Anna Winger’s ‘This Must Be the Place’ & Théophile Gautier’s ‘My Fantoms’

Berlin has been the European “It” city for most of two decades, but American authors have not been attracted in commensurate numbers. Jeffrey Eugenides lived there while writing “Middlesex,” but who recently has written anything as memorably Berlin-centric as Christopher Isherwood’s “Goodbye to Berlin”?Anna Winger’s “This Must Be the Place” (Riverhead, 303 pages, $24.95) is therefore welcome. Ms. Winger, a Massachusetts native who now lives in Berlin with her family, gracefully captures the odd emptiness of Berlin’s streets, as well as the subtleties of its inhabitants. Her heroine, a New York transplant named Hope, compares the city to Newark: It does not hustle like a great metropolis should, she says. It is in large part an ugly city, built for cars, rebuilt after the war in haste. Her husband, David, an economist, has dragged Hope to Berlin, where she is meant to get over a miscarriage. But it is December, and Berlin is glum.Walter Baum, Hope’s neighbor and eventually her guide to Berlin, is facing middle age. He has nothing to show for his acting career but 14 years as Tom Cruise’s German voice. A star in the dubbing industry, Walter has just lost Heike, whose role in a soap about a women’s prison has finally given her more cachet than Walter can stand.The odd-couple romance that inevitably forms between Walter and Hope stands in for Berlin’s gloomy appeal. The mopey American, the more mature German who yet believes in Tom Cruise — they have much to teach one another. Hope’s first visit to Walter’s apartment leads quickly to an explanation of where the Berlin Wall ran and what exactly it contained. And their love affair often becomes a colloquy on Berlin’s paradoxical history. Even Hope’s tedious evenings out with David dwell on Berlin’s history, which he explicates in the condescending belief that all Hope needs is to think of other things for a while.“This Must Be the Place” is a smart, tasteful novel, but it leans a bit too much on Berlin. Ms. Winger’s interest in the city is not superficial. She sets her story in Charlottenburg — an upscale section in the West, the polar opposite of hip former East German neighborhoods such as Prenzlauer Berg or Friedrichshain. Her German characters look back not to the recent years of change, or to the difficult years after World War II, but to the ’80s, when West Berlin’s cultural orientation was more pro-American than it is now. Walter’s favorite meeting restaurant is called the Wild West. In the world of the novel, Walter is a kind of “good German” because he is an American German. His mother was American, and he spent a year in California, where he played Prince Charming at Disneyland. His friend Orson, an ambitious German director, needles Hope when she mentions the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Like a true Berliner, he is sensitive to the uses and abuses of suffering as “social capital.” But Walter, Tom Cruise’s voice in Germany, defends her. “This Must Be the Place” is at heart a sophisticated romantic comedy, but geopolitics are never far away.* * *Paris has been a magnet for bohemians for much longer than Berlin, and few of its historical denizens would likely have considered Berlin a possible alternative. But in the 1830s and ’40s, two of Paris’s most recherché poets were looking to Germany for inspiration. Gérard de Nerval (1808-55) and Théophile Gautier (1811-72) were of the same generation as Poe and de Quincey. They were Romantics with a strong taste for the macabre. As translator Richard Holmes explains in the introduction to his anthology of Gautier’s fiction, “My Fantoms” (NYRB Classics, 194 pages, $14), ghost stories had long been disdained by the French, and Gautier’s great literary accomplishment was to adopt the material of writers such as E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) for a French audience. He made German creepiness fit for the salons of Paris.Gautier did not transcend Hoffmann — the German is by far the better storyteller, and the main thing that differentiates some of the earlier stories collected in “My Fantoms” from third-rate Hawthorne tales is their franker sexuality. Most of the stories collected here feature succubi or necrophilia, sometimes both. But one of the more successful is also one of the least sexual: “The Actor” tells the story of a Viennese actor whose portrayal of Mephistopheles in “Faust” eventually draws the notice of the devil himself. “I was not entirely satisfied with your laugh,” says the devil. “It was, at best, the laugh of a rogue.” But most interesting from the viewpoint of literary history — and literary history is the best reason to read “My Fantoms” — is Gautier’s short memorial to his friend Nerval, who had famously translated “Faust.” The warm friendship between these two men complicates the seeming archness of their tastes.“On more than one occasion the shadow of the ancient teutonic oak flickered across his brow with its secret whisperings,” he wrote of Nerval. “His forehead was admirably formed, polished like a piece of ivory and glowing like porcelain … Yet such a countless number of ideas were humming in it … that this Pantheon of the mind eventually became a Pandemonium, and the high dome of intellect was shattered.” Gautier and Nerval, so much admired and cited by authors such as Baudelaire and Proust, thought of each other, curiously, as importers of a German sensibility. The best way to inhabit any capital city, perhaps, is to dream of a completely different place: America in Berlin, or Germany in Paris.blytal@nysun.com

Anna Winger’s ‘This Must Be the Place’ & Théophile Gautier’s ‘My Fantoms’

Anna Winger’s ‘This Must Be the Place’ & Théophile Gautier’s ‘My Fantoms’

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