My Berlin probably peaked on 9th November 2014. In a spacious borrowed flat in Mitte, not far from trendy Arkonaplatz, I had countersigned a passport application for a baby just born to friends: British father, German mother. This blessed infant seemed to have landed in a world of frictionless harmony, with the rifts of history now no more than a weightless bubble. As twilight fell, we walked along Bernauer Strasse to the Mauerpark. There, on the 25th anniversary of its fall, we watched a line of white balloons successively released along the course of the former Wall. The 8,000 helium blobs of freedom sailed up into an unresisting sky. At the Brandenburg Gate, Daniel Barenboim conducted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” and Peter Gabriel gave his rendition of (what else?) David Bowie’s “Heroes”.
Old Berlin hands—seasoned expats, not to mention natives—would scoff that I turned up laughably late to the party. Ideal cities always have their mythical moment in the sun. For belated pursuers of the legend, that moment was usually around a decade ago. In the 2000s, Berlin veterans would reminisce about the Wild East thrills of the post-Wall years. Then, a handful of still-valid Deutschmarks would rent you some prairie-sized warehouse, while the clubbers’ favoured temple of delirium had not yet shifted to the decommissioned power-plant of Berghain from the hulking air-raid shelter of the Reichsbahnbunker. Grizzled hedonists of an earlier vintage spoke fondly of pre-unification West Berlin, that island of subsidised dissent where Nato arms sheltered lotus-eating lifestyles and Bowie himself blossomed again at 155 Hauptstrasse in Schöneberg.
Over the past quarter-century, Berlin has— somewhat improbably—ousted Paris as the metropolitan idyll for aspirant “creatives” from abroad. Until recently, their adventures had spawned piecemeal stories but lacked a defining chronicle. Now, Vincenzo Latronico’s novel Perfection—published in Italian in 2022, superbly translated by Sophie Hughes and shortlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize—has given a generation its compact, stylish, ironic but self-doubting voice. Inspired in part by Things, Georges Perec’s “story of the Sixties”, Latronico gazes unsparingly, but never cruelly, at his twentysomething couple as they pursue the ideal in their long-term rental home in Neukölln.
Web designers Anna and Tom (presumably Italian, but quite at home in their English-speaking “spaceship”) seem to attain “pretty much everything they had ever wished for” in their immaculately decorated flat. But even they feel that they have missed the party. During the late Obama years (around the time of my own Berlin rapture), they feel “envious of the legendary period of the nineties when everything had been up for grabs”. In turn, they look with sympathy on latecomers who face the rocketing rents, rammed venues and ever-more labyrinthine bureaucracy of a time when, even in Berlin, “Space had ceased to be limitless”. Perfection never exists in the moment you grab it.
The urge to seek your best life in a distant town merges utopian longing with a kind of nostalgia, as if happiness lies not just elsewhere on the map, but at some optimum point in the past. In outsiders’ fantasies, the glory days have always just departed. Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris puts a pitch-perfect comic spin on this syndrome. Transported each midnight to the 1920s Montparnasse of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Picasso, the moonstruck American hero learns that Picasso’s mistress hankers for the Belle Époque charms of the 1890s that Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas knew. Thrust back to that era, he finds that its artists pine for the splendours of Paris in the Renaissance…
In outsiders’ fantasies, the glory days have always just departed
Nomadic foreigners have long yearned for an ideal city, at its ideal age. The Grand Tour of the 18th century saw aristocrats from Britain and elsewhere feed on the dilapidating marvels of Venice, Rome and Florence. Signs of decaying pomp only enhanced the allure. Byron’s wandering hero Childe Harold discovers in Venice that “her palaces are crumbling to the shore”. Still he worships the subsiding Serenissima as “the pleasant place of all festivity, the revel of the earth”. In post-Napoleonic France, Paris became—in Walter Benjamin’s words—the “capital of the 19th century”. There, every wannabe world-changer sought a magical uplift. Paris retained its crown as the hub of foreign hopes through the century to come, even if turmoil and hardship for long stretches made its art and thought glitter against a rundown frame. After all, Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast—the memoir of his Parisian 1920s that launched a million transatlantic pilgrimages—opens with an account of the horsedrawn sewage-collection carts that drained stairwell privies on the Rue Mouffetard. The prospect of a fifth-floor coldwater walk-up garret seldom deterred would-be existentialists, or later deconstructionists, fresh from Brooklyn or Brentwood.
Then the Warsaw pact collapsed. The Parisian intellectual class of 1968 lost their insurgent glamour, as their once-scruffy city centre morphed into a well-scrubbed theme park. So Berlin staged its coup. Vast, cheap, empty, neglected (especially across the windblown steppes of the former East), the once-and-future German capital planted on the sandy heaths of Brandenburg emerged as the expat utopia for the turn of the third millennium. Only in the Weimar era, when gay and bohemian visitors flocked to the fabled citadel of tolerance, had the city magnetised curious foreigners in this way. Even then, its narrow enclaves of acceptance felt—as Christopher Isherwood writes in Goodbye to Berlin—like “a sparkling nucleus of light” surrounded by grim suburban barracks and, beyond them, the icy Prussian plains, that “immense waste of unhomely ocean”.
After 1945, Hitler, Stalin and Allied air raids had left much of the city a wilderness of weeds and ruins. Much in the East remained untouched during the long stagnation of the GDR years. If it felt ripe for a new surge of settlement, then Berlin had welcomed industrious incomers at least since Frederick the Great’s artisan recruitment schemes of the 18th century. As John Kampfner notes in his shrewd and illuminating tour of the city’s past, In Search of Berlin, “Immigration was built into the growth model”.
Yet the post-unification expat throng differed from their forerunners in Paris or Venice. Latronico’s piercing scrutiny of minutely curated lifestyles shows how—and why. In this Berlin, “Freedom had turned into abundance”. The city’s tragic past fails to stir outsiders who crave a blank slate for personal reinvention. Anna and Tom know in theory that history had “hollowed out” the space they occupy. But it “never occurred to them” that “the distinction between Alt- and Neu-buildings in property listings had been drawn by the Allied bombings”. Even the “gritty, conflict-torn place” of the 1980s feels remote. As for gentrification and the soaring rents that result, that’s “something other people did”.
The Berlin of scarcity, rubble and blood remains a nightmare from which they have happily awoken. When, in 2015, the wave of Syrian refugees to Germany flows into camps on the old Tempelhof airfield, the pair help to staff a soup kitchen. They welcome this chance of an “outstanding rendezvous with history”. It doesn’t last long. Soon, their politics—fuelled almost exclusively by the New York Times and Guardian websites—have shrunk back to veggie cooking and avoiding Ubers. Except when it’s really cold.
Maybe Latronico does inject a little satirical cruelty into his compassion. Yet Tom, Anna and their cosmopolitan chums appear not as parasitic villains but specimens of their class and epoch, hothouse blooms of post-Wall plenty observed as closely as the exotic pot-plants—the “lush monstera”, the “giant euphorbias”, the “downy-stemmed philodendrons”—that beautify their flat. Those plants adorn the meticulously arranged online ads that attract the short sub-lets keeping their Berlin dream financially afloat. Anna and Tom may regale friends back in hidebound southern Europe with tales of “cheap rent and epic parties”. In truth, their fragile idyll rests on cross-subsidy from lets and erratic spikes in the market for expat services, whose websites they design.
Unlike those earlier pilgrims in Montmartre or Trastevere, their Berlin generation lives out its idyll in both acute and virtual space. “The internet came of age” along with Tom and Anna. They have parlayed their status as young digital natives into marketable cross-border skills. Whereas earlier sojourners shared their joys via enraptured letters, pictures or poems, now Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook transmit a rolling journal of their Berlin days. To determine exactly when social media “spread through every aspect of their lives” feels as pointless as asking whether a forest fire begins “at the first twig or third tree”.
Far from plunging into Berlin’s history, these digital migrants float above it, even in this city where every street sign and wall plaque buttonholes you with stories of the past. The urban landscape becomes a stage set for the ideal existence, whether sought via “home-made fermentation kits” and gourmet meals at home, or on weekend gallery crawls and chemically enhanced clubbing nights. It will find completion only when its pixelated image ascends into the digital realm. These gravity-defying children of “abundance” live more in cyberspace than they do in Neukölln. Latronico dissects a 21st-century state of soul. Berlin, city of vacant lots and new beginnings, acts as its rapid incubator.
Anna and Tom may inhabit a virtual paradise, but they come to cherish their physical milieu only when it starts to slip beyond their grasp. There always comes a time to say goodbye to the dream town. In 2010s Berlin, “an injection of dollars” fuels “chaos in the housing market”. Big bucks land heavily. “Porsches and Teslas” spread south into once-hip districts as “the laptops crowding café tables became wider and more matte”. “The queue at Berghain kept getting longer, or their patience shorter.” As the community centre where old-timers played cards gives way to “the flagship store of a Japanese trainer brand”, Anna and Tom’s extraterritorial bliss is trumped by its platinum-card upgrade.
They move for a while to Lisbon: in my experience, the “new Berlin” of choice for many post-pandemic city connoisseurs. Yet the escape from bone-freezing winters fails to compensate for duller art, food and work. “It was all different... yet it was also somehow all the same.” We suspect Latronico might plan some grisly comeuppance for these smug surfers on the latest wave of European privilege. But no: in a clever coda, they turn their digital marketing prowess to a boutique hotel project back beside the trusty old Med that they fled. It’s all “completely perfect”, gush the influencers, “just like… the pictures”.
‘Berlin is not really there. It’s an idea.’
City fantasies have always faded as youth flees, funds run low and reality bites. Tom and Anna quit Berlin equipped with a new brand of internet-driven nostalgia. Their own patch of “abundance”, Latronico suggests, came about thanks to “a specific overlap between the city’s history and theirs”. That history has now moved on. A much-publicised rent crisis has seen the cost of apartments soar far beyond the reach of non-corporate incomers. Berlin can’t keep up with its acute housing needs, for more than 220,000 new properties. Rows flare over proposals to carpet the Tempelhof field with high-rises.
Meanwhile, the Germany into which Berlin so uneasily fits has changed fast. Putin’s Ukraine invasion broke six decades of reflex pacifism. A resurgent nationalistic right shook the foundations of a default liberalism. Then the Gaza war made inattentive outsiders understand that Germany’s hard-wired postwar politics of penitence might stifle or curtail domestic debate. In many ways, Anna and Tom’s beloved Berlin has gone the way of Hemingway’s Paris. From sex clubs to warehouse parties and the “neon glow” of gallery openings on chilly winter streets, it will survive as myth. It began as a sort of fiction anyway. Kampfner quotes David Chipperfield, the Berlin-based British architect who has recreated the city’s iconic museum sites: “Berlin is not really there. It’s an idea.”
In Perfection, Latronico gives crystalline fictional shape to one expression of that idea—a version that bewitched utopia-hunters around the world. The novel captures a moment that, on these cold plains, will not return. Rather, the aura of cult city for dreamseekers will descend elsewhere. Sofia? Porto? Wrocław? Thessaloniki? Wherever the mantle settles, be sure of one thing. It was much better, cheaper and cooler 10 years ago.
