From Sally Bowles in Goodbye to Berlin to Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Berlin's literary inhabitants bring the city alive
Tales of the city … west Berlin in 1961. Photograph: Sergio Del Grande/Mondadori via Getty Images
To me Berlin is as much a conceit as a reality. Why? Because the city is forever in the process of becoming, never being, and so lives more powerfully in the imagination. Long before setting eyes on it, the outsider feels its absences as much as its presence: the sense of lives lived, dreams realised and evils executed with an intensity so shocking that they shook its fabric.
Over the years, so much of it has been lost, invented or reinvented that the mind rushes to fill the vacuum, fleshing out the invisible, linking the observed city with the place portrayed in 10 thousand films, paintings and – above all – books.
Yesterday echoes along today's streets and the ideas and characters conjured up by Berlin's authors can seem to be as solid as its bricks and mortar.
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Over the years, so much of it has been lost, invented or reinvented that the mind rushes to fill the vacuum, fleshing out the invisible, linking the observed city with the place portrayed in 10 thousand films, paintings and – above all – books.Yesterday echoes along today's streets and the ideas and characters conjured up by Berlin's authors can seem to be as solid as its bricks and mortar.
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