Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Ghost Dance in Berlin: A Rhapsody in Gray
    Ghost Dance in Berlin: A Rhapsody in Gray
    Ghost Dance in Berlin: A Rhapsody in Gray
    Ebook151 pages2 hours

    Ghost Dance in Berlin: A Rhapsody in Gray

    By Peter Wortsman

    2.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Every great city is a restless work in progress, but nowhere is the urban impulse more in flux than in Berlin, that sprawling metropolis located on the fault line of history. A short-lived fever-dream of modernity in the Roaring Twenties, redubbed Germania and primped up into the megalomaniac fantasy of a Thousand-Year Reichstadt in the Thirties, 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 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTravelers' Tales
    Release dateJan 15, 2013
    ISBN9781609520793
    Ghost Dance in Berlin: A Rhapsody in Gray

    Read more from Peter Wortsman

    Related to Ghost Dance in Berlin

    Related ebooks

    Special Interest Travel For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Rome Is The City Of Poets

      May 4, 2018

      Rome Is The City Of Poets
      5 min read

    • Article

      Berlin

      Feb 1, 2024

      Berlin
      9 min read

    • Article

      A World Of Wonders And Catastrophes: Discovering Vermeer And His Hometown

      Feb 14, 2023

      Dodging the oncoming bikes, I climb a low mound a few feet above water level and look across at the city. It is a clear evening: the horizon holds a delicate tang of orange that ascends, becoming royal blue, then indigo. In front of me is a quay wher

      6 min read

    • Article

      Reason AND Imagination

      Nov 1, 2023

      Reason AND Imagination
      6 min read

    • Article

      Hero Worship

      Oct 29, 2020

      It wasn’t meant to be like this. With worldwide celebrations champing at the bit, 2020 was going to be Beethoven’s year… until a pandemic came along to rain on the anniversary parade. But it doesn’t always take a significant birthday to provide the e

      5 min read

    • Article

      Can The German Path To Truth And Reconciliation Work In America?

      Jul 15, 2020

      From my apartment in Gesundbrunnen, to the north of Berlin’s city centre, it is about a six-kilometer walk to the Brandenburg Gate. The route I take leads me through housing estates built in the gaps where World War II rubble was cleared, and past 19

      9 min read

    • Article

      Letter From Berlin

      Jun 15, 2021

      Letter From Berlin
      5 min read

    • Article

      Journeys Without Borders

      Feb 7, 2020

      Journeys Without Borders
      11 min read

    • Article

      Staying Gold

      Dec 1, 2022

      Staying Gold
      6 min read

    • Article

      Owned By Others

      Jul 3, 2021

      Owned By Others
      5 min read

    • Article

      Capturing the “Ruin Porn” of Berlin: Layers of history beckon with imperfect memories.

      Nov 14, 2013

      Click on the image above for slideshow. It’s 6:45 on a Tuesday morning as Ulrike, a feisty Berliner in her early 50s whose dyed strawberry blonde hair whispers hints of gray, climbs out of her car, clutching a camera. The September fog is just liftin

      8 min read

    • Article

      The Good, The Bad And The Frankly Awful

      Oct 25, 2023

      Timothy Mowl and Julian Orbach (Stephen Morris, £20) IN his epistolary novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), Tobias Smollett, has the comically hypochondriac and irascible—but gradually mellowing—figure of Matthew Bramble, a country squire

      6 min read

    • Article

      Commentary: US Should Build A Memorial 'Plague Column' For COVID-19, But Where? Here's An Idea

      May 8, 2020

      Plague columns don't exist in the United States. The nation was founded too late, after the 17th and early 18th century European heyday of memorials built to mark the end of a blistering contagion. An epidemic's brutal cost in human lives and its myr

      5 min read

    • Article

      Statues Of Liability

      Mar 1, 2024

      Statues Of Liability
      3 min read

    • Article

      How Art Made The World

      Oct 11, 2023

      How Art Made The World
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Waste Land turns 100

      Oct 19, 2022

      The Waste Land turns 100
      5 min read

    • Article

      Letter from Munich

      Dec 13, 2019

      Letter from Munich
      6 min read

    • Article

      Sputnik On A Stick

      Apr 2, 2018

      IN THE LATE’ 80S‚ THE SUBJECT POLITICAL SCIENCE AT UCT WAS A CONTRADICTION IN TERMS. Thing is, you see, there really wasn’t much to compare with our divided land, so we turned to three equally disparate and desperate locales: Palestine, Ireland and B

      3 min read

    • Article

      Adrift in Sunlit Night

      Jun 1, 2020

      Adrift in Sunlit Night
      20 min read

    • Article

      To Make Art Is To Be Human

      Oct 13, 2021

      IN 1950, Ernst Gombrich published The Story of Art. The book was an instant bestseller and was the first to show that there was, indeed, such a thing as a story of art, that artists and movements existed not in isolated moments of time, but as part o

      7 min read

    • Article

      The MILK of DREAMS

      May 12, 2022

      The MILK of DREAMS
      3 min read

    • Article

      Shostakovich in South Dakota

      Sep 1, 2023

      Shostakovich in South Dakota
      23 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Ghost Dance in Berlin

    2.5/5

    3 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 1/5
      I originally took this as a serious book about Berlin and something I could learn enough from to make me want to travel there, or at least to feel satisfied in my reading of it enough to save a future trip for someplace else I might need to visit more importantly. Frankly, the text was dead and I was disappointed.

      "…my circumcised identity hanging prone between my legs."

      Instead of maintaining an interesting and serious stance within his text, Peter Wortsman, the author of this travelogue, cannot help himself but refer in any way he can about his obvious love object, his penis. Because of his repeated exposures of his privates to anyone reading, the book is perhaps unforgettable, but certainly for all the wrong reasons. I cannot quite put my finger on what was the most extreme of the problems here for me except to say his silly idea of being clever and amusing, as well as somebody we might be overly enamored with, reminded me too much of another popular writer I completely despise by the name of David Shields. They have the same problems with delusions of grandeur.

      After reading several books written by the great W.G. Sebald I suppose I have been spoiled over what a good travelogue should be. It is not Ghost Dance in Berlin. Not by a long shot. Forget what the blurbs on the book say, this book is for camera-toting bus-riding sissies and not for a gal on foot with a pack on her back and the courage of a Panthera Onca. Sebald comes at you with all the fervor and historical bald truths he can muster. Plus he makes it riveting. This Wortsman guy thinks he's tough because he can fantasize an attack on a moron the likes of Henry Kissinger, sidle up next to him in the German john, and proudly shake his love-club in the face of Henry at the urinal. Wortsman is sickening to me and more than disgusting. How a translator of such work as the great artist Kleist's can stoop so low as this, and with a subject like Berlin so absolutely interesting and relevant to our time. Plus he makes all men look bad, and that really pisses me off.

    Book preview

    Ghost Dance in Berlin - Peter Wortsman

    1

    My Winterreise

    CHEWING ON A MOUTHFUL BIT OFF A HALF LOAF OF coarse Vollkorn (whole grain) bread bought bright and early when the baker at the S-Bahn Station Berlin-Wannsee opened for business, I am standing, knee-deep in snow, at the grave of writer Heinrich von Kleist, on a wooded knoll overlooking the Kleiner Wannsee (Little Wann Lake), where, with a pistol shot, the troubled Romantic put a last period on the sentence of his life. The warm dough kneaded between tongue and palate and the kernels exploding under the millstone of my molars make for a pleasant distraction from the cold, an inner armor that insulates and fortifies. Nobody knows how to bake whole grain bread like the Germans, it tastes like it just came out of the oven in Hänsel and Gretel.

    Shooting up out of sleep at daybreak, thrilled to be alive, I waited for the darkness to dissolve before venturing out, bundled up, a walking seven-layer cake, wadded with boxers and T-shirt, long johns, flannel shirt, sweater, overcoat, hat, hood, and woolen scarf, reveling in the frozen silence.

    The spectacle of the icy lake glimpsed through the blurry periscope of my tearing eyes is dreamlike, birds frozen in flight and sailboats iced in at half-tilt. The pillow of snow on the lonesome tombstone supplants the white hair Kleist, a suicide at thirty-four, never lived to grow. It’s a peaceful, melancholy spot removed from the road in a copse of evergreens—not quite as remote as Kleist must have found it, but almost. Hard to imagine it’s still within Berlin’s city limits. An unassuming carved wooden sign, easy to miss unless you’re looking for it, points toward a winding footpath, oddly discouraging access. I am the only living soul in sight, and though I understand they mean to make it more presentable by 2011, the bicentennial of his passing, for the moment at least it’s still conducive to musing.

    The poet Rilke went to Paris to serve as secretary to the sculptor Rodin and managed to carve a memorable book from the experience.¹ Secretary, in a manner of speaking, to Kleist—it’s my English take on his words that helped earn me this sojourn in Berlin²—he would surely not have begrudged my extracting a few reflections.

    Wannsee, the posh district of lakeside villas where I live, is named for the lakes. The Academy is considerably less intimidating than I had feared.³ The white wine helps. The nicest thing about it is the silence and the solitude when I want it, and then to emerge for limited spells of sociability at breakfast and dinner.

    *

    Gazing at me over the rim of his glasses, the bookkeeper at the Academy, to whom I’d come to inquire regarding the delay in the payment of my monthly stipend, caught me peering out the window at the Großer (Big) Wannsee, the vast frozen body of water out back, perhaps divining my intent. It’s not really a lake, you know, it’s a swollen river, he remarked with a clipped, nervous laugh, adding, People have fallen in. The poet Georg Heym, another casualty of German letters, fell through a hole in the ice. But this is my year of living dangerously, the coldest winter in decades. When the young women on staff dare do it, as they say they will, I too will walk across.

    *

    Wintry Berlin is a city largely devoid of color, except for a dirty white carpet of snow flung over a treacherous ice slick and a perennial gray cloud cover overhead, ice and sky running into each other, stained by the faint yellow trace of a distant sun that never quite breaks through.

    *

    Picture my surprise last Wednesday on my way back to Wannsee, at the sight of a green hand gripping the railing before me on the crowded tram and artificial ruby-red hair flapping in a simulated tropical breeze. Part wildebeest, part uprooted palm tree escaping the inhospitable arctic chill into the hothouse on wheels. And in the startling blur—a sudden burst of color blinds—the green gloved hands became fluttering palm leaves and the electric redhead a fabulous fruit, a cross between a pineapple, a coconut, and a ripe pomegranate—more tantalizing and forbidding than Eve’s fabled apple of temptation. In vain did my nostrils flutter in search of an olfactory rush, for this exotic fruit had no scent. She was cold, an ice fairy, a Berlin mirage, dashing out ahead of me at Alexanderplatz, and promptly melting, the renegade burst of color immediately blending back into the ubiquitous gray.

    *

    Sunday, despite the sub-zero temperature, I trekked the considerable distance out to Charlottenburg Palace—Berlin is a vast urban expanse—to catch the closing of the Lucas Cranach exhibit. I admit to an erotic tingle at the sight of all those oddly titillating blond nudes: his quizzical Eve, fondling fig leaf and apple; a seductive Teutonic Venus engaged in a sultry bump and grind with a veil that reveals more than it hides; bold Judith, sword in hand outside the tent, just after beheading Holofernes; and the virtuous Lady Lucretia, all her soon-to-be self-sacrificed loveliness on display, preferring death to dishonor—the pin-up girls of antiquity priming and pricking burgeoning Protestant morality. But I was particularly taken by the small self-portrait of the painter, a personal friend of Luther, who, despite his considerable worldly success, opted to preserve this guilt-ridden gaze to pass on to posterity. My libido too numb to take the tingle along, Cranach’s uneasy look accompanied me on my chilly rush home.

    At minus ten degrees Celsius, the frigid sunset over Alexanderplatz, where I emerged from the U-Bahn (subway) to catch the S-Bahn (elevated), made the ground feel like a glacier underfoot. There on the frozen pavement sat a hooded black man playing pipes. Not bagpipes, mind you, massive metal pipes, a makeshift instrument composed of lead fittings twisted pretzel-like and painted blue, on which he banged a primal rhythm and blew a ululating wail, a cross between the guttural groan of an aboriginal didgeridoo and the mournful lament of a landlocked leviathan still aching with life while divining imminent death. His Lied der Kälte (Song of the Cold) echoed in the arctic chill, each frozen note an inkling of eternity. Too cold to pull off my gloves, reach into my pocket, and pluck out a coin, I rushed by, stirred by the sound, wondering how long he’d have enough breath and dexterity left in his frozen fingers to keep blowing and banging.

    Oblivious, meanwhile, to such rarefied aesthetic considerations, two homeless men, the one without gloves pushing the other, without legs, along in a rickety wheelchair with one wheel broken, the protruding spokes flicking a curious percussive accompaniment, went whizzing by to seek the tenuous shelter of the unheated station. Wintry Berlin is no place for beggars. From the corner of my eye I caught the legless one in the wheelchair shrugging at the musician, as if to say: He’s still got all his limbs, so what’s he wailing about? Or perhaps it was a grudging shrug of sympathy. Too cold to consider for long, we almost collided, exchanging chilly looks, and each rushed off to our separate destinies.

    _______________

    ¹ The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paris: 1910

    ² Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist, selected, translated and with an afterword by Peter Wortsman, Archipelago Books, New York: 2010

    ³ The American Academy in Berlin, where the author resided as Holtzbrinck Fellow in the spring of 2010

    2

    The Vectors of Alexanderplatz

    BERLINERS FONDLY CALL IT ALEX FOR SHORT, LIKE IT was an old friend with a familiar, pudgy, pockmarked face, a perennial beer buzz, and a couple of front teeth missing. That mangy mug has undergone multiple facelifts over the years, and given the prodigious bulge of its cheeks, and the various pockets or forecourts it encompasses, it is hard to say just where Alex ends and the rest of Berlin begins. And in a sense it hardly matters, since Alex is as much a state of mind as a precise locale. There’s nothing beautiful about it. In fact, it’s really rather ugly, as far as urban spaces go, compared to the great monumental squares of Paris, London, and Rome. But Alexanderplatz is positively electric, pure current unmediated by wires. Rumbling with arriving and departing underground and above-ground trains, trams, taxis, and buses, clip-clopping with boots, it’s not a place to linger for

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1