Barbara Demick profiles a single street that encapsulates Berlin’s turbulent history over the past century.

NINE BLOCKS, ONE HUNDRED YEARS
by Barbara Demick
PRH, Spring 2028
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

From the slinky cabarets of the 1920s, to the rise of the Nazis, to the city’s destruction at the end of World War II, to the post-war division and the building of the Berlin Wall. Then reunification, gentrification, the reemergence of culture and counter-culture, the stirrings again of ethnic tensions and an emboldened right wing.

The story is told through interviews with past and present residents. Main figures are a 99-year-old Jewish woman who as a girl witnessed the trashing of the Jewish businesses on Kristallnacht 1938. A man in his late 80s (his mother was cleaning lady for Bertolt Brecht) with an impeccable memory of neighbors forced to wear yellow stars, of friends killed by bombs in the final battle for Berlin in 1945, and of smuggling between the Soviet and West sectors post-war and the building of the Berlin Wall. A former Stasi informant. Four generations of a Turkish family first moved to Berlin in the 1960s as guest workers. An artist in the first wave of West German squatters to move into East Berlin in 1989, nurturing a club scene that would turn Berlin into a destination for young tourists.

The street, Brunnenstrasse, runs between the former East and West Berlin, once bisected by the wall, and was the site of many tunnels excavated to help East Berliners escape. It was also the location of a Nazi deportation center for elderly Jews. It all happened here.

Barbara Demick is author of the award-winning books Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood and Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town. She was bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times in Beijing and Seoul, and previously reported from the Middle East and Balkans for the Philadelphia Inquirer.