Dieter E. Zimmer traces Vladimir Nabokov’s time in the city…
In 2001, a book of mine was published that dealt with the fifteen years Vladimir Nabokov spent in Berlin, from 1922 to 1937. It is mainly a picture album, based on a collection of photos on the subject. The title of the book is Nabokovs Berlin (Berlin Nabokova, Nabokov’s Berlin). I am aware that at first this seems an absurd title, raising a swarm of question marks in every Nabokovian’s head. Nabokov never had the mind of a tourist eager to inspect the sights neither of Berlin nor of any other city. He never wrote to depict any place for its own sake, let alone Berlin.
He had not come here because he had been eager or at least curious. He wanted very much to be somewhere else, on the shores of the Oredezh. He never became fond of Berlin and at the end intensely disliked it. He lived within the lively Russian community of Berlin that was more or less self-sufficient, staying on after it had disintegrated because he had nowhere else to go. He had little German. He knew few Germans except for landladies, shopkeepers, the petty immigration officials at the police headquarters.
And of course his language students, among them possibly one Dietrich, the executions maniac. He thought Germany was the epitome of poshlost. He took little interest in German affairs as if they did not concern him, so little that he did not perceive the fundamental change that went on in the spring of 1933 in all its enormity and portent. So one might assume there never was what might be termed Nabokov’s Berlin. Yet there was.
Berlin and its townspeople were all around him, from morning to night he came across them in the streets and the shops, in the buses and streetcars, the parks and gardens, the cinemas, the libraries, the fun fair of Lunapark, the Sportpalast were he went for boxing and ice hockey matches, the soccer fields. He always was a most keen observer, and he needed an ample supply of everyday reality for his novels and stories. So he took it where he had occasion to observe it, and that was Berlin.
Many stories and six of his early novels where fully set in Berlin and two partly. They are full of Berlin. It is true that it is not a Berliner’s Berlin the way it is in Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, for instance. It is mostly Russian Berlin, but it is Berlin all the same. Even ignoring much of Berlin seems a typical Berlin trait. Berlin is made up of many different milieus that hardly take any notice of each other. Not caring about other milieus than one’s own is a widespread and normal Berlin attitude up to this day.
It so happened that four bestselling German novels set in Berlin were written in the late 1920s, at the same time as Nabokov’s King, Queen, Knave the German translation of which was not a bestseller. They were Menschen im Hotel by Vicky Baum, Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin, Fabian by Erich Kästner and Bruder und Schwester by Leonhard Frank. There is much more of Berlin to be seen in King, Queen, Knave than in any of them.
Döblin’s extraordinary novel has more of the city only insofar as it has its idiom and its way of thinking; in this sense it is a close-up while Nabokov’s fiction stays at a neutral distance. But Döblin’s city itself is reduced to a few blocks between Alexanderplatz and Rosenthaler Platz. Döblin lived not far away, and I believe Nabokov never ventured into those proletarian quarters. Nabokov’s Berlin by contrast is the “Russian Berlin” of Wilmersdorf, Charlottenburg and Schöneberg, the city center and the city’s parks and forests, notably the Grunewald.
It can safely be said that no other city is as tightly interwoven into Nabokov’s work as Berlin. There are hundreds of passages in his work dealing with some detail of the place. He had an uncanny eye for detail that nobody else seemed to take note of. Did anybody else ever notice that the statue of Empress Auguste Viktoria in the Tiergarten held a sort of fan made of stone? How many in the legions crossing that bridge across the Landwehrkanal h…