Slow fire

"Every time I see you I think of Dachau, baby." It was not what Susan Neiman expected to hear when she left Harvard in 1982 to spend a year in Berlin finishing her philosophy dissertation. But she soon discovered that history there has a way of intruding into even the most private moments. She stayed six years and wrote a book about something called Vergangenheitsverarbeitung, a word that describes the way Germans confront their past and the Nazis. It was a word that began to haunt Neiman, who is Jewish. Every conversation brought with it an invisible army of ghosts. A lover insisted he couldn't face her without confronting his Nazi parents. A country weekend turned into a quandary when the hostess broke out a bottle of '39 Sauternes, left over from her father's tour of service in occupied France. A rabbi explained the difficulty of sorting out applications to join the Jewish Community in a place where former Nazis may invent Jewish ancestry to mask their own guilt.

But by then Neiman had fallen in love with Berlin: its Hinterhofe, where organ-grinders still play for coins thrown from kitchen windows, its Kneipen on every corner, where poets and barmaids drink beer until dawn, and the talk is charged with urgency and heady tension like no place on earth. With the mixture of irony and poignancy unique to Berlin itself, Slow Fire provides an intimate look at Berliners a generation after the war. In writing this remarkable memoir, locating a time and place as precisely as Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin did in another era, Neiman has composed an unforgettable ode to the city that, for better or worse, emblazons its century like no other.