Berlin Stories

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Our West Berlin

Storybook from the Island

Various Authors from Berlin

Translator:

Cindy Opitz, Carolyn Steinberg

Editor: Lia Rockey

Genre: Literary nonfiction

Softcover; 224 pp. / 64 pics

Dimension: 6’’ x 9’’

Suggested retail: $ 24.95

ISBN: 978-1-935902-54-6

Release: Fall 2023

Our West Berlin! The beloved urban island where bars and pubs were open all night so the locals could plot the revolution! Where beer was cheap and sausage on a roll was considered dinner. Where the tenements still bore bullet holes from World War II, and the draft did not exist. Where the city government regularly stumbled over some real estate scandal and where the Communist-controlled S-Bahn train did not run (mostly).  Where old-timers, Turkish immigrants, and students from West Germany lived side by side without much talking to each other, where winter smelled like coal,  and summer smelled like weed. This book is devoted to this half-city,  surrounded by the Wall, which ceased to exist in 1989. Two dozen authors who are, or were living in Berlin  have contributed stories, from JFK touring Checkpoint Charlie to squatters at the Wall. It is a book for those who remember, and for those who wish they did.

Stories by Andreas Austilat, Bernd Matthies, Erkan Arikan, Eva C. Schweitzer, Gerd Nowakowski, Gretchen Dutschke, Harald Jähner, Ingo  Lamberty, Kerstin Schilling, Martina Schrey, Mary Pepchinsky, Michael S. Cullen, Paul F.  Duwe, Paul Hockenos, Ralph Blumenthal, Rik DeLisle, Rosa von Praunheim, Sharona Legner, Stephen Kinzer, Tanja Dückers, Ulli Kulke, Uwe Rada, and Wladimir Kaminer.

The cover was drawn by Gerhard Seyfried (above). The artist, author and historian, born in Munich, has lived in Berlin since 1976. He has published fifteen comic books, plus countless cartoons and posters shown in numerous exhibitions.

Paradise America
Author: Egon Erwin Kisch
Pictures:

Lewis W. Hine and Berenice Abbott

Preface:

Los Angeles Evening Post-Record
Genre: Narrative Nonfiction
Softcover; 320 pp. / 41 pics
Dimensions: 6’’ x 9’’
Suggested retail $ 24.95
ISBN: 978-1-935902-00-3

ISBN in Germany:

978-3-96026-046-2

Release: 2024

Paradise America describes a road trip Egon Erwin Kisch took in 1928/29, from New York City to California from the perspective of the downtrodden, the immigrants, the Afro-Americans, the workers at the harbor and in the coalmines, the construction workers, the sinners, and the settlers. Kisch, the famed Weimar-era “racing reporter”, talks to the men who are building the skyscrapers and work at the docks and in the field. He visits the docks, the jails, the courthouses, and cemeteries for the poor in New York, but also the banks on Wall Street. He documents the slaughterhouses in Chicago, the Ford factories in Detroit, and stops by the Capitol in Washington as well as the theatre where Lincoln was shot. He plays God on Hollywood Boulevard, feels with the extras and the stars, meets the author Upton Sinclair, and visits Charlie Chaplin doing a movie on location. His adventures include the election campaign of Herbert Hoover and Al Smith, a boat tour through the Panama Canal, and Sutter's Farm in Sacramento, where the gold rush began. Kisch shows us a detailed, and often humorous picture of America just months before the Great Depression. In some respect, not that much has changed in America today. An entertaining work for everybody interested in American history translated here for the first time.

Egon Erwin Kisch, born 1885 in Prague to a Jewish family, was a journalist and travel writer known as the "racing reporter". He started his career in 1906 in Prague for Bohemia, a German-language newspaper. After having served in WWI, he moved to Vienna and then Berlin where he wrote for the Communist paper Die Rote Fahne, The Red Flag. He traveled to Greece, Italy, the Soviet Union, China; in 1929, he came to the U.S. under a false name to write a series of literary reportages. In 1933, the ardent fighter against the Nazis had to flee; he landed in fled in Australia, later reached Paris, went back to New York, and finally ended up in Mexico City. After World War II, he returned to Prague, where he died in 1948. He published more than thirty books and numerous newspaper stories.