Berlin Last performance, farewell to Kreuzberg
Berlin Last Presentation, Farewell to Kreuzberg (French original title: Berlin, dernière ) is a novel by the French author Kits Hilaire , which was written in 1990.
First novel after the fall of the Berlin Wall and forerunner of the then burgeoning genre " Wenderoman ". Berlin, dernière became a bestseller and cult book.
In this first novel, Kits Hilaire conveys an unusual perception of the fall of the Berlin Wall and its consequences, from which an original depiction of Germany emerged beyond the usual imagery, where scenes and thoughts reflect the zeitgeist of a generation.
shape
In the form of diary notes, “Berlin Last Presentation, Farewell to Kreuzberg” describes the perspective of a young person in Kreuzberg. The main scenes are gloomy demolished houses, the street where the smell of coal and kebab spreads, and of course the wall - everything that belongs to the “Kreuzberg myth”.
content
The story begins in the 1980s and ends in January 1990, when the idea of the existence of two German states was already buried.
A very young woman comes to Kreuzberg. She is French and Kreuzberg seems to be the only place to live. An island in the middle of Berlin, the refuge of youth culture, utopia for all those who did not want to belong to the mainstream, the paradise that has always existed in the consciousness of the residents and which will always be there in their imagination.
In Kreuzberg one forgets that something else exists elsewhere, that there is nature and normal people elsewhere. (...) You lose the feeling for the outside world, for the beyond the wall. (...) Kreuzberg was the center of the world - the only possible place, the only viable reality. (...) My family, these are the streets here. The concrete and the people that make up these streets.
For the narrator, Kreuzberg is central, her life story, the core of her identity formation. Berlin presents itself as an unreal and precisely therefore perfect non-place, which in the case becomes a physical expression of the misery of growing up. Neither everyday life nor the scent of the big world penetrated as far as Kreuzberg, which was stuck to the wall. The outside world was also not interested in the district - only occasionally, as an object of curiosity. The book revolves again and again about the security, the being locked in in Kreuzberg - locked "like in the womb".
The novel as a representation of contemporary history
The legend of Kreuzberg breaks when the wall falls and Kreuzberg is transformed from the outskirts to the center of Berlin overnight. With the penetration of the outside world, Kreuzberg dissolves as a protected zone. The outlying district, which was once unattractive for construction speculators, has become one of the first inner-city addresses in Berlin and no longer offers a refuge. An exotic playground has been trampled down, which once flourished protected in the shadow of the wall. There is great distrust and fear of a reunified Germany, "in which the right arm would stretch upwards."
expenditure
- Kits Hilaire: Berlin, dernière . Flammarion, Paris 1990, ISBN 2-08-066503-0 .
- Kits Hilaire: Berlin - last performance: Farewell to Kreuzberg . Translated from the French by Barbara Traber. Ed. Erpf, Bern / Munich 1991, ISBN 3-905517-31-0 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Siegfried Forster: 25 ans de «Wenderoman» après la chute du Mur, et le «Wendekino»? In: rfi. November 9, 2014, accessed July 16, 2018 (French).
- ↑ Jeremy Tambling: The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and the City . 2017, ISBN 978-1-13754910-5 .
- ↑ Ulrike Zitzlsperger: ZeitGeschichten: the Berlin transition years: the location of the city after the wall . 2007, ISBN 3-03911087-X .
- ^ Hermann Rudolph: Berlin - rebirth of a city: fall of the wall, struggle for the capital, rise to the metropolis . 2014, ISBN 3-869950-74-9 , pearl diver
- ^ Gisela Dachs: Farewell to Kreuzberg , Zeitmagazin, December 1990
- ^ A b c Barbara Lang: Myth of Kreuzberg: Ethnography of a district (1961-1995) . 1998, ISBN 3-593-36106-X .