Goodbye to Berlin: New Novels Recall a City's ‘Poor but Sexy' Heyday

New York Times

23-06-2025

Berlin, they say, is dead. Kaput. Over. Not what it used to be.
Then again, part of Berlin's modern identity as Europe's licentious, experimental, ultraliberal techno capital is that it has always been finished. A jaded, black-clad noise musician declared as much to me on my first visit to the German capital in my early 20s, two decades ago. Then, as now, Berlin existed in a perpetual state of disdain for its present in favor of a vanished, superior past — the precise years of which varied widely depending on whom you asked (and tended to coincide with the person's youth).
Still, the consensus seems to be that Berlin is, if not quite over, no longer the anything-goes metropolis that, from the collapse of the wall to the 2010s, enchanted so many people seeking a freer, cheaper, less conventional way of living.
I lived in Berlin for several years starting in 2018, and continue to spend my summers there. I still find it inspiring, more so than my native Dublin (a capital that's always felt like a village), but there's no avoiding the facts: The city is fast becoming as expensive as London or Paris, and a new nexus of capital and property speculation is erasing what's left of a bohemian utopia in its 'poor but sexy' heyday.
Dark historical clouds once again swoop in. I regularly see footage of Berlin's Polizei suppressing pro-Palestinian protests with disturbing brutality, while a state-sanctioned cancellation campaign against critics of Israel's actions in Gaza has chilled the cultural sector. The sinister far-right party Alternative für Deutschland is on the rise. The other kind of party — the one represented by storied techno temples such as Berghain and Tresor — is now the stomping ground of tech and finance elites.
I've just read a batch of novels set in Berlin, all published this year. While fiction is an imperfect receptacle for history, it tends to capture the moods, textures and sensibilities of a period far better than official records can. Novel writing being a slow-motion affair, only one of these four books is set in our evil decade. The others take place in the decade prior — when an image of the city solidified just as the reality underpinning it began to dissolve.
Reading about Berlin at its most recent peak underscores the subtle manner in which a city can both vanish and endure — can be credibly declared dead even while retaining great promise and vitality to those who still flock there in search of a better life. The books speak less about the city itself than the desires, pretensions and last gasps of a 21st-century vanguard: the hedonistic cosmopolites and dropout creatives who once dominated the cultural discourse but now look very much like an endangered species within the current world order. While common themes emerge — gentrification, immigration, economic and political shifts — these four very different novels form something of a Cubist portrait of a place, and a people, receding into the mists of history and nostalgia.
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