From Berlin

For Armando, a Dutch artist and writer who has lived in Berlin since 1979, the city is filled with ""Witnesses who kept on believing in [the] Reich until the very end. Witnesses who suffered. And witnesses who simply went about their lives."" To find those witnesses, he actively searched out places where ""older people gather together."" In their fragmented recollections, these Berliners recall, above all, the unending strangeness of war. One woman remembers her half-Jewish uncle who miraculously managed to keep his job, only to be threatened by a Russian officer with deportation at the end of the war: ""The officer said, I'll arrange the paperwork so you can stay here, but in return I want to sleep with your wife. And he did."" The emotions cover a wide range. One woman tells about the loss of her father and brothers who were conscripted in the last days of the war and her mother who was ""repeatedly raped by a couple of Russians, while I, a little girl, had to stand by and watch. Since then, nothing in my life has really given me pleasure. So don't talk to me about guilt."" A devoutly religious woman says she wasn't a Nazi but adds apologetically, ""I know it sounds awful, and I hesitate to say it. I almost don't dare to, because everyone says he wasn't a Nazi."" Whether relaying these snippets, or in longer chapters, stories about his own life in this haunted city, Armando writes with an ironic distance. ""Contemplating the transitory things in life is melancholy work, but I've apparently never learned another trade. It's a protest against time."" (Oct.)