Ghost Dance in Berlin

Every great city is a restless work in progress, but nowhere was and is the urban impulse more in flux than in Berlin, that sprawling metropolis located directly on the fault line of history. A short-lived fever-dream of modernity and haven of the avant-garde in the Roaring Twenties, redubbed Germania and primped up into the megalomaniac fantasy of a Thousand-Year Reichstadt in the Thirties, only to be reduced in 1945 to a divided rubble heap, subsequently revived in a schizoid state of post-World War II duality, and reunited in 1989 when the wall came tumbling down ? Berlin has since been reborn yet again as the hipster hub of the 21st century. This book is a hopscotch tour in time and space.Part memoir, part travelogue, Ghost Dance in Berlin is an unlikely declaration of love, as much to a place as to a state of mind, by the American-born son of German-speaking Jewish refugees. Peter Wortsman’s fluency in German makes the text resound in eerie stereo. The winter of 2010 was so cold, he literally walked on water. From his perch in a lavish villa on Berlin’s biggest lake, he imagines the parallel celebratory haunting of two sets of ghosts, those of the exiled erstwhile owners, a Jewish banker and his family, and those of the Führer’s Minister of Finance and his entourage, who took over title, while in another villa across the lake another gaggle of ghosts is busy planning the Final Solution. Where a wall once stood dividing East and West the city remains bisected by invisible borderlines, back and forth across which the author blithely hops, with an eye, an ear and a tongue for telling detail. The text is studded with accounts of memorable conversations and encounters with a garrulous cabbie, a Michelin star chef, street musicians, winos, lawyers, bankers, politicians, and a hooker, with cameo appearances by Henry Kissinger and the ghost of Marlene Dietrich.And when spring erupts and Berlin finally bursts out of hibernation, Wortsman’s scintillating account of the celebration of the urban impulse is punctuated by, among other phenomena, trees shedding pods that look like snow, a bungee jumper leaping from the roof of a hotel, youth amassed to block a neo-Nazi march, and the first ever sighting of Siamese twin ladybugs.