What does the end of a democracy look like to people who don’t know it’s ending? That question, central to any serious reckoning with Germany’s Weimar Republic, also resonates with many Americans today, and it drives Wendy Lesser’s Berlin Before and After. Lesser, the founding editor of The Threepenny Review and a frequent visitor to Berlin since 2003, has written neither a conventional history nor a travel memoir but a double exposure: the Berlin of 1929 and the Berlin of today, made to comment on each other across the catastrophe that occurred between them.
The “before” is the book’s finest achievement. Lesser chose 1929 deliberately, as “the last year in which it was possible to turn a blind eye,” and she reconstructs it through people who lived it without foreknowledge: Alfred Döblin finishing Berlin Alexanderplatz while workers tore up the actual square; Albert Einstein fleeing the fuss over his fiftieth birthday; the young Billy Wilder, who had earned his keep as a dancer-for-hire at the Eden Hotel, now filming People on Sunday at the Nikolassee beaches; American actress Louise Brooks, back in town to film The Diary of a Lost Girl after Pandora’s Box; Count Harry Kessler mourning Gustav Stresemann’s death yet taking nearly a year to register the economic collapse. Even news of the October crash leaves “surprisingly little sign of it on the surface” — which is precisely the point. Catastrophe arrived while life still felt basically normal, including for most of Berlin’s 160,000 Jews.
The fate of those Jews shadows the whole book. “Astonishingly,” Lesser observes, “not one of my characters from 1929 perished in the camps”: fame, connections, and information bought escape. The two who did not elude Hitler’s reach — Franz Hessel, who died broken by a French internment camp, and Walter Benjamin, who took his own life at the Spanish border — receive some of the book’s most quietly devastating pages. Equally searching is her account of how today’s city marks the absence. She prefers the unobtrusive Stolpersteine, which as testimony feel “unfinished and still alive,” to the Jewish Museum’s “coerced sympathy,” and she is bracingly skeptical of Germany’s current philosemitism. Readers might not always agree with the author, but they will always know where she stands.
The “after” proceeds by essay rather than argument: walls and monuments, the Stasi legacy, glass architecture, bookstores and newspapers, theater, a ride down the full length of the M29 bus. The method is inherited from Hessel’s flânerie, and it occasionally meanders. The American parallels announced in the opening pages are also more asserted than demonstrated. Yet the book’s deeper lesson emerges less from analogy than from disposition. What Berlin taught Lesser is an optimism that “contains within itself a full awareness of what is wrong” — a civic habit embodied by the military and police trainees touring the Topography of Terror “because they need to know what their organizations were capable of.”
Stresemann warned in September 1929 that Germany was “dancing on a volcano.” Lesser’s wager is that a society that remembers its eruptions honestly stands a better chance of surviving the next one. For American readers who, as she argues, have already entered their own 1929, this humane and unsettling book shows both what the volcano destroyed and what facing it squarely might still make possible.
Jan Burzlaff is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Jewish Studies Program at Cornell University, specializing in Holocaust, Jewish, and modern European history. His current book project is a victim-centered history of the Holocaust.
