Here in Berlin
Written by Cristina García
Narrated by Joan Walker
3.5/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
An unnamed Visitor travels to Berlin with a camera looking for reckonings of her own. The city itself is a character-vibrant and postapocalyptic, flat and featureless except for its rivers, its lakes, its legions of bicyclists.
Here in Berlin, she encounters a people's history: the Cuban teen taken as a POW on a German submarine only to return home to a family who doesn't believe him, the young Jewish scholar hidden in a sarcophagus until safe passage to England is found, the female lawyer haunted by a childhood of deprivation in the bombed-out suburbs of Berlin who still defends those accused of war crimes, a young nurse with a checkered past who joins the Reich at a medical facility more intent to dispense with the wounded than to heal them, and the son of a zookeeper who fights to keep the animals safe from both the war and an increasingly starving populace.
Bringing the people of this famed city to life, critically acclaimed novelist Cristina Garcia aligns the stories of the past with those of the future.
Cristina García
Cristina García is the author of eight novels including Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, A Handbook to Luck, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, King of Cuba, Here in Berlin, and Vanishing Maps. Her work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into fifteen languages. She has taught at universities nationwide and is currently Resident Playwright at Central Works Theater in Berkeley. Visit her website at CristinaGarciaNovelist.com.
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Reviews for Here in Berlin
24 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/53.5 A unknown, unnamed visitor arrive in Berlin, and sets off to discover exactly what this city has gone through and become. It is, 2013 and as she travels she talks to many different people, discovering their stories, writing them down. She calls them by different titles such as nurse, just putting their real names in small print shove the titles. Many of those she talks to had different roles during WWII, and some are Cubans who moved here during that time.These are vignettes, snapshots of the people who make up this city. They come from all walks of life, and many of their roles during the war are ones I had never heard about before. In the vignette simply called Preachers, a young girl working as a linguistic anthropologist, fluent in seven languages, is sent by the Nazis to the American South to study the oratory skills of the Black preachers. The young Jewish woman who was hidden in a tomb for several days, until her husband could get them passage to England. Many other stories, so many, all so very interesting seeing the city through these snapshots. History's long shadow cast over a burgeoning city that has changed much. Uncovered stories and unforgotten memories, very well done. I believe the visitor is a stand in for us, the readers and the thing she sees and thinks are inserted between the vignettes.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I really liked the concept of this book with its myriad vignettes, and many of them were very compelling. But I think that also hurt the book--with the sheer quantity of stories being told here, they were frequently not explored fully enough (for my preference at least). The audio would have benefited from multiple readers as well. Its sole reader, Joan Walker, was good, but didn't offer enough variety for the amount of accounts within this short book.