City of Letters: The Making of Literary Life in Berlin

Since the rise of the cultural bourgeoisie in the 19th century, German national imagination has been predicated on a picture of the life of the mind, an identity frequently expressed through the epithet ‘Land of Thinkers and Poets.’ In thousands of neighborhood bookshops, literary cafés and salons throughout the city, intimate and local networks intersect wider reading publics constituted between strangers. Today, Berlin has become a site where the political controversies over memories of the Holocaust are publicly engaged through art, and rapid transformations in the cultural landscape resulting from the fall of the Berlin Wall are still to be fully absorbed. More recently, the life of books has also become an important space in which the politics of difference in era of the Eurozone and migration crises is negotiated. The dissertation therefore tries to suggest some of the ways volatile processes that define urban life are refracted through artistic practices, and argues the regions of aesthetics, politics and ethics are neither reducible to one another, nor bound strictly apart in everyday life. My work explores how artistic and philosophical concepts like the sublime and the fantastic are embedded in everyday life, transforming possibilities for political and ethical action in contemporary Europe. Through my ethnography, I explore the daily labors of literary culture - among specialists and ordinary people, from reading and writing, to creating art and debating philosophy - at a time when questions around the aesthetics and politics of representation have remerged as central to confronting ethical tensions. To this end, I have been interested in the ways artistic forms of life allow city dwellers to remake the world around them, affording news way to confront catastrophic pasts, inhabit fragile presents, and imagine better futures. These forms of labor, I suggest, both engender and are produced by urban ecologies, offering a critical vantage on enduring structures of economic, racial, and expressive inequality. The literary, I argue, is not limited to the pages between the bindings of a book, but rather suffuses space, from the concrete and trees of city streets to the organization of social life. My fieldwork follows multiple and emergent forms of engagement across interlocking scenes in the city, and corresponding to the characters who move through these scenes, for example the salon director, the exile, the urban poet, the critic and the translator. In this way, I trace how the literary emerges through concrete practices that marry the durable structures of the law and the market to the effervescence of literary encounters