The Undercurrents

A Story of Berlin

De: Kirsty Bell

Narrado por: Rachel Pickup

Duración: 8 h y 46 m

Resumen del Editor

Humane, thought provoking, and moving, this hybrid literary portrait of a place makes the case for radical close readings: of ourselves, our cities, and our histories.

The Undercurrents is a dazzling work of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism told from a precise vantage point: a stately nineteenth-century house on Berlin’s Landwehr Canal, a site at the center of great historical changes, but also smaller domestic ones. The view from this house offers a ringside seat onto the city’s theater of action. The building has stood on the banks of the canal since 1869, its feet in the West but looking East, right into the heart of a metropolis in the making, on a terrain inscribed indelibly with trauma.

When her marriage breaks down, Kirsty Bell—a British-American art critic, adrift in her mid-forties—becomes fixated on the history of her building and of her adoptive city. Taking the view from her apartment window as her starting point, she turns to the lives of the house’s various inhabitants, to accounts penned by Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Gabriele Tergit, and to the female protagonists in the works of Theodor Fontane, Irmgard Keun, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A new cultural topography of Berlin emerges, one which taps into energetic undercurrents to recover untold or forgotten stories beneath the city’s familiar narratives.

©2022 Kirsty Bell (P)2022 Blackstone Publishing

A wonderful biography of a fascinating city

When a series of house incidents coincide with the end of the author’s marriage, Kirsty Bell decides to write a book about the building she lives in and the sorroundings. What resulted is this beautifully written, informative gem.

Captivating analysis of the heart and trauma of Berlin

I just loved learning about a city I live in through the eyes and mind of a smart female gaze, using historical facts, women's voices and spiritual information to map out Berlins nerve paths and veins... her undercurrents. TOP READ!