Berlino 1920-2020. Narrazioni della grande città tra Repubblica di Weimar e contemporaneità

Valentina Serra

;Iwan-Michelangelo D'Aprile

2024-01-01

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Abstract

The metropolitan dimension of Berlin is, as well known, a literary subject of great interest that finds its most complete representation in the years of the Weimar Republic, especially in Alfred Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). The critical, almost desperate dimension of the protagonist in the face of an expanding metropolis, captured in the politically, socially and economically complex phase of the 1920s and 1930s, renders, in what are defined as the canonical Großstadtromane of the time, an ascending and descending parable of a protagonist struggling with his/her ambitions of integration into the social dimension (see for instance Irmgard Keun’s Das kunstseidene Mädchen, Vicki Baum’s Menschen im Hotel and Gabriele Tergit’s Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm). In contemporary literary production, it is possible to notice a creative process that tends to evoke the models that emerged from the Weimarean reality, a fact that solicits significant parallels with regard to a series of themes such the possibilities to depict the metropolis, the analysis of the male and female picaresque characters, and the transitory or migratory dimension of the urban population. The contemporary Berliner novel – exemplified here mainly in the works of Nellja Veremej, Berlin liegt im Osten, 2013, Fatma Aydemir, Ellbogen, 2018 and Lutz Seiler, Stern 111, 2020 – seems to be reconnecting with traditional narrative models and not only from a thematic and contemporary point of view, but also claiming the ability to read (and re-read) the city through the lens of history, tracing a significant lesson from the past. The aim of this contribution is a comparative analysis of the literary production of the Weimar-era and contemporary Großstadtroman from a historical, thematical and narratological poin of view, in order to investigate the characteristics and transformations of the Berliner Roman.