Between 2015 and 2019 I wrote a series of fragmentary short stories about Berlin, from the perspective of a tour guide, a ‘street level storyteller’ as I liked to think of myself in those sun-drenched, wind scorched days, people rich days.
Now, in 2024, I have started a new book project based on my teaching and writing about Berlin history, and these older stories seem like a wonderful way of remembering my impressions of the city when I knew it less well, and loved it still with the ardour of new love.
And I really want to keep the promise I made when I set up this website, that its primary focus would be ‘writings from Berlin’ – something that has been rather absent amidst the projects, the teaching and the guiding over the past five years.
So, over the next 6 months I’m going to be sharing some of these stories here on my website.
Berlin has changed so much since 2015, even since the last of these fragments were penned in early 2019, so that they also remind me of what isn’t here anymore….in the Quicksand Metropolis, where the present rises and falls so quickly, where the look of the place changes so constantly – that in the end, it is the traumatic history of the city that seems the most enduring, the most consistent thing of all.
Even in these brief short stories you can see the outlines of that past everywhere, presented to you by someone (me) only beginning to understand its enormity, and what it means for our damaged world today.
Click on the title links below to read the stories.
Lauren van Vuuren 