Have you heard that Berlin is dead? I hear it often. Our pupils are like convex pennies. It is a Tuesday afternoon. It is a phrase, alas, that I am wont to use. At Berghain for the twenty-fourth weekend in a row: this is Berlin. Sighing as my rectum is flushed thanks to the state-financed Enemas for the Gainfully Unemployed initiative: this is Berlin. A party drug fabricated by murky corporate interests puts neoliberalism in a pill.
Berlin is burnt to the ground in an orgiastic craze of myopic altruism. The narrator decides it is now a good time to invest in real estate. He worries art has no revolutionary potential. He wants to make a difference in the world and offers a refugee some cashews. He begins to believe he is being surveilled, has a mental breakdown, and abandons his family. Donald Trump is elected, and the crazy man is not so crazy now , eh?
The window of her apartment is smashed shortly after the move, then the flat is broken into, leading her to find a new apartment, where she begins to hear screaming voicesβonly for the window to be smashed there too!
It turns out it was the narrator all along: a literal Nestbeschmutzerin. Better not look in the basement either: you might find the remnants of occult Nazi rituals, as in Red Pill ; and that building, naturally, was once owned by a Jewish family, the spectral presence sine qua non of contemporary Berlin.
Berlin, if the gap-year fantasia of these writers is to be believed, possesses an occult prowess for manifesting lurid sensations in the bodies of its residents. If not by the war, then Berlin is haunted by its subsequent division. These novels are largely situated in the former West but are pervaded by a received image of the GDR as an omnipresent Stasi state, evident in their preoccupation with surveillance. The narrator of Oval lives in an experimental eco-house and is spied on by its corporate overlords.
