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Literary Berlin Today (1982)

A little over a half-century ago, Berlin was one of the great literary cities of the world. Here lived the playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht and the novelist Alfred Döblin, whose forgotten classic Alexanderplatz Berlin (1929) had as its protagonist the city itself. Here lived the critics Walter Benjamin and Carl Einstein; here Herwarth Walden edited Der Sturm (1910-1932), which is still remembered as one of the great avant-garde magazines. Here had Dada thrived, albeit briefly. Not only was the best literary review of the 1920s, Die literarische Welt, published in Berlin, but so was the most snobbish, Querschnitt (meaning cross-section) The legendary Wieland Herzfelde began his publishing career in Berlin in the 1920s; S. Fischer Verlag was already established here. Glorious though it was, literary Berlin emigrated or vanished in the wake of Adolf Hitler’s accession to power.

Postwar Berlin has been something else—-a divided city, one part a Western oasis under the control of the occupying powers of the West (America, Britain and France) and the other part the capital of a Soviet satellite state. Of the writers who had made Berlin so important in the pre-Hitler period, only Brecht returned, a shadow of his former self, not to the West but the East, where a theater called the Berliner Ensemble was established especially for him. The old publishing houses (except Ullstein) left Berlin for the increasingly prosperous, though smaller cities of Western Germany--Frankfurt, Cologne, Hamburg and Munich. “It is a dying city,” the cultural critic Roland Wiegenstein told me, “and dying cities have a special perfume. And since it is dying slowly, it will be a good place to live for a hundred years.

This West Berlin is officially tied to West Germany, which is another place, over a hundred miles to the West and yet further away to the south, at least thirty minutes by airplane and several hours by road or train. It is not for nothing that West Berliners customarily speak of traveling to “West Germany,” as though it were another country. Nonetheless, West Germany generously supports Berlin as the Western outpost in the East, bestowing tax deductions, fellowship programs, cultural subsidies, and wage increments, among other, sometimes more subtle inducements.

Here it is commonly understood that cultural activities that are not commercially viable must be subsidized not only for their own sake but for the city’s survival in this hostile Communist sea. The Deutsches Opera receives a subsidy that accounts for nearly 90% of its total budget; this is the highest percentage of subsidy for any theater in Germany. The theaters of West Berlin are comparably subsidized. Since commercial publishing is disadvantageous in Berlin (given the costs and obstacles of shipping through the hostile sea)~ publicly funded institutions arose to fill the slack. The principal one has been the Literarisches Colloquium, an organization without peer elsewhere in Germany or in the U.S. It was founded by Walter Höllerer, himself a poet, playwright, critic and the founding editor of the literary magazine Akzente, as well as the former head of the language department of the Technical University. Under his guidance, the Literarisches Colloquium sponsors readings and conferences; it publishes not only a series of small-format books of poetry and prose but larger books that sometimes draw upon its seminars (such as continuing one on “Literature in the Technological Age”). It also has a film studio to produce both films and television programs about literature. All this is housed in an elegant mansion on one of Berlin’s handsomest lakes, the Wannsee. Though the Literarisches Colloquium may not now be as influential as it was a dozen years ago, without it cultural Berlin today would be a different place.

Its funds come mostly from the City’s Senator (Ministry) für Wissenschaft und Kulturelle Angelegenheiten (Cultural Affairs). The literature director is Dietger Pforte, an earnest young man who formerly lectured on literature at Berlin’s Free University. From his office high in Europa Center, he explained how the Berlin Senate on an annual budget of a million marks ($400,000), a range of programs: stipends for young writers (including Berlin residents who write in Turkish or English), grants to five young German-language authors from elsewhere (to spend five months apiece at the Literarisches Colloquium complex), travel funds to bring foreign writers to Berlin and for Berlin writers to go abroad, several literary prizes, publications funds for books that would not otherwise appear, festivals of esoteric literature (e.g., Icelandic, Croatian), an annual book entitled Ex Libris--Berliner Bficherform that reprints poems and stories by local writers, in addition to advertisements by local publishers announcing their recent titles; and 25 Christmas presents of 400 Deutschemarks apiece to indigent writers. Not unlike literature program directors here, Pforte complains that funds allocated to his department are only 1% (one percent) of the total allotted to Berlin’s performing arts.

The single most famous author of postwar Berlin has been Gunter Grass. Born in Danzig (now called Gdansk) in 1929, he came to Berlin after the War to attend an arts college. His first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), made him not only an international celebrity but the de facto spokesman for younger Berlin intellectuals. When the East Germans built a wall to divide the city in 1961, it was Grass who appeared on television and then organized an international writers protest (to no avail). From time to time he also campaigned strenuously for his Social Democrat comrade Willy Brandt. Most of his attention has gone to producing a continuous stream of novels, poems, plays and essays, in addition to visual art that is frequently exhibited. Grass still maintains a residence here, as well as a secretary and an administrator for the Alfred Döblin literary prize that he personally funds; but since his divorce a few years ago, he has lived mostly in the West German countryside south of Hamburg.

Because only a few can depend upon the literary marketplace for a secure source of income most Berlin poets, fictioners, and critics do other things. A few like Höllerer teach in the universities, but academic jobs for writers are scarcer here than in the U.S. (as Germany has yet to discover creative-writing programs.) Some writers work regularly for the newspapers or the radio stations. Some like the poets Rolf Haufs or Aras Oren are full-time producers at Sender Freies Berlin (Radio Free Berlin). Both it and RIAS (Radio in the American Sector) broadcast readings by local writers in addition to book reviews and radio essays. All German stations produce hörspiele (hear-plays) by contemporary writers. In Germany, radio stations generally pay better than even the slickest magazines.

Even though Berlin is not what it was, even though it is geographically inconvenient, it still attracts writers. Over 250 of some note live among its two million, and that ratio is higher than anywhere else in Germany. Some are here because they were born here. Others came because it remains Germany’s largest city, with the most cultivated population and most permissive atmosphere. Fred Viebahn, a novelist born 1947, came to Berlin from Cologne at the end of the 1960s. “I thought it was the most lively city in Germany, the youngest in spirit. The enclosed situation of the two worlds confronting each other was very creative for me at the beginning.” Mechthild Rausch, a critic from Hamburg who has lived in Berlin since 1966, says, “Here you can see where the great modern writers and artists lived; that would be impossible in the thoroughly rebuilt cities of the West. We are a divided country, but only Berlin is a divided city. Therefore, in Berlin you experience the German situation.” She came to connect herself to its avant-garde tradition. Three leading members of the so-called Vienna Group settled here in the 1960s--H.C. Artmann, Gerhard Rühm and Oswald Wiener; and it was here that Rühm edited his monumental anthology of the group’s activities (1967) and Wiener lived when his major novel, Die Verbesserung von Mitteleuropa (The Improvement of Central Europe) (1969), was published. Many regard this book as the most consequential German experimental fiction of the past two decades. It begins with an index and closes with three appendices and a bibliography. Its pages have Roman numerals. It mixes styles and genres in ways both pretentious and comic. Parts appeared here a decade ago, in Joachim Neugroschel’s translation; the whole should appear before we die.

The Israeli historian Gershom Scholem, who left in 1923, came back to Berlin for a residency last fall, a few months before his death, showing his wife where he wrote his first book, where he did his first translations, where his parents were buried. The novelist Edgar Hilsenrath came here after 25 years in New York. Born in Leipzig in 1928, he settled in the U.S. in 1951; but since he wrote in German, he wanted to return to a German-speaking country. Some of his belongings were mailed to Munich; others to Berlin. He chose Berlin. “It is the only German city where you don’t feel you’re among beer-drinking Germans.” Night, a novel based upon his concentration camp experiences, disappeared soon after publication (in Michael Roloff’s translation). A decade later, it became a bestseller in Germany. A journeyman in New York, Hilsenrath is now a literary celebrity in Berlin, able to live off his royalties.

More than any other German city, perhaps even more than Paris, Berlin attracts writers who were born someplace else and often write in languages other than German: Gunter Grass from Danzig, the poet Oskar Pastior from German-speaking Rumania, Aras Oren and Gttney Dal from Turkey, the novelist Jeanette Lander from Atlanta, Georgia. Emmett Williams, the American concrete poet, recently established permanent residence here, as a retrospective of his visual art travels around Europe. One of the two editors of Litfass, the principal local literary magazine, is a Bulgarian. Christopher Middleton, a British poet presently residing in Texas, is a member of the Akademie der Kunst’s literature section. This hospitality to the avant-garde and to foreigners is scarcely new to Berlin, which easily integrates exotic outsiders into its cultural life. It was here, after all, that Edgard Varèse, L. Moholy-Nagy, W. H. Auden, and Christopher Isherwood spent their formative years.

Emmett Williams is one of many foreign writers who first came to Berlin as guests of the DAAD Kunstlerprogranim, which, since the early 1960s, has offered residencies to 25 artists from around the world. Traditionally five of that number have been writers; five, visual artists; and five, composers. (The others are nowadays filmmakers, video artists, and architects.) Each is given a studio and a modest stipend, and in his0 or her mail comes a fortnightly packet of invitations to art openings and other cultural functions. Among the writers recently resident here under the DAAD were Michel Butor, Witold Gombrowicz, Milan Kundera, Stanislaw Lem, Maria Vargas Llosa, and Dick Higgins, Some like Williams, as well as the playwrights George Tabori and Anthony Ingrassia, elect to make Berlin their principal home.

As all but one of the publishing conglomerates are now in West Germany, Berlin’s publishers tend to be small and specialized. Klaus Wagenbach, formerly a Kafka biographer, founded twenty years ago a firm that bears his name, and he has since specialized in leftish writers, not only for Marxist criticism but for poetry and fiction. His company and its dissident offspring, Rotbuch Verlag (a radical commune), are the only local firms profitable enough to support several people. The others are small publishers in the American sense, run by only a few people who do all the work. Medusa Verlag has recently been issuing the collected works of Carl Einstein (1885-1940), a Berlin Jewish writer who wrote a pioneering book on African visual art and yet comparably pioneering cubist novel (that likewise remains untranslated). Merve Verlag specializes in small-format paperbacks on avant-garde art and cultural theory. Karen Kramer Verlag deals in anarchism. Elefantinpress recently published a large book about John Heartfield (1898-1968), the Berlin photomontagist who was perhaps Marxism’s (and East Germany’s) greatest visual artist. Renate Gerhardt, the widow of the poet Rainer Gerhardt (immortalized in a Charles Olson poem), has books of art and literature for over two decades. Like all good alternative publishers these smaller firms issue books, and kinds of books, that the bigger boys would not touch.

As many Berlin writers discovered, much as American writers have, that their books were not in the local bookstores or were rapidly rushed out of print, several of them founded in 1976 a cooperative Autorenbuchhandlung, an authors’ bookstore, that would carry all their own books. “The idea of it was in the air,” Fred Viebahn remembers. “Once we decided to do it, it happened quickly.” Each member invested a thousand Deutschemarks, which can be retrieved, should any of the 150 sponsors decide to resign from the cooperative. With a table in the back and a tea-kettle on a hot plate, the shop also serves as a kind of clubhouse which has a weekly gathering, attended by a dozen or two, every Saturday afternoon. There are similar Autorenbuchhandlung in Munich and Frankfurt and ought to be comparable shops in the States.

Because West Berlin is still officially occupied territory (and not West Germany), its younger residents cannot be drafted into the official German military. As a result, Berlin has 70,000 students--more per capita than any other German city--in addition to ex-students, lapsed-students and bohemians. Among them, needless to say, are a large number of aspiring poets and fictioners who, not unlike their kind elsewhere, establish magazines, publish small editions, and read their poems in coffee houses, among other venues. Among the more interesting of the new magazines are KULTuhr, edited and designed by Norbert Tafelski, and Gepin, a large-format, informal collection of art and writing co-edited by Carl Rolf-Peter Baacke, who also edited the first volume of the Carl Einstein retrospective. Many younger poets, mostly unknown, were collected in a populous anthology entitled simply Berlin, edited, translated into English, and introduced by Mitch Cohen, himself a young American living in Berlin and writing poetry in both English and German. The book’s publisher is, to no surprise, an American small press--Mudborn of Santa Barbara.

If West Berlin’s literature is state-supported, that on the other side of the Berlin wall is state-supervised which means that, as in Russia, not only the literary magazines but the publishing houses are wholly bankrolled and controlled by state organizations. In some respects, East Berlin is a typical Communist literary scene. When the poet Wolf Biermann became too much of a public nuisance, he was expelled; and those East German writers who protested the Biermann expulsion were themselves granted “exit visas,” sometimes for as long as several years. While Biermann himself settled in Hamburg, others, among them Klaus Schlesinger, Jurek Becker, and Thomas Brasch, chose to settle in West Berlin.

Once on the other side, Brasch and Becker became better friends, whom I met together. Born in England in 1945, of Jewish refugee parents, Brasch came to Germany after the War and grew up in East Berlin. Working primarily as a translator and in factories, he published thirty poems. In 1968, he went to prison for distributing leaflets protesting the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. In 1977, he published a collection of stories with Rotbuch, Before the Fathers the Sons Die. Challenged by the East German authorities to retract the book or go to the West, he chose the latter. The British ambassador to Berlin, remembering Brasch’s birthplace, gave him a passport. A nervous, energetic man, Brasch has since produced plays, novels, films, and photographic books based on his films. One film that he wrote and directed, Iron Angels, opened in New York this past fall. Brasch now lives in West Berlin because he would rather not be a West German. “It’s not a part of this rich, fat, petty bourgeois country. It’s like a railroad station. There’s nothing permanent about it.”

The position of Jurek Becker is more subtle. Born in Lodz, Poland, in 1937, of a Jewish family that survived Hitler’s concentration camps intact, he too grew up in East Berlin, served in its military and even paid dues, he told me, to the Communist Party from 1955 to 1974. Having protested the expulsion of his old friend Wolf Biermann, Becker was given a three-year exit visa. Thanks to the success of his first novel, Jacob the Liar (1969), which appeared in English translation in 1975 (and reminded reviewers of Sholem Alechem), Becker’s first year out was spent teaching at Oberlin College (where Fred Viebahn was also on the faculty). Returning home, he decided to settle instead in West Berlin, while remaining a citizen of East Germany. Indeed, in a city that asks everyone to take sides, he straddles the wall with sons on one side, a home on the other, and publishers and accounts on both. A ten-year visa has since replaced his three-year pass. An American university recently invited him to a symposium of German-language literature. Amongst a Swiss and an Austrian, Becker discovered he was chosen to do double-duty, representing both East Germany and West. “We thought we could save money,” his hosts told him, “by inviting you.”

Of the literary writers remaining in East Berlin, the most prominent are Christa Wolf, a poet in her early fifties whose books have been published in the U.S.; Robert Weimann, a scholar of English and American literature who is also first vice-president of the Akademie der Künst der DDR; and Stefan Heym, a genuinely popular novelist who came to the U.S. in 1935 and spent World War II in the U.S. Army. On the run from McCarthyism, Heym went to East Berlin in 1952, settling in Grunau, an outlying district, in the same modest detached house that he still occupies. Returning his American passport, he became an East German citizen and with his American-born wife founded Seven Seas, an English-language publishing house that issued “American authors who couldn’t be published in the U.S.” Until recently, Heym drafted his novels first in English and then prepared the German “versions” himself. (His last two novels were done under a reverse procedure.)

On the porch of his house, he was quick to point out how East Berlin differs from other Eastern-bloc cities. Publishers give royalties on sales, in contrast to the Soviet system of paying a writer a lump sum upon the size of his book. “Berlin’s a divided city,” Heym continues, “The influences from east and west interchange. It’s very stimulating. If you imagined the United States divided, one side real existierender Sozialimus and the other side capitalist, and the line ran through Chicago, you’d have fun in Chicago.” Nonetheless, because Heym published last two novels in the West without official East-German permission, “I was pulled into court; I was fined. Whether here or in America, every time a goddam stupid blockhead government gets into power, I get into trouble.” He speaks contemptuously of “the good boys, writers whom the government likes. They get huge editions; they get emoluments and stipends. These are rich guys.” What are their books like? “ I ask, Uplifting,” he replies. Curmudgeon though he be, Heym plans to stay here, “as long as nothing worse happens to me.”

Another way that East Berlin differs from Moscow, say, is that its writers go often to the West.Robert Weimann was in Toronto this past spring, holding the Northrop Frye Chair of Literary Theory. Stefan Heym starred at the Frankfurt Book Fair last month. The poet Stephan Hermlin belongs to the West Berlin Akademie der Künst in addition to that in East Berlin. (The latter pays its members a salary of 800 Eastmarks a month; the former has meetings and parties.) The novelist Hermann Kant, president of the Writers Society (and a party member for the past 32 years), told me how much he enjoyed his eight-city lecture tour of America in 1980. Christa Wolf has taught at Oberlin, while the playwright Heiner Muller spent a semester at the University of Texas. In a Communist city whose common citizens are forbidden to visit the West, even West Berlin--that’s why the Wall--the writers often have ”privilege” of free passage.

Comparing East Berlin with West, Jurek Becker told me that even though the retail price of books is much less in East Berlin than in West, the editions are much larger in the East and the royalties to authors are also higher (15%, rather than 10%). Since the cost of living is cheaper in the East than in the West, the number of fulltime professionals is proportionately greater. Also, members of the Writers Society can get from the state enough money to sustain a year or two of fulltime work. “One problem,” Becker continues, “is that once a book is sold out in the East, it is not automatically reprinted. The more the Party likes you, the sooner you get a second edition.” Such decisions are made by publishing executives who are responsible to the DDR cultural ministries. Hermann Kant cited another difference. “Here society is more interested in literature. The main difference is that we believe here in miracles, that literature is another form of magic. On the other side, they are indifferent.”

While Berlin today is not the Berlin of the past, now, so physically isolated and yet so culturally sophisticated, it is a singular city and thus an interesting one, whose literary presence is stronger than any one or another of its writers; for here the issues of socialism and capitalism, of dreams and realities, of realism and fantasy, of new waves and old, of possibility and limitation, of state-support and total independence are played out every day in a single arena, Whatever is happening elsewhere in world literature is likely to occur in Berlin as well.