Berlin Noir

by Thomas Wörtche (Editor)

Overview

Now, Berlin’s noir tradition—fueled by history, geography, and various literary traditions—adds up to a powerful volume of riveting short stories.

“A volume of short stories that revolve around the history, geography and literary traditions of Berlin.” —New York Times Book Review, “Globetrotting,” April 2019

“The 13 stories in this welcome entry in Akashic’s noir series, all set in 21st-century Berlin, are less about traditional crime and more likely to involve gentrification, immigrants, or Airbnb . . . There’s more than enough variety to entertain most readers.” —Publishers Weekly

Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city.

Brand-new stories by: Zoë Beck, Ulrich Woelk, Susanne Saygin, Robert Rescue, Johannes Groschupf, Ute Cohen, Katja Bohnet, Matthias Wittekindt, Kai Hensel, Miron Zownir, Max Annas, Michael Wuliger, and Rob Alef. Translated from German by Lucy Jones.

From the introduction by Thomas Wörtche:

Berlin does not make it easy to write noir fiction—or perhaps Berlin makes it too easy. Noir tradition casts a long, influential, and even daunting shadow. Alfred Döblin’s and Christopher Isherwood’s works, some of Bertolt Brecht’s plays, the Morgue poems by Gottfried Benn, M by Fritz Lang, and many other narratives from the first third of the twentieth century, all of which are tinged with noir, set high intellectual standards, and literary and aesthetic benchmarks that are hard to surpass . . .

Neither Döblin nor Benn, Brecht nor Lang, catered to any crime fiction formats. They merely steeped their literary projects in a great deal of noir. And so it is with most of the stories in our anthology: they do not necessarily follow the usual patterns of crime fiction, but regard noir as a license to write as they wish, a certain way of approaching the city, and a prism through which its nature is viewed . . . What’s left is history. It is omnipresent in Berlin at every turn; the city is saturated in a history full of blood, violence, and death.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781617756320
Publisher:	Akashic Books, Ltd.
Publication date:	05/07/2019
Series:	Akashic Noir Series
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

THOMAS WÖRTCHE, born in 1954, is a literary scholar, critic, and was director of several crime fiction publishing imprints. He is currently responsible for a crime line with Suhrkamp Verlag. He lives in Berlin and is the editor of Berlin Noir.

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

Berlin, Year Zero

Berlin does not make it easy to write noir fiction — or perhaps Berlin makes it too easy. Noir tradition casts a long, influential, and even daunting shadow.

Alfred Döblin's and Christopher Isherwood's works, some of Bertolt Brecht's plays, the Morgue poems by Gottfried Benn, M by Fritz Lang, and many other narratives from the first third of the twentieth century, all of which are tinged with noir, set high intellectual standards, and literary and aesthetic benchmarks that are hard to surpass. Perhaps this is why Berlin barely existed as a setting in noteworthy crime novels after the Second World War, with a few exceptions such as Ulf Miehe's Ich hab noch einen Toten in Berlin (1973) and some other disparate texts. For Anglo-Saxon authors, Cold War Berlin was more interesting: John le Carré, Len Deighton, Ted Allbeury, and Ross Thomas all knew better than most German crime writers how to turn the divided city into a story, and even today's "historical" Berlin crime wave, set against papiermâché backdrops from the 1920s and 1930s, was ushered in decades ago by the British writer Philip Kerr. It took until well into the 1980s and 1990s before Berlin was inscribed onto the crime fiction landscape of unified Germany — by authors like Pieke Biermann, Buddy Giovinazzo, and D.B. Blettenberg, even though their works defied strict crime fiction classifications.

In the proud tradition outlined above, this legacy is continued in Berlin Noir: neither Döblin nor Benn, Brecht nor Lang, for example, catered to any crime fiction formats. They merely steeped their literary projects in a great deal of noir. And so it is with most of the stories in our anthology: they do not necessarily follow the usual patterns of crime fiction, but regard noir as a license to write as they wish, a certain way of approaching the city, and a prism through which its nature is viewed.

As Franz Hessel, the flaneur and spiritual brother of Walter Benjamin, once noted: Berlin is a city that "is not," a city that "is always on the move, always in the process of changing." Stagnation, you could say, leads to death, as illustrated by Robert Rescue's story included in this volume, "One of These Days." Written in a style that might best be described as stoic madness, it is set in the heart of Wedding (paying homage, as it happens, to a real-life bar called the Mastul), a traditionally working-class district that has increasingly become the target of gentrification. In "Heinrichplatz Blues," Johannes Groschupf's elusive hero suddenly vanishes after years of having drifted (to the delight of many women) through the bars of Kreuzberg's Heinrichplatz, a setting that is now a veritable tourist hot spot. Nothing ever remains the same — but what does remain in this case is a mystery and the echo of a bygone libertarian lifestyle.

This famed lifestyle is, in turn, an echo of the roaring twenties, the first age of sexual emancipation, which was experienced in the "laboratory of modernity" and has now been abbreviated into the raunchy-sounding product "Babylon Berlin." Sodom and Gomorrah, in Ute Cohen's toxic, modernday story "Valverde," has degenerated into a dull game played by the rich — and not necessarily beautiful — in chic, exclusive Grunewald. There is no hint of emancipation here, but inevitably greed, profit, and exploitation, which only an insane work of art can adequately express.

There is play with smoke and mirrors in the hip district of Mitte, which is itself increasingly transforming into an artificial hot spot of luxury and fashion, much to the ire of the long-established population. Even if the hipsters are progressive, politically correct, and ecologically minded, well-known capitalist practices emerge as soon as the surface is scratched. And in Katja Bohnet's "Fashion Week," they also reek.

Naturally, Berlin is also a place where people lose their minds: what really goes on in the head of Dora, the eponymous character in Zoë Beck's story — one who is practically invisible too, as it happens — remains unclear. What can be said for certain is that some aspects of modern life are not easily endured, even if a person's background is, at first glance, solidly bourgeois. Dora, in any case, appears to favor the sexual violence she endures as a homeless woman around Zoo Station than the straitjacket of a "normal" existence. And if the urge to impose "normality" arises, obsessive tidying can quickly veer from the neurotic to the psychopathic, as Susanne Saygin's story "The Beauty of Kenilworth Ivy" shows. Here, a marauding killer in Schöneberg tries to clean up the city by eliminating representatives of the "bourgeois"; this, in her view, is the only way to protect social diversity in the botanical biotope of Berlin — by weeding out these undesirables once and for all. What an evil paradox. The frustrated film critic in Ulrich Woelk's "I Spy with My Little Eye" has long since lost touch with reality and logic; he just doesn't know it yet. His perceptions of what is real and what is illusion have been radically tampered with by the cinema, alienating him from the foundations of his own existence. As he tries to write a "human interest" story set in a run-down area of Moabit, it is clear that he is living his life through the movies, even when he ... But why not just read it for yourself!

And when it comes to the much-vaunted subject of identity, the labyrinthine possibilities that Berlin offers are not easy to navigate. Upright man by day, killer by night, to paraphrase Karl Marx. A cruel strategy of survival in Friedrichshain, perhaps, a district particularly tyrannized by party tourism, especially around Boxhagener Platz. To get to the bottom of it all, it may be a good idea to have an outsider look at the goings-on in Berlin, as the Italian investigator in Matthias Wittekindt's "The Invisible Man" dares to do.

Berlin is a relatively peaceful city, at least compared to other capitals around the world. This is partly because organized crime — which is just as endemic here as elsewhere — observes strict rules that aim to inflict as little collateral damage on bystanders as possible. Which does not mean that cops and gangsters do not appear in Berlin Noir. Kai Hensel's satirical story "Cum Cops," about the unusual rehabilitation of a police officer from conservative Altglienicke, is based on actual events: In summer 2017, a Berlin police unit became the laughing stock of Germany when it was sent back to the capital from Hamburg following a scandal involving public sex and heavy drinking. The Berlin unit had been deployed there to assist with the expected G20 summit riots. And the consequence in Hensel's story is a fatal reverse thrust.

Blood is also spilled in Miron Zownir's story "Overtime," about a clash between corrupt cops and genuine gangsters. The fact that this story moves back and forth between Kreuzberg and Neukölln is not supposed to suggest that these two districts have a particularly high crime rate: Berlin's fifteen districts are mere political entities, whereas specific neighborhoods are the socially relevant entities — and in these neighborhoods, huge differences in lifestyles and crime exist. That's why Max Annas's Neukölln introduces us to a completely different kind of world than Zownir's. And Annas's characters, although certainly not squeakyclean Germans, are part of the fairly standard diverse population of a big city. The guy in the (metaphorical) sack in "Local Train" is not happy about this. That's why he belongs in the sack.

What's left is history. It is omnipresent in Berlin at every turn; the city is saturated in a history full of blood, violence, and death. The echoes of the Nazi era can still be felt in Michael Wuliger's "Kaddish for Lazar," even though the relationship between Jews and Germans is highly contemporary and ironic in this story, and felt especially keenly in the "new West," particularly Charlottenburg. Rob Alef's "Dog Tag Afternoon," on the other hand, deals with the consequences of the Second World War — more precisely with the 1948/1949 Berlin airlift, which had more to do with Germany's Western connections than many other actions by the Western Allies. History forces its way up into the present from a past that can't be buried, surfacing at the exact spot in Tempelhof where American and British aircraft punctured the Soviet blockade.

Berlin, as we want to show, is a "SynchroniCity" (Pieke Biermann), a city of the most disparate and diverse simultaneities, firmly attached to the rigging of its political and literary history and always moving forward in the present. And noir, in its very essence, does that too. In this respect Berlin Noir is a snapshot; and as I write this today, I fully expect that everything will look completely different in just another year's time.

Thomas Wörtche Berlin, Germany February 2019

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I: Stress in the City
"Dora" by Zoë Beck (Bahnhof Zoo)
"I Spy with My Little Eye" by Ulrich Woelk (Moabit)
"The Beauty of Kenilworth Ivy" by Susanne Saygin (Schöneberg)
"Local Train" by Max Annas (Neukölln)

Part II: Cops & Gangsters
"Cum Cops" by Kai Hensel (Altglienicke)
"The Invisible Man" by Matthias Wittekindt (Friedrichshain)
"Overtime" by Miron Zownir (Kreuzberg)
"Valverde" by Ute Cohen (Grunewald)

Part III: Berlin Scenes
"Heinrichplatz Blues" by Johannes Groschupf (SO 36)
"Kaddish for Lazar" by Michael Wuliger (Charlottenburg)
"Fashion Week" by Katja Bohnet (Mitte)
"One of These Days" by Robert Rescue (Wedding)
"Dog Tag Afternoon" by Rob Alef (Tempelhof)

Editorial Reviews

03/18/2019

The 13 stories in this welcome entry in Akashic’s noir series, all set in 21st-century Berlin, are less about traditional crime and more likely to involve gentrification, immigrants, or Airbnb. Contemporary social themes are present, such as in Max Annas’s “Local Train,” in which a clumsy attempt by a group of immigrants to take revenge on a neo-Nazi thug comes to an unexpected conclusion, or Katja Bohnet’s “Fashion Week,” in which a woman retaliates against an abusive lover less for his personal violence than for his exploitation of foreign workers. Dark comedy is found in Susanne Saygin’s “The Beauty of Kenilworth Ivy,” which features a Dexter-like serial killer with a botanical bent, and in Robert Rescue’s “One of These Days,” a romp through the challenges of dealing with a suicide’s inconvenient corpse. Rob Alef’s “Dog Tag Afternoon” is one of the few stories to make use of the city’s dramatic history, linking a contemporary homicide to the Berlin Airlift. Though the selections contain little actual noir, there’s more than enough variety to entertain most readers. (May)

Publishers Weekly

2019-02-17

A city with a rich noir past looks beyond its history to an equally unsettling present.

As editor Wörtche acknowledges, "Noir tradition casts a long, influential, and even daunting shadow" over Berlin. But most of the 13 stories are rooted firmly in the present. Michael Wuliger's "Kaddish for Lazar" is the only tale to mention, even in passing, the Nazi era. And Rob Alef's "Dog Tag Afternoon" chronicles the death, at age 96, of one of the American pilots who flew the Berlin airlift. Otherwise, the stories focus on 21st-century misery. A band of Nigerian immigrants torments a not-entirely-innocent victim in "Local Train," by Max Annas. A family struggles to deal with their mentally ill sister in Zoë Beck's haunting "Dora." A depressed artist becomes an accessory to crime in Miron Zownir's "Overtime." And in Ute Cohen's "Valverde," a boy toy takes his revenge on a quintet of rich bitches. Even seemingly innocent contemporary pleasures provide a platform for mischief. In Susanne Saygin's "The Beauty of Kenilworth Ivy," a vigilante finds Airbnb the perfect means of locating prey. A gang of clueless volunteers who run a co-op watering spot cope with a body stashed in their freezer in Robert Rescue's "One of These Days." And in "Fashion Week," Katja Bohnet shows that even the glittering annual couture fest can lead to mayhem.

Wörtche keeps his promise to show Berlin as "always moving forward in the present" in this determinedly contemporary but genuinely noir collection.

Kirkus Reviews

"This collection is very modern, the stories are set now and reflect on contemporary concerns. They demonstrate a dynamism and originality that shows just how important a part of the euro-noir genre German writing is. There are thirteen stories here, as diverse as the city they are set in, each one is from a different part of the German capital, and although they are disparate with very different intentions, a picture emerges of a troubled, multi-cultural, vibrant city that has always had its own distinct character . . . A welcome addition to one to the most fascinating long running series in crime fiction."

NB Magazine

"The 13 tales are well chosen and the collection skillfully put together by Wörtche . . . This is definitely a book that should be on the list of all noir lovers."

New York Journal of Books