How Can We Understand Berlin? Kirsty Bell
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Through her exploration of her house in Berlin, writer Kirsty Bell makes the case for radical close readings of ourselves, our cities, and our histories.
Through her exploration of her house in Berlin, writer Kirsty Bell makes the case for radical close readings of ourselves, our cities, and our histories.
Berlin is a world-leading city with a remarkable and troubled history. In her new book, The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin, a dazzling work of biography, memoir and cultural criticism, Kirsty Bell tells the story of the place from a precise vantage point: a stately nineteenth-century house on Berlin’s Landwehr Canal, a site at the centre of great historical changes, but also smaller domestic ones.
Taking the view from her apartment window as her starting point, she turns to the lives of the house’s various inhabitants, to accounts of the city by Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg and Gabriele Tergit, and to the female protagonists in the works of Theodor Fontane, Irmgard Keun and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A new cultural topography of Berlin emerges, one which taps into energetic undercurrents to recover untold or forgotten stories beneath the city’s familiar narratives.
In this interview with Festival of the Future City director Andrew Kelly, Bell talks about how she researched and learned about the city; the people who have lived in her house; her life in both East and West Berlin; and A House Through Time. They discuss how Bell’s work can inspire and help others learn about their place; women and Berlin; Germany and the Holocaust and attempts to memorialise and come to terms with this; whether trauma can be inherited; recent attempts to make Berlin a more liveable city, especially in terms of housing; and Berlin books to read.
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Read the transcript of this conversation
Kirsty Bell’s The Undercurrents is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. Buy a copy online from our partners Waterstones.
Kirsty Bell is a British-American writer and art critic living in Berlin. She has published widely in magazines and journals including Tate Etc. and Art in America, and was a contributing editor of frieze from 2011-2021. She was awarded a Warhol Foundation Grant for her book The Artist’s House, and her essays have appeared in over seventy exhibition catalogues for major international museums and institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and Tate, UK.