plays a role in the narrator’s psychological breakdown, as his attempts to give a coat and money to a young girl are misread as an effort to ‘get access’ to her, hastening his expulsion from the Deuter Centre (Kunzru, 2020: 259). In this way, his ideas about ‘the freemasonry of dark-skinned men who meet in white places’ (Kunzru, 2020: 156) are shown up as a grave misreading, the sequence performing the way in which the realities of those who have been compelled to travel to Berlin, rather than chosen to do so, remain beyond these novels’ empathic reach. Yet one striking aspect of Red Pill is the narrator’s noticing of a pattern in the street-signs he sees relating to migration: those written in English say things like ‘Refugees Welcome’, while those in German carry questions like ‘Wieviel ist zuviel?’ (‘how many is too many?’). English here is the language of conviviality and hope, while German is nativist and exclusionary. A similar patterning can be seen in Helon Habila’s Travellers, where English fluency undergirds intersecting tales of flight and displacement constellated around the unnamed narrating ‘I’, producing a complex picture of the ‘New African Diaspora’ in Europe. Travellers depicts how linguistic misunderstanding can be performed and weaponised, standing in for different kinds of incomprehension. The narrator wonders of a passing woman who has smiled at him, ‘Even if I spoke her language, the language the city spoke, would she understand me?’ (Habila, 2020: 8), and recalls an incident in a post office when an assistant’s refusal to speak English is clearly down to racial prejudice rather than actual linguistic shortcomings. A similar thing is found in Red Pill even when its narrator does speak German: while on one of his long walks through the Wannsee area, he gets ‘dirty looks’ from an assistant in a bakery who ‘pretended not to understand my German’ (Kunzru, 2020: 66). The fact that Kunzru’s narrator is reading Kleist in the original indicates that his German-language skills are not the real issue here.

Generally, these novels depict a world in which English is part of the fabric of everyday life in Berlin. As Ned, the protagonist of Matthew Sperling’s Viral, explains in a phone call to his mum: ‘You can get by with just speaking English out here, to be honest. My German’s just okay’ (2020: 109). The social worlds in Oyler and Setton’s novels are those of English-language bookshops as well as the German-language schools they attend. At the same time, Anglophone characters are mostly shown to be at least attempting to learn German. Reflections on language acquisition are often eloquent and subtle. Adrian Duncan’s Love Notes From a German Building Site offers a rich depiction of the cosmopolitan space of a construction site at Alexanderplatz, where the workers hail from Ireland, Ukraine, Bulgaria, the United Kingdom and elsewhere. The novel is distinctive for Duncan’s inclusion of idiosyncratic glossaries: freely associated word lists which mix the specific practical imperatives of the narrator’s work as an engineer with drifts through his psychology and preoccupations, as he attempts to make sense of his migration from Dublin to Berlin with his half-German partner. Meditating on the word ‘drücken’ (to press, or to print) and ‘Blatt’ (paper, or leaf) as he looks up at sap falling from the linden trees, he imagines

the sap being pushed out onto the leaves. I thought the whole tree was printing itself onto the surface of these leaves – that the trees, swaying and bobbing and perspiring in the breeze, were publishing themselves in many daily editions. (Duncan, 2020: 53)

Amid his depiction of the building site’s structures of friendship and collegiality, as well as animosity and tension, these linguistic reflections lend a depth of texture to Duncan’s account of a migratory experience that is some distance from Heyd and Schneider’s stock-image of the ‘expat’ as part of a nomadic ‘hypermobile elite’ working in ‘post-industrial industries’.

Digital Berlin

In each of these novels, digital technologies both accelerate and complicate narrators’ resettlement in and adjustment to Berlin. The only exception is Sojourn, where Chaudhuri’s narrator watches the news on BBC and CNN – the only English-language television he can access – and visits video rental stores to pick up Bollywood films. ‘I need to watch TV’ he tells his departmental minder (Chaudhuri, 2022: 54). In each of the other texts – set almost two decades later – television has been replaced by computers and phones, allowing characters to continue moving in Anglophone cultural, social and political worlds located outside of Berlin even while they are physically located in the city.

Under these conditions, one consistent commonality is the way that the experience of living in Berlin is shaped by a context of liberal defeats in the United States and the United Kingdom. Sperling’s Viral, for example, presents the spectacle of the 2015 UK General Election – which led to Brexit – with a group of expats and Germans watching in a state of ‘appalled fascination as it became clear that the scale of the defeat for the Labour Party was in fact larger, even worse, than the exit poll had predicted’ (2020: 189). Trump’s election a year later comes at the ending of Kunzru’s Red Pill and the opening of Oyler’s Fake Accounts, and is explicitly thematised in both texts as the characters move back and forth between Germany and the United States. At the same time, these protagonists do not uniformly fulfil Hilal and Varatharajah’s description of figures who ‘don’t need to think along local lines at all, because their whole existence in the city is only temporary’ (2020: 109). In fact, there are often productive fusions between the local and the distant. In Red Pill, the narrator becomes obsessed with an American television show he streams online, and increasingly confines himself to his room in the Deuter Centre. Yet, although this typifies technological conditions which create the possibility, at least, of Berlin coming to seem a mere backdrop, his breakdown is precipitated precisely by the interaction between his online experiences and the things he witnesses first hand in Berlin, whether related to the migrant crisis or the domestic architecture around Wannsee. In a similar way, the protagonist of Power’s A Lonely Man, is reminded of his visit to the Oranienplatz refugee camp while reading a Guardian article about the British Eurosceptic politician Nigel Farage. Global and local discourses coalesce here towards potentially productive insights. It might, perhaps, be complained that there is an absence of national context – replicating the sense of schism between Berlin and ‘Restdeutschland’ complained of by German critics like Maxim Biller (2001: 156). On the other hand, the sense of Berlin as part of a constellation of global cities that are better connected with each other than with their own provincial hinterlands (not one of these recent Anglophone novels features so much as a weekend outing to Brandenburg) is hardly unprecedented. Yadé Kara’s 2023 Wende novel Selam Berlin, for example, imagines (West) Berlin as a ‘Staat für sich’ – a state unto itself (Kara, 2023: 18). Shuttling back and forth from Istanbul, its protagonist Hasan Kazan experiences German reunification as a violent welding together of the city into a national context with which he has little sympathy, and which has little sympathy with him.

Of this group of novels, the only one in which ‘tech’ is thematised in terms of commercial enterprise is Sperling’s Viral, where protagonist Ned is co-founder of a Kreuzberg-based social media agency called ‘The Thing Factory’. Sperling (2020: 82) sends up the tensions between the values of Ned’s industry and those of ‘Berlin’ itself: in the course of focus groups relating to The Thing Factory’s plan to produce an app that is ‘a sort of Uber for escorts’, he is immediately met with a subtle sociological analysis from one of the escorts themselves, who sees platforms like Uber and Airbnb as key contributors to ‘Gentrifizierung’. Among the other texts, more striking is the way that they depict the affective experiences produced by the use, rather than the creation, of contemporary digital technologies. This is principally illuminated not when such technology works but when it fails. One striking moment in A Lonely Man comes when Power’s protagonist Robert is immobilised by a lack of mobile data coverage. When an anonymous caller tells him that his wife has been injured in a cycling accident, he impotently tries to book a taxi: ‘He launched Uber but it wouldn’t load: the blue dot that was him hung in an empty grey field’ (Power, 2021: 250–251). The failure of the electronic representation immobilises the narrator in the real world: it is as if the real space ‘wouldn’t load’. In a highly contemporary way, the actual city here becomes a pendant of its digital replica – collapsing together what urban sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1991: 33) called ‘representational spaces’ and ‘representations of space’. Where Chaudhuri’s narrator in Sojourn meditates on the strange experience of observing the city from the tenth floor of the World Bank building and later being on the pavement – ‘in the world I’d seen from the top floor’ (2022: 66) – Power reveals how this state of mind, poised between map and territory, has become a normal way of inhabiting urban space.

A different kind of technological failure is foregrounded by Oyler in Fake Accounts – in this case highlighting rather than collapsing the distance between the United States and Europe. Oyler’s narrator discusses the feeling of dislocation produced by the time difference when she tries to communicate with New York, refreshing pages in vain as the people who comprise the nodes of her social networks are still asleep: ‘no matter how much I scrolled, it wasn’t enough to rouse the people I knew to post on Twitter’ (2022: 149).

Suddenly finding myself ahead of everyone, spinning my wheels, with no one to acknowledge my existence at the customary intervals, I entered a state of twitchy, frantic boredom, fixating on what I could not stop considering the “real” news, from the United States. (Oyler, 2022: 150)

The way in which the time difference makes digital networks unsatisfactory defamiliarises them and forces the narrator to realise their presence: ‘when I was living my “real” life there [in the US] I had insisted that social media was not part of it but rather some aberration’; in Berlin, ‘I had finally to admit that Twitter was not a distraction from reality but a representative of it’ (Oyler, 2022: 151). Rather than ‘making stone stony’, as in Viktor Shklovsky’s famous phrase, here literature makes technology glitchy to reveal the presence of the ‘device’ in a new sense.

These examples suggest ways in which digital technology feeds into characters’ experiences not so much of connectivity as frustration and isolation. The loneliness of Setton’s (2022a: 133) protagonist Daphne is similarly textured and tempered by the digital interfaces with which she engages. ‘Clicking and swiping and refreshing, pacing the reassuringly familiar landscape of apps’, her thoughts ‘drift on waves of social media’; she spends ‘every evening on Reddit and Google’s barren landscapes, or stalking people I no longer spoke to on Facebook’ (Setton, 2022a: 4, 17, 63–64). At the same time, Daphne’s use of MeetUp.com to find a group to go jogging with shows us this technology bringing her into contact with Germans, breaking out of the cosmopolitan – but non-German – social worlds of language schools and English bookshops. The same is true of Oyler’s protagonist when she joins the dating website OkayCupid. These cases appear to present digital platforms as the most immediate way to emerge from the solitude experienced in an unfamiliar city. Yet, prompted by their interactions with toxic male figures, Oyler and Setton’s protagonists in fact make use of these services not only to meet people but to deceive them, so that self-reinvention slips irresistibly into cruel dissimulation and deception. If Daphne’s anxiety at not ‘living the Berlin Experience’ is initially assuaged by the thought that ‘How I actually spent my time was immaterial, because eventually I could tell whatever story I fancied’ (Setton, 2022a: 133), the fabric of untruths she weaves ultimately comes unspun in a moment of personal catastrophe: as she boards her Ryanair flight back to London, she regrets that ‘I never went to a club, I never barbecued, I never went swimming in a lake. I’d just stewed in the foetid air of my own bell jar’ (Setton, 2022a: 236). Oyler’s protagonist, meanwhile, uses her OkayCupid presence to cultivate a series of invented identities (‘fake accounts’) based around signs of the zodiac, coolly replaying her own treatment by her performance-artist boyfriend, who inexplicably fakes his own death before abruptly reappearing. If, as sociologist Georg Simmel wrote in his 1903 essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, the modern city ‘grant[ed] to the individual a kind and an amount of personal freedom which has no analogy whatsoever under other conditions’ (1997: 180), these examples suggest ways in which digital technologies have both expanded and complicated this ‘freedom’, making it both more and less liberating.

Conclusions

If the use of English in Berlin is attached to a variety of different contexts and experiences of migration, recent English-language Berlin novels have been correspondingly varied in their depictions of the city. Though they do sometimes present superficial representations of the city as a mnemonic space, the nature of this superficiality itself is often thematised: partly through reflection on the sites of commemoration and memorialisation, and partly through the acknowledgement of ‘Berlin’ as an already-existing topos of English-language fiction. If their protagonists sometimes disavow their place within social processes like ‘gentrification’, on other occasions they present meaningful reflection on changes to have occurred in the city since reunification. Though they certainly appear to testify to the existence of a mobile, internationalised class of Anglophone writers, the nature of this mobility is not uniform: the modes of intercultural fluency they depict offer insights to the use of English within convivial as well as exclusionary contexts. Their depiction of how digital technologies shape the experience of urban space, producing an urban experience that is both local and global and sometimes contributing to acute experiences of disorientation, are relevant to an understanding of the contemporary city as such, as well as of Berlin in particular. Ultimately, they suggest that the project of literary topography – even, and perhaps especially, outside of a city’s ‘mother tongue’ – can be a useful tool in understanding the experience and representation of urban space in the contemporary period.