It’s embarrassing but unavoidable, since the world of modern publishing has now assigned to authors the job of being their own publicists. Anyway, here I go:
In just over two weeks, on September 8, a book that I’ve been working on for about four years will be coming out from HarperCollins. It’s called Berlin Before and After: A Cautionary Mirror for Our Times. The “before” is the Berlin of 1929, a year I examine in some detail as I move through the seasons to bring to life that city on the verge of disaster—a society “dancing on a volcano,” as one of that era’s more astute statesmen put it. And the “after” is Berlin now: a metropolis of monuments, memorials, street signs, performances, books, TV shows, and other manifestations of that dark past, all combining to create a culturally vital city that I’ve grown to love over the past two or three decades. The point of the book, or one of the points, is that however horrifying a city’s history has been, its present-day citizens’ willingness to remember and acknowledge the past can bring about a certain degree of atonement.
And the “cautionary mirror” part…well, if you’ve been paying attention to our current national situation, you’ll be aware of how much we, right now in America, are teetering on the verge of our own Third Reich, our own Stasi-run East Berlin. We’re in a very scary time, and I thought it might be heartening for my readers, if also chastening, to see how another place went into this dark tunnel and then eventually managed to come out of it.
There’s been a nice little review in Kirkus so far, with other reviews soon to come, I hope. If you like, you can order the book through the HarperCollins website or through Amazon—or, even better, buy it at your local bookstore, if such a thing still exists in your neighborhood. And for those of you who live in the New York area, there will be a panel discussion about Berlin Before and After at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge on the evening of Wednesday, September 30, featuring me, Noah Isenberg, and Rosanna Warren, all talking about the book and its implications. That NYU even is free and open to the public, but you need to register here for it beforehand. Please come if you can, and do introduce yourself to me if we haven’t already met.