Prologue: Looking for Berlin

Abstract

Like many of us, this book originated in chance and accident rather than forethought and planning. Not long after the Wende, the coming down of the Wall, I happened to be in Berlin, and, as I wandered through the newly open city, it struck me (as it doubtless struck many others at that time) that after some sixty years — roughly the span of my own lifetime — Berlin had returned to a state it had not known since the Nazis came to power. This brought to mind the group of English writers who had, briefly or not so briefly, made Berlin their home in the last years of the Weimar Republic, and I wondered idly how much in a merely material sense had survived two generations of destruction and rebuilding, partition and reunification: how far the physical fabric of the Berlin that Wystan Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender and others had lived in and written about could be, historically or sentimentally, recovered or rediscovered.