THE UNDERCURRENTS

An enthralling book about how finding the truth of a city’s story means finding the truth of your own.

Bell, a British American art critic, has lived in Berlin long enough to feel “the undercurrents and the downward pull that seem inseparable from Berlin’s identity.” In this nuanced, layered narrative, she effectively describes that sensation, creating a complex hybrid of the past and present, framed by the history of the “aggravating and interfering” apartment where she lives—in a neighborhood that has been home to artists and Nazis, entrepreneurs and orphans. “I set myself the task,” she notes, “of writing a portrait of the city….The memory of a place does not lie flat on a straight line of time; it is syncretic and simultaneous, layered in thin sediments of event and passage, inhabitation and mood. Walking around Berlin, she has discovered constant reminders—some deliberate, some not—of the rise of the Reich, the arrival and devastation of the war, and the city’s Cold War division. At the same time, Bell examines the difficulties in her own life. This sense of jumping between themes could have resulted in a tangle of confusion, but the author skillfully weaves the narrative threads into an elegant tapestry. Everything she encounters in the city seems to evoke something else. There are connections between the political and the personal, the beautiful and the obscene, the freedom and the self-repression. Bell wonders if the unification of the two parts of Germany, with East Germany being written out of history by a triumphant West, was an unalloyed positive development for Berlin. She sees a city that has become a maze of aggressive architecture and a culture obsessed with housing costs and property speculation. The author ends with a gesture of ambivalence, with Bell deciding to leave her apartment for somewhere “more manageable and less temperamental.” It’s an odd but strangely fitting coda.

A remarkably absorbing work that requires close attention—and repays in full.