Berlin Now: The City After the Wall

In this enlightening collection of essays, Berlin resident Schneider unearths the city’s charms and hazards. Journalist Schneider (Eduard’s Homecoming; The Wall Jumper) first came to Berlin from Freiburg as a student in 1962 and has since seen enormous changes, the most shattering of which was the tearing down of the Berlin Wall after the earthshaking events of November 1989. Apart from the subsequent building projects that have transformed the city, such as the development of Potsdamer Platz and the shifting of the historic Mitte (middle) toward what was once East Berlin, Schneider is intensely focused on the East-versus-West dynamic. He describes East Berliners as dragging their Communist ideals and Stasi legacy, and resenting Western democratic standards, and he says that East Berlin women are “self-confident and divorce-happy,” as more of them have been forced to work than their Western counterparts. Moreover, the once-ostracized Turkish “guest workers” now make up a largely assimilated minority, with Vietnamese, Russians, and Jews nestled in far-flung neighborhoods, despite lingering episodes of racist violence. Covering the city’s grim history as well as its current night clubbing, these essays reveal an authentic city that does not bother being more lively than beautiful. (Aug.)