A new novel about Weimar Berlin

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For once, I’m using this blog to promote a book. It is a novel called Berlin Expo.

I have always been fascinated by Berlin in the 1920s. Some wish they had lived in 1967’s San Francisco, others regret having been born too late to experience swinging London, or Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria or even Pericles’ Athens.

For me it’s Berlin. And I owe that to my uncle Alfred and the photographic album which he showed me with longing mixed with pain. I could tell he wished he could have showed me more than some black and white photos and a number of 78 rpm recordings, more than some yellowed copies of Süddeutsche Zeitung and a few books, by Kästner, by Döblin, which I could only read with difficulty.

Every now and then, his old friend Dieter would come to visit him. Dieter was a genuine Berliner, who had left Germany in 1938. Some of the stories in Berlin Expo are based on his recollections. He had this habit of telling a story while withholding the end, whether to create a mystery mood or because there were details he preferred not to disclose.

The novel starts in 1934, when an exhibition of « degenerate art » is being staged in Berlin by Rudolf Dunkels, an official of the newly set up Nazi régime. The exhibition, fictional, is nevertheless based on real exhibitions having been held during the thirties, the most famous (infamous, rather) was the one in Munich in 1937. But much of the action is set in the twenties, in the Weimar years.

"Berlin 1925, artistic capital of Europe with a frenetic nightlife. Berlin 1934: the Nazis organize an exhibition called "Degenerate Art". A painting owned by Morel, a French merchant, is requisitioned for that exhibition. That picture, with a highly erotic motif, can ruin a certain cultural official of the regime, who fears to be caught up by his past. Other characters: Violetta, "the muse of Moabit", singer and painter. Harry, a young poet, leader of the literary coterie of Café Schimmel. Argus Bang, the owner of the cabaret Blue Mouse. Sacha, a young Russian Jew trying to make a career in the emerging talking cinema. Vittorio, a futurist painter who ended up as a fascist. The novel discusses the relationship between art and totalitarianism, but it is also a picture of the decadent Berlin of the twenties and its hectic nightlife."