An American Flâneur in Berlin
There is a moment, somewhere between Gabi Hartmann's arrival on the snow-dusted platform of MohrenStra e station and her silent recognition of a stranger in an Eberswalde town square, when this book stops being a travel memoir and becomes something harder to name - and far more difficult to put down.
An American Fl neur in Berlin follows Gabi, a California woman of German descent, on a late-winter pilgrimage to the city of her ancestors. One hundred and twenty years before her overnight flight from Los Angeles, her great-great-grandfather Karl-Friedrich Hartmann had boarded a Hamburg steamship headed the other way - a young Prussian farmer's son with no inheritance, only courage and a destination. He settled in the Salinas Valley and never returned. Now Gabi is retracing that arc in reverse, carrying a question she cannot quite articulate: What does it mean to belong somewhere you have never been?
What she finds is not a tidy answer but a city that unsettles and illuminates in equal measure. She stands at the ghost-site of the F hrerbunker, where the marble recycled from Hitler's demolished Chancellery now lines a subway station. She attends Sunday service at the Berlin Dom, that glorious monument to Prussian opulence inside a supposedly austere Lutheran church - and sits quietly with the contradiction. She rides the S-Bahn to Wannsee on a frozen January morning when the tour boats lie buried in untouched snow and hooded crows pick their way along a deserted pier. She wanders the hushed vastness of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - the very library Wim Wenders filmed in Wings of Desire - half-expecting angels.
And through all of it she is a fl neur in the truest Baudelairean sense: unhurried, unattached, following the city's subtle aesthetic contours wherever they lead, trusting that the spirit of a place will speak to those patient enough to listen.
The book's beating heart is a question about identity and time. In Eberswalde, the small former-Prussian town where the Hartmanns farmed for a thousand years, Gabi searches for traces of a world obliterated first by the Luftwaffe and then by Soviet reconstruction. She finds a town that looks like the original but is not - and then, in a sunlit town square, she locks eyes with a young woman who walks exactly like her, tosses her head exactly like her, and walks on. No polite introductions, no cups of tea. Just a moment of electric recognition across five generations and an ocean of time.
David Tuffley writes with the eye of a novelist and the mind of a philosopher. An American Fl neur in Berlin is not a guidebook, though it will make you want to book a flight. It is not a history, though it carries the weight of one of the twentieth century's most consequential cities. It is not a meditation on solitude, though its luminous appendix of quotes from Pascal, Thoreau, Kafka, and Nietzsche reveals the inner logic of wandering alone.
It is, in the end, a book about the astonishing discovery that arrives only when you stop looking: that home is not always where you were born. Sometimes it is where you come from, and sometimes those are entirely different places.
Read it slowly. Read it the way Gabi walks.
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