In his cultural topographical map of Berlin, Andrew Webber analyses representations and meanings of Berlin in literature, film, photography, art and other forms of cultural practice, from the beginning of the 20th century until the first decade of the new millennium. Webber’s investigation leaves behind the beaten track of representational space and official memorial culture and instead descends into the subconscious city vaults, the underground world of trauma, melancholia and phantasmagoria caused by a dramatic history consisting of belated modernization and a cycle of ideological euphoria and violent annihilation. The connecting thread through this psycho-topographical chart of Berlin that leads from Fontane’s Irrungen, Wirrungen, a work rooted in the 19th century but already sensitive to the impact of modern urban capitalism, to Tom Tykwer’s Lola rennt, ‘effacing the political time and place in order to retell a sort of new Odyssey’ (p. 286), is Walter Benjamin’s notion of allegory as developed in Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. The allegory as a device of desintegration and trope of anteriority (de Man) and melancholia functions in Benjamin’s own reflections on Berlin in Berliner Kindheit, transforming the urban landscape into an uncanny scenery, a topological map of thresholds and effaced borders between interior and exterior, monument and psyche, a dystopian architecture of non-similarity. In a similar vein, Webber follows the allegorical traces of Berlin in the work of different cultural practitioners throughout the century. Next to an extensive introduction, focusing on thematics and theory, the book consists of six chapters that are organized chronologically, yet in which the essential temporality of each spatial entity is underscored in line with Benjaminian allegory. Chapter one, ‘Berlin Chronicle Thresholds and Boundaries’, deals mainly with Walter Benjamin’s own Berlin memories. The second chapter, ‘Berlin Ensemble’, traces the evocation of the city in Brecht’s writings and filmic work. The third chapter, ‘Berlin symphonies’, is an analysis of Walther Ruttman’s 1927 film Berlin: die Sinfonie der Groβstadt and its 2002 remake by Thomas Schadt. ‘Berlin Alexanderplatz’ focuses on Döblin’s novel of the same name. The chapter on the ‘Berlin Wall’ reads Bachmann, Wolf, Johnson and Wenders. The final chapter, ‘Berlin Marathon’, is set after the Fall and analyses the key topographical structures in recent films such as Michael Klier’s Ostkreuz, Kutluğ Ataman’s Lola und Bilidikid, with its ‘counter-performance to those established by Leni Riefenstal’ (p. 275), and eventually Tykwer’s successful movie Lola rennt, in which the protagonist ‘runs free from the historically laden sites of Berlin on a course that seems designed not to bring the city’s twentieth-century past into play’ (p. 275).

Webber’s in-depth readings from Fontane to Ataman function in a wide historical intertextual context. Although not all Webber’s arguments may be entirely convincing, his in-depth study certainly offers food for thought and discussion, as it is in keeping with the so-called ‘topographical turn’ in literary and cultural studies and with topics such as addressed in memory and trauma studies, urban studies, psychoanalysis, Benjamin studies, and critical theory. Although one sometimes grows somewhat weary of the incessant flow of references to the theoretical canon, Berlin in the Twentieth Century. A Cultural Topography is an interesting and profound study of the ambivalent meanings of a fascinating city.