The Undercurrents

Kirsty Bell

• Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781913097899
• eBook ISBN:
  9781913097905
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin is a dazzling work of biography, memoir and cultural criticism told from a precise vantage point: a stately nineteenth-century house on Berlin's Landwehr Canal, a site at the centre of great historical changes, but also smaller domestic ones.
When her marriage breaks down, Kirsty Bell – a British-American writer, in her mid-forties, adrift – becomes fixated on the history of her building and of her adoptive city. Taking the view from her apartment window as her starting point, she turns to the lives of the house's various inhabitants, to accounts penned by Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg and Gabriele Tergit, and to the female protagonists in the works of Theodor Fontane, Irmgard Keun and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A new cultural topography of Berlin emerges, one which taps into energetic undercurrents to recover untold or forgotten stories beneath the city's familiar narratives. Humane, thought-provoking and moving, The Undercurrents is a hybrid literary portrait of a place that makes the case for radical close readings: of ourselves, our cities and our histories.

Sources

Books and Essays

Dawn Ades, Daniel F. Herrmann (eds.), Hannah Höch (London: Prestel, 2a014)

Anonymous, Eine Frau in Berlin: Tagebuch Aufzeichnungen vom 20 April bis 22 June 1945 [A Woman in Berlin: Diary 20 April 1945 to 22 June 1945] (Munich: Random House, 2008)

Ingo Arend, ‘Das Erinnerungsprojekt: Gespräch mit Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm über den Kampf um die Berliner Stadtmitte’ [‘The Remembering Project: A conversation with Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm about the battle for Berlin’s Stadtmitte’], Kunstforum International (1993)

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann and the Holocaust (London: Penguin, 2005)

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Margaret Atwood, ‘Margaret Atwood on how she came to write The Handmaid’s Tale’, Literary Hub (August 2018)

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994)

Gabriele Baring, Die geheimen Ängste der Deutschen [The Secret Fears of Germans] (Munich: Scorpio Verlag, 2011)

Vicky Baum, Grand Hotel, trans. Basil Creighton (New York: New York Review of Books, 2016)

Antony Beevor, Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (London: Penguin, 2003)

Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900, trans. Howard Eiland (London and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2006)

Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften III (1912-1940) [Collected Writings III: 1912-1940] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972)

Barbara Beuys, Die neuen Frauen: Revolution im Kaiserreich 1900-1914 [The New Women: Revolution in the Empire 1900-1914] (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2014)

Sabine Bode, Die vergessene Generation: Die Kriegskinder brechen ihr Schweigen [The Forgotten Generation: The Children of War Break Their Silence ] (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2004)

David Bowie, Lars von Tröne, ‘Ich denke oft, Brecht hätte das so gemacht’ [I often think, Brecht would have done it that way], Der Tagesspiegel (January 2001)

Arno Brandlhuber, Florian Hertweck, Thomas Mayfried (eds.), The Dialogic City: Berlin wird Berlin (Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2015)

Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, Marion Kaplan (eds.), When Biology Became Destiny. Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984)

Marie von Bunsen, Die Frau und die Geselligkeit [The Woman and Society] (Leipzig: Seemann & Co., 1914)

Marie von Bunsen, Die Welt, in der ich lebte: Erinnerungen aus glücklichen Jahren 1860–1912 [The World in which I Lived: Memoirs of Happy Years 1860-1912] (Leipzig: Koehler und Amelang, 1929)

Ralf Burmeister (ed.), Hannah Höch: Aller Anfang ist DADA! [Hannah Höch: All Begins With DADA!] (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 2007)

Florian von Buttlar (ed.), Peter Joseph Lenné: Volkspark und Arkadien [Peter Joseph Lenné: People’s Park and Arcadia] (Berlin: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1989)

Andrea Büttner, Shame (London: Koenig Books, 2020)

Felix Denk, Sven von Thülen, Der Klang der Familie: Berlin, Techno und die Wende [The Sound of Family: Berlin, Techno and the Fall of the Wall] (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014)

Georg Diez, ‘Missed Opportunities: Berlin’s Architectural Wasteland’, Der Spiegel (March 2013)

Jenny Diski, Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America with Interruptions (London: Virago Press, 2002)

Jenny Diski, Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? Essays (London: Bloomsbury, 2020)

Catherine Leota Dollard, The Surplus Woman: Unmarried in Imperial Germany (Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2009)

Marguerite Duras, Practicalities (New York: Grove Press, 1990)

Jimmie Durham, Between the Furniture and the Building (Between a Rock and a Hard Place) (Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König and München: Kunstverein München, 1998)

Werner Düttmann, Berlin ist viele Städte [Berlin is Many Cities] (Berlin: Archibook, 1984)

Christiane F., Wir Kinder von Bahnhof Zoo [We Children of Zoo Station] (Hamburg: Carlsen Verlag, 2017)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ‘Rainer Werner Fassbinder’, Arsenal (August 2015)

Theodor Fontane, Cécile (München: dtv, 2011)

Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest, trans. Hugh Rorrison (London: Penguin Books, 2000)

Theodor Font...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• CONTENTS
• PRELUDE
• I. DITCH
• II. WITNESS
• III. PLOT
• IV. WATERCOURSE
• V. SWAMP
• VI. ADRIFT
• VII. RAILWAY TIME
• VIII. MAIDEN
• IX. TRIANGULATION
• X. SIGNS
• XI. COLLISION COURSE
• XII. TRANSPORT
• XIII. FREE-FALL
• XIV. AN INTERLUDE
• XV. STANDSTILL
• XVI. DEAD END
• XVII. EXCEPTION
• XVIII. WIDE FIELD
• XIX. TURN
• XX. DISPLACEMENT
• XXI. CONSTELLATION
• CODA
• Index of Maps and Illustrations
• Author’s Note
• Sources
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Copyright