Description
Book SynopsisOf all European cities, Americans today are perhaps most curious about Berlin, whose position in the American imagination is an essential component of nineteenth-century, postwar and contemporary transatlantic imagology. Over various periods, Berlin has been a tenuous space for American claims to cultural heritage and to real geographic space in Europe, symbolizing the ultimate evil and the power of redemption. This volume offers a comprehensive examination of the city’s image in American literature from 1840 to the present. Tracing both a history of Berlin and of American culture through the ways the city has been narrated across three centuries by some 100 authors through 145 novels, short stories, plays and poems, Tales of Berlin presents a composite landscape not only of the German capital, but of shifting subtexts in American society which have contextualized its meaning for Americans in the past, and continue to do so today.
Trade Review"Parker’s work is a meta-tale of quest and frustration, of mythical past, wished-for projections, and threadbare present, of history, daily life and literature. It is a book of fictional reality, and in-depth documented analysis of endless American mirrors of Berlin and Berliners throughout over one and a half century." - Mariana Net, University of Miskolc US in European Journal of American Studies [Online], 2017 pp. 1-5.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Prologue: “a smaller but more intense orchestration” Landscape Place and Space Part One: American Space American Berlin Across Three Centuries Part Two: A Tale of Berlin How American Is It Toy Houses and Playing-Card Lawns “German” Roots Part Three: Rags, Riches and Rooming Houses Riches Rags Rooming Houses The Great Divorce Water Crossings Part Four: “This is our Armageddon” Ruined Landscapes, Ruined Women Women with Attachments: Mermaids, Drink and Drowning City of Night “Certain tendencies”: Queer Berlin0 Underground Berlin “Something was different, but nothing had changed” Contaminating City Just off the Kurfürstendamm: Spy Fiction The Garden and the Forest: Natural Space in Berlin The Weather in Berlin Isolating Berlin Naturalizing the Wall Escape from Berlin Part Five: Family Reunions: Searching for Someone in Berlin Women and Children First: Taming History Contemporary Voices: Re-Storing Mythologies Conclusion Bibliography of Fiction Bibliography of Secondary Sources Index
