Berlin, perhaps more than any other city in our collective imagination, has lived through so many identities, and has morphed from one version of itself into another, several times, over the course of just a few generations. Berlin is a city of extremes—and its past 60 years haunts us even as its present delights and absorbs us.
Jeffrey Lewis is an award winning literary novelist whose new novel, Berlin Cantata, spins numerous huge questions around a single house, a house once owned by Jews, then by Nazis, then by Communists, and now by writers. Berlin Cantata weaves 13 voices around the ownership of this house, voices disparate in motivation, nationality, and intent. It is a novel about identity, about reclamation, about Berlin. It is a novel about reconciliation, about the ghosts of the past, both beloved and feared, and about what it means to be a German. And what it means to be a Jew in Germany now, a generation removed from the war, and following the 1989 collapse of the Berlin Wall. Jeff Lewis says that Berlin is “a city that has lost one of its limbs and is receiving a miraculous gift, a little bump under the flesh, where the limb is just beginning to grow back. The city is Berlin in the years right after the Wall fell, the gift is the Jews.”
If Berlin interests you or even haunts you, acquaint yourself with Jeff Lewis. Berlin Cantata is a beautiful novel, whose extraordinary strands explain the conflict, love and burden of coming to terms with Germany. It is a most compelling story about reconciliation. He is the author of several award-winning novels, and was a Writers Guild and Emmy Award-winning writer on “Hill Street Blues” for years.
In conversation with Andrea Grossman.
At the Goethe-Institut, 5750 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. Free parking in building. Tickets, $20. For reservations, click here or email reservations@writersblocpresents.com