What Berlin Teaches Us About Resisting Tyranny: Wendy Lesser’s Cautionary Mirror for Our Times

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. One of my most frequent guests on the show is an old British friend of mine, David Goodhart. He had a best selling book a few years ago called The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics in which he introduced the idea of us either being settled in one place, the somewheres, versus those who flit around the world, the everywheres. My guest today is very much of an everywhere. Wendy Lesser divides her time. She's an acclaimed author, critic, founder of The Threepenny Review, one of the top, literary websites [ed.: The Threepenny Review is a print literary quarterly]. And, she divides her time equally, perhaps, in some ways between Berkeley, where she's speaking to us, New York, and Berlin. And in fact, she has a new book out in a few days. It's called Berlin Before and After: A Cautionary Mirror for Our Times. And as I said, Wendy is joining us from Berkeley, California, just over the bay from me. Wendy, congratulations on the new book. Do you think being an everywhere or being someone comfortable able to live from place to place to divide your time between Berkeley and New York and Berlin, does that enable you to write better or see better places? How does it change your view of the world?

00:02:00 Wendy Lesser: I certainly don't think it enables me to write better in the sense that some of the most somewhere people in the world, like, the author of The Leopard, Lampedusa, never budged outside of Sicily, and he was one of the greatest writers of this twentieth century. So it doesn't necessarily improve your writing to go other places and live in other places, but it improves your life. And for me, it's enabled me to write about things that I would not have been able to if I had stayed in my native California and not budged from it. And, I would say just to answer your description of equal time, I spend about equal time between Berkeley and New York. Berlin has less. That is, I'm not fully resident in Berlin the way I am in those two other places, but I love it so much that I spend a lot of time there.

00:02:53 Andrew Keen: It's interesting that you introduced Lampedusa, who, of course, wrote about his Sicily. He may not have budged from his desk. Kinda reminds me of Machiavelli as well, who dressed up in the clothing of the past to write about the present. Being in a single place like Lampedusa allowed him to, in a sense, escape that place. Is that fair?

00:03:19 Wendy Lesser: He did. And he— one of the good stories about him is that he would carry around a version or— an edition of Shakespeare with him on his daily rounds in the coffee houses of Palermo so that he always had something to cheer him up and that he could read. Shakespeare was his escape from twentieth century Sicily.

00:03:40 Andrew Keen: So coming back to this book, and maybe we'll do another show one day on, Lampedusa. Coming back to Berlin Before and After. The subtitle of the book, Wendy, don't need me to tell you this, is a cautionary mirror for our times. Why for you is Berlin not just a mirror, but a cautionary one?

00:04:04 Wendy Lesser: Well, I think many people over the last couple years and even during the first Trump administration had made analogies between late Weimar Berlin and America at the current stage. We're in trouble. We know we're in trouble, but not everybody realizes it, and there's still a sense that things could come out okay if the democratic process is maintained. So when I first started writing this book, I wanted to write about Berlin and the Berlin that I love now. And part of the reason I love it now is because it's looked back over its dark past and made accommodations to that and acknowledgments of that and, not forgotten anything about it. But as I got closer to writing the book, America's condition got worse and worse. And it seemed that we were not only in our own 1929, which is the year I picked as the book before year, but perhaps in 1930, '31, or even '32 that we were verging on our own descent into, frightening dictatorship. So that's the cautionary mirror part.

00:05:14 Andrew Keen: Our cities, Berlin, New York, maybe even Berkeley, where you live. I'm not sure if it's a city. I mean, it's a small city for sure.

00:05:22 Wendy Lesser: Like a San Franciscan, I have to say. Yeah.

00:05:24 Andrew Keen: Well, no. I've lived in Berkeley. I actually think of myself more as a Berkeley person than a San Francisco person. I don't think San Francisco is much of a city either. But are they, in a sense, Wendy, people? I mean, the way you're presenting Berlin in all its complexity, in the book, is it like a person? Is it a mirror of a person?

00:05:45 Wendy Lesser: Yeah. That's a good thought. I mean, I don't necessarily think of cities in that way, but, yes, certainly the way I look at Berlin, even more than the other two— yeah. And Berkeley too certainly has a personality. New York has many personalities. It would be very hard to characterize it, and I'm sure Berlin does too in ways that I can't see because I'm not such a long term resident. But Berlin does have a feel of having a character and personality traits that are manifested both in its individual citizens as you run into them, but also in the way it treats history, the way it treats art, the way it treats performance. It has a recognizable quality. So I think you're right that it in that sense, it is like a person.

00:06:34 Andrew Keen: Why Berlin as opposed to Munich or Frankfurt or Dresden? Why did you choose— I mean, obviously, Berlin was the capital of Germany in 1929. But, actually, it wasn't. Right? I mean, Weimar was the capital.

00:06:52 Wendy Lesser: Well, very short— briefly. Weimar was only the capital when they founded the Weimar Republic by that was in 1919, 1920. I think by late nineteen twenty, they had moved back to Berlin.

00:07:04 Andrew Keen: So just so— maybe before we even get to that, I'm jumping ahead a little bit. Remind us, Wendy, of Berlin's history. My understanding is that it doesn't have quite the depth of history of other European cities, London, Paris, Rome. Is that fair?

00:07:23 Wendy Lesser: Well, it has centuries of history, but not in an as coherent a way because, remember, Germany didn't come together as a country until the nineteenth century, like Italy. So it was a capital in Berlin, but it was just the capital of Prussia of one subsection of Germany. But by the nineteenth century, it was a capital. I'd say the city in its physical manifestations doesn't have the depth of those other countries. It tends to be— it had a lot of nineteenth century stuff, very little from before the nineteenth century. And at the time I started the book, you know, 1929, very little from the modern period. So it looked like a nineteenth century kind of dull, beige or gray stone clad city with a lot of identical height buildings. It was bombed unbelievably much during World War two. That's way after my 1929 period. But the Berlin that you see now is largely a reconstruction. Not entirely. Things were saved, but many were reconstructed. So its history is complicated and not coherent, and that's one of the things that's interesting about it. It's had to remake itself continually.

00:08:38 Andrew Keen: And it's not just now. It's remade itself many times in the past, many books on Berlin. In fact, we did a show a few years ago with Sinclair McKay. I'm not sure if you know his book, Berlin: Life and Death in the City at the Center of the World. It was presenting Berlin as a kind of the center of the world. Wasn't always, of course, the center of the world. How did it— in your view, how did it experience the shift from being the capital of Prussia to the cap— to the capital of Germany? As you know, Germany wasn't united until 1871, Berlin was the capital of Prussia, and then it was Bismarck's Prussia that through war united Germany. Did Berlin, did Berlin comfortably go from Prussia to Germany, or did it reflect all the ambivalence and contradictions of a united Germany in the late nineteenth century?

00:09:41 Wendy Lesser: So I have to say that this is way outside my area of expertise. My interest in Berlin begins pretty much in the twentieth century. So I would send people to a book called Berlin: The Story of a City by Barney White-Spunner, an Englishman who spent years and years researching the entire history of the city back to its medieval period, and that is where you'll find out everything, from the nineteenth century backward. So I really can only speak to what was going on essentially from World War one onward when it was already Berlin capital of Germany and then soon became Berlin capital of the Weimar Republic. Immediately after the end of the first World War, the Hohenzollerns were deposed. The last one fled Germany, and it became a republic for the first time in its life.

00:10:36 Andrew Keen: And, of course, speaking of Englishmen in Germany, some of our best, most lucid memories of Berlin in this period are from Englishmen, Christopher Isherwood, which comes to mind. So remind us then, Wendy, let's fast forward from, from the nineteenth to the aftermath of the First World War. Remind us of what Berlin was like in not just 1919, 1918 after the war, but in the nineteen twenties. Why did it become, in a sense, borrowing from, McKay's book, the center of the world in the nineteen twenties, certainly the center of the cultural and maybe the philosophical world.

00:11:20 Wendy Lesser: Well, of course, that's his title, not mine. I would not have said the center of the world. I think there's a lot to the world that we in the West don't know about. And, and I'm not even sure that other Europeans would have considered it the center of Europe. And, again, that's not my interest in Berlin. Not that it was so central to other cultures, but that it had such a lively culture in itself. So in the nineteen twenties in Berlin, let's just take 1929, the year I focus on. You had artists practicing at the top of their ability who we still care about today, like George Grosz and August Sander, Otto Dix. We— you had plays by Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator both premiering that year. You had incredible concerts conducted by, conductors from all over as well as local Berlin Philharmonic, conductors. You had books coming out ranging from All Quiet on the Western Front early in the year to Grand Hotel, which I believe is a much underrated cultural study, although it's also a potboiler with characters living in the hotel, to Berlin Alexanderplatz, which is, you know, definitely a masterpiece. And even Thomas Mann's Mario and the Magician came out that year, a short little novella that very accurately predicted what was about to happen in Italy and Berlin, Germany. But, I think all those things all that culture existed in the city side by side with sort of wild, living it up. And you're right. Christopher Isherwood was drawn there, and his first visit was in 1929. That's partly why I picked the year, too. He's a wonderful chronicler of the city, and he has a lot to say about it. Billy Wilder is another great chronicler of the city. He— we know him because he became Billy Wilder, the American movie director. But then he was Billy Wilder, the journalist for a weekly Berlin paper and just beginning to get involved in the movies. His first movie was shot in 1929 and released in 1930. And so, yeah, a tremendous amount was going on there, but not necessarily anything that was world shaking, if you see what I mean. Only in retrospect do we see these things as major.

00:13:50 Andrew Keen: And speaking of movies, of course, most people will be familiar with the Germany of the twenties from the movie Cabaret.

00:13:58 Wendy Lesser: True. Which is based on Christopher Isherwood, of course, and based on his wonderful book, Goodbye to Berlin, which features heavily in my book as does Christopher and his kind, which is his afterlook, his, autobiographical look at the time he spent there.

00:14:15 Andrew Keen: So going back to your book, Berlin Before and After, is this the Berlin of Isherwood, the Berlin of, Brecht? Is this Berlin before? Is this your description of what Berlin was before? And we'll get to before what in a minute. But Yes. Is this a kind of in your view, going back to Lampedusa perhaps who idealized the, some sort of ideal type Sicily, is this your ideal Berlin, the Berlin of the twenties?

00:14:50 Wendy Lesser: Well, the past is always fetching and, you know, appealing in a way that the present is not. But, no, I don't think it's my ideal Berlin. I think it's essential to my picture of what Berlin is. I wouldn't love Berlin as much if it didn't have that past and those important elements. But those great cultural achievements live side by side with huge economic and political and social disorder and people not knowing which direction their culture was gonna go the next month, the next week. So I don't think those are ideal circumstances for people to live under, but I certainly still love many of the cultural manifestations that came out of that period as I love cultural manifestations that are coming out of our period now. You know? Having a terrible government and a terrible, time politically is not inconsistent with producing good culture. I mean, look at nineteenth century Russia.

00:15:54 Andrew Keen: Or post war Eastern Europe.

00:15:56 Wendy Lesser: Yeah.

00:15:57 Andrew Keen: So, of course, the before is the rise of Nazism and the coming to power in 1933 of Adolf Hitler in Germany. To what extent in your reading of German history, Wendy, and of Berlin, was the rise of Hitler in some ways a kind of direct response to what was happening in Berlin, to the Berlin of, sort of a an eruption of sexuality and artistic innovation of general creativity. Do you see Nazism in some ways as the antithesis of the Berlin of the twenties?

00:16:39 Wendy Lesser: Those are two different questions. I do see it as an antithesis, but I do not absolutely do not see it as caused by the freedoms and, flamboyances of Berlin in the nineteen twenties. Just as I do not see the election of Trump as a reaction to so called wokeness or trans rights or any of those things, they— cultural manifestations do not cause such government changes. Economic forces cause these government changes. And in fact, Berlin never went Nazi. Berlin never elected the Nazis with a majority rule. So the city of Berlin, which is where all these wild things were taking place, was consistently left wing or left of center anyway and voted that way up to and including 1933. Hitler had to abolish democracy to take over Berlin. What did happen elsewhere in the country as it's happening elsewhere in Germany now, in fact, with the rise of the AfD, is, extreme discrepancies between wealth and poverty and parts large parts of the country feeling deprived and people feeling like they needed a government that would help them out and the Nazis promising to do that. So some of that, which was in a distant way an aftermath of the first World War, all of that influenced the rise of the Nazis extremely. There were also other factors like antisemitism and, xenophobia and various other things that are always bubbling under the surface of the culture as they are in ours in America right now. But I think the economic forces are the main ones.

00:18:23 Andrew Keen: You've touched on this a few times. The subtitle of the book is a cautionary mirror for our times. Are you making a direct comparison to the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the MAGA movement in The United States? Are there literal equivalences between Berlin in the twenties or thirties and Berkeley or New York in the twenty twenties?

00:18:50 Wendy Lesser: Oh, not so much Berkeley and New York because we are little bubbles within the entire American culture. So I don't witness it on my front doorstep as often as I read about it in the paper, but there are definitely equivalences. I mean, our attacks on immigrants, for instance, are and the idea that the blood of America has been poisoned by immigration, that is taken straight from the Goebbels playbook against the Jews in Germany. And, the effort to cut down on individual human rights, gay rights, women's rights, all these things that were on the rise in nineteen twenties Germany but were instantly squished in the nineteen thirties, that too is visible here. I'm not saying we're in an exactly parallel situation. You never are. In my experience, history does not exactly repeat itself. But, I do want people to be aware of the parallels, and I didn't have to force them. In other words, I wrote the book the way I wanted to, just talking about what was happening in 1929 Berlin and what is happening in Berlin now, which is a completely other place. And then there came every once in a while, every 30 or 40 pages, an opportunity to draw an analogy with what was happening in America. I didn't hammer it in. It's not the purpose of the book to hammer anything in. The purpose of the book is to lay out what things were like and what things are like now and to give people a sense of how a city can transform itself if it looks to and acknowledges its past.

00:20:28 Andrew Keen: Not everyone, of course, would agree with you. You have a Berkeley neighbor, actually, just up the street. I don't know if you know her, Arlie Hochschild—

00:20:35 Wendy Lesser: I do know Arlie. Yeah.

00:20:37 Andrew Keen: Who is, of course, went to the other America, lived there, wrote about it quite sympathetically, believes that maybe the two Americas should be a little bit more understanding and empathetic towards one another. What would it have been like, in the twenties or thirties for a Berliner to go out of Berlin? Would it be like a New Yorker or someone from Berkeley or San Francisco to go as Arlie did to Tennessee or Kentucky or Mississippi?

00:21:10 Wendy Lesser: Yes. And, actually, there we have novels that show us how that worked. That is if you look at Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, the characters— okay. So Lübeck, where Thomas Mann grew up, is not exactly a burning metropolis, but the characters from the South, from Bavaria, are treated as if they're hicks, you know, as if they're from this sort of unbelievably faraway place. And more to the point, certain novels that were written in the, later in the twentieth century, but talk about characters from Berlin going out into the country. For instance, there's a recently reissued novel called Effingers by a German Jewish woman who fled to London. Gabriele Tergit is her pseudonym. And it talks about the Jews who originated in these small villages that were heavily Jewish in the countryside and then sent their offspring to Berlin to make a good living. And the successful Jews that arrived in Berlin became very cosmopolitan and had nice houses, invented cars, all sorts of other things. And then they would go back and they would visit the parents in these little villages, and they wouldn't believe how primitive things were. So that's just a small subset of German culture. But I think anytime you have a capital city and a surrounding countryside, you get these things. Certainly, London and its, outer areas had that quality, you know, in the twentieth century. I don't know if it does now.

00:22:44 Andrew Keen: So what was Berlin like in the nineteen thirties? Hitler, of course, set up shop there. Maybe he wasn't quite as popular in Berlin, certainly on amongst progressives as he would have been in other large cities like Munich, where he had more history. But what's your reading of Berlin, shall we say, after when the Nazis came to power? What was it like living in Berlin in— after 1933? And how did the city change? I mean, obviously, its architecture I mean, some of its architecture changed, but, how did the city change?

00:23:22 Wendy Lesser: Okay. So I just have to clarify that the after of my title is not after 1933. It's after 1989. That is—

00:23:30 Andrew Keen: Okay. So after the wall came down.

00:23:32 Wendy Lesser: Right. Berlin before and after refers to Berlin going into a dark place, which it stayed in one way or another till 1989. That is first, they had the twelve years of the Third Reich, but then with barely a pause to take a breath, they had the divided city, you know, followed by the Berlin Wall, and that all lasted until 1989. And the premise of my book is I am not going to research 1933 to 1989. The city is going to tell you about what happened there. So I other than telling you what the monuments have told me, I know there's a monument in Bebelplatz in Berlin to the burning of the books in May 1933. So I can tell you that, a lot of despised literature, all the people we love, those books were burned in May 1933. But I can only tell you that because the city now the city I can walk through now has told me that. So the after part of my title is Berlin now. Essentially, the Berlin I have come to know in the twenty first century reflecting back on its past.

00:24:42 Andrew Keen: So as a cautionary mirror for our times, is it a narrative about a city that is now, quote, unquote, free? Is it— I mean, I know you're a big fan of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. You write about it on your blog. Is the history of, of Berlin, of this before and after, is it rather like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony?

00:25:11 Wendy Lesser: A good analogy. That's really good. I mean, I had never thought of it myself. But, yes, Freiheit comes in big at the end. But I say that in a very limited and somewhat ironic way. That is nobody is totally free these days. Everything binds us. All of our backgrounds, all of our laws, all of our requirements for making a living, we're not free in that sense. But certainly, the Berlin now— the Berlin of the twenty first century is a place where people go to and feel like they are getting away from the restrictions that, that ruled that city in the past. And interestingly, to me, even the people that control the city seem aware of that. So graffiti is allowed to flourish freely in a way that you don't see often in other major cities. But because there was so much restriction on free speech, both under the Third Reich and under the divided city, that all over the city now, you just see wild manifestations of graffiti. It's really interesting. It's one of the fun parts of the city. And there are lots of other examples of this allowance of freedom, the way they celebrate May Day, for instance, the fact that people are allowed to go wild and throw bottles. And if you look around on May 2, the ground is just filled with broken glass, but the city tolerates it, brings in extra cops, deals with it. You know? It gets up— it gets going the next day without worrying too much about the fact that people have gone wild the day before.

00:26:48 Andrew Keen: And just, going back to, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which I know, as I said, you enjoy.

00:26:57 Wendy Lesser: Who doesn't?

00:26:58 Andrew Keen: When the wall came down, of course, Leonard Bernstein, conducted a very famous version of Beethoven's Ninth, on this, this wall, which had crumbled. You mentioned before, Wendy, the rise of the AfD. Is Berlin now like then maybe New York or Berkeley or other places that are not keen on MAGA America, or is there a difference between the Berlin of 2026 and the New York of 2026?

00:27:34 Wendy Lesser: Oh, well, of course, always there's a difference between cities because they are the product of their cultural history and the people that live there and everything else. But I do think Berlin is separate from Germany and has been since I've been going there in 2003. And I would say my Berlin friends, who include a lot of former West Berliners, would say it's been that way since the nineteen seventies when it was a little walled off enclave within East Germany. And it was an island, and peop— and it was a very hothouse island before the wall came down, but it was a culture that was different from the rest of West Germany even though it was run by the West or was considered part of the West. And so now I think, yeah, I think it would be difficult for the AfD to take over Berlin. They are, polling very high in the election that's going to take place on September 6 [ed.: the Berlin Abgeordnetenhaus election is scheduled for September 20, 2026], city elections. The AfD is polling high, but the other, party that's polling very high is, the left, literally. And because all the other parties have resolved not to form a coalition with the AfD, I don't think it's possible for the AfD to take over the government. I think the left parties will all band together if they all get over a majority combined. In the country as a whole, that's a bigger question, although there's still a firewall, as they call it, set up between all the other parties and the AfD. The AfD is actually Alternative for Deutschland is what it stands for. The AfD is actually a— I forget what the exact term is. I was gonna say, like, a condemned party. It's a party that has been labeled by the National Intelligence Service, their equivalent of our FBI, as a dangerous right wing movement. It is— it is a "keep your eye on this because it's going to get problematic" party, and it could be set under restrictions because of that. So far, that hasn't happened. So far, legally, it's allowed to run people for office and things like that, but it's on the verge of being restricted because it's considered so constitutionally dangerous. But I don't think it's dangerous in Berlin at this point.

00:29:48 Andrew Keen: Sounds like an epidemic.

00:29:51 Wendy Lesser: Well—

00:29:52 Andrew Keen: Are there any vaccines for this thing, Wendy? Any vaccines for the AfD?

00:29:57 Wendy Lesser: For right wing movements in general, I think we're seeing them all over the world. It's not just in our two countries, Germany and America.

00:30:06 Andrew Keen: You spent some time in Berlin. As you've noted, you got lots of progressive friends there. Do you think there's an equivalent German writer, journalist who maybe comes to New York, and writes a book, about New York or Washington DC or San Francisco or Los Angeles and describes it as a cautionary mirror for our times? You think, Europeans are beginning to look at America as not the future, but the past or this mix of the future and the past?

00:30:38 Wendy Lesser: Yes to the second part of what you said. They definitely are looking to America as, oh, we thought it was a place that represented freedom, and now we realize it doesn't. That's true for lots of Germans and not just writers. Whether a writer from there is interested in coming and talking about America? I mean, there are good German writers who visit New York. For instance, Daniel Kehlmann, the author of The Director, that great novel about G. W. Pabst, and also an early— many earlier wonderful novels. He lives, part time in New York. Jenny Erpenbeck, who features heavily in my book and is really, I would say, at this point, my favorite living German writer, she visits New York. She's published by New Directions here, and she comes to New York. And I heard her give a talk at Barnard telling the students, essentially, you know, we— the problem is that East Berliners and East Germans in general felt deprived, looked down upon when the country united, and they felt like they were second class citizens. She explicitly said, and I think you have a similar problem here with your disenfranchised people. You know? It causes resentment. So it's not invisible to the people from other countries what's happening in America. But so far, nobody has decided it's interesting enough to write a book about. Maybe it's too well known. Maybe everybody knows America's business too much to bother reporting it to their own citizens.

00:32:05 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And, I mean, people have— I guess Arlie Hochschild, people like her have written books about this in a way. You mentioned the Pabst book, which I enjoyed as well. There's not that much in Berlin in the book, but it's a wonderful book. I mean, it's very cinematic. But its narrative is about the intimacy between Hollywood, The United States, and Germany. Does it— in your experience in Berlin, is there this intimacy between The US and Berlin in particular and Germany more broadly? Does the US have a special place in the minds of your Berliner friends?

00:32:53 Wendy Lesser: Not just my Berliner friends and not just Berlin. I think everybody across Europe and possibly the other parts of the world I know less about was influenced by 1940s, 50s, 60s American movies. The generation that is, making films now or that just passed, that generation watched a lot of American movies and responded to it. The Kehlmann novel, The Director, I don't think it's all that much about Hollywood, although Pabst fled to Hollywood briefly and then found that he couldn't do anything that he wanted to, and he ended up going back to Germany and working under the Nazis. And it's— and the whole rest of the novel, most of the novel, is much more about the compromises that he had to make working that way, trying to enact his own genius at the same time as he was being subjected to the restraints that were imposed on him by the Nazis.

00:33:50 Andrew Keen: Although, in a funny way, I mean, I don't think he was trying— that Kehlmann was suggesting that Hollywood and the Nazis are the same thing, but he experienced the same compromises and the same misery intellectually, at least in Hollywood.

00:34:05 Wendy Lesser: Yeah. He experienced misery and compromises of a different sort, and he decided that for him, the ones he would experience in Germany were more tolerable. I mean, there were other reasons. And the novel is partly fictionalized, of course, so it's not a 100% what happened to the real Pabst. But in the novel, he goes back to take care of his aging mother, and he's only allowed back in during a certain period, so he has to make a choice. Is he going to be there or here? So there were many factors, and, and he probably would have been very unhappy in Hollywood. And we have examples of the people that fled from my 1929 Berlin. Brecht, Walter Mehring, Alfred Döblin. There were a bunch of others. Thomas Mann, he wasn't from Berlin. He was from Munich, but still, they all went to LA. They all lived in the German, exile ghetto in Los Angeles, and they weathered out the war there. But many of them and many of the people who fled to New York and were employed at the New School as well, like Erwin Piscator and others, went back. They went back to Germany when, in the fifties. Brecht went back in 1949 and Piscator a year or two later. And others of the— of my characters from 1929 ended up going back because they couldn't make a creative life for themselves in either Hollywood or New York. They couldn't live on the thin slice of culture that was available to them in a way that they could live in the depth of culture that was their own. And I've seen this in exiles here that I knew in Berkeley. Czesław Miłosz, for instance, the Polish—

00:35:47 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Yeah. I did an interview in his old house a few years ago.

00:35:50 Wendy Lesser: Yeah. Yeah. He so he lived for many years here, and he was a very wonderful presence to have in the community, but you always felt like he thought, who are these little children playing with their toys in their sandbox? You know? They don't have a clue about history. That was how I always felt he was thinking.

00:36:10 Andrew Keen: Maybe that's a Polish thing. You mentioned movies. There's something remarkably cinematic. I mean, maybe that's why the Pabst film comes to mind about Berlin. I'm a big lover, I'm sure you are as well, of, Wenders' movie Wings of Desire.

00:36:34 Wendy Lesser: Yes.

00:36:35 Andrew Keen: A 1987 film written about these imaginary angels in Berlin. In your view, does Berlin have— I mean, many films, of course, have been made about where we live, the Bay Area, San Francisco, New York, London. But does Berlin have a particularly cinematic quality? I mean, much of the innovation in the twenties, of course, as you noted earlier was cinematic. They were inventing a medium back then in the same way as maybe Silicon Valley invented the Internet.

00:37:09 Wendy Lesser: Yeah. I think, for me, it's a very cinematic city, but that's partly because I know it partly through films. I mean, I saw Wings of Desire long before I ever saw Berlin. And, I even saw Goodbye, Lenin!, that wonderful—

00:37:24 Andrew Keen: 2003—

00:37:25 Wendy Lesser: movie before I saw Berlin, and then I've seen it several times since. But there— and these days, if you watch the television program Babylon Berlin, which is a version of cinema, really, it's done as carefully as cinema as expensively as cinema. It uses the old and new Berlin very carefully. I mean, it uses actual places in the city. This is part of my book. I quote from the— the set choosers, the, people that went out and found the places where things would be filmed and then made sure that all the new stuff was cleared away and only old stuff was shot for the nineteen twenty nine, nineteen thirty shots. So, yes, I think it's a very cinematic city. Wings of Desire is so cinematic that when you know, part of it is filmed in the actual Staatsbibliothek, the main city library where the angels hang out. That's where they are when they're not doing their angel work. And I took some pictures in that, library, and I posted them online. So this is the library that was in Wings of Desire. And somebody wrote to me and said, really? I thought it was just a set that was made up for the movie. And that's kind of how Berlin is. You kind of can't tell whether it's the real thing or a set. It's always thought of itself in something of that way. You know?

00:38:40 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Maybe, again, that's what ties it to California. There's a set like a Hollywood set in a way, although it's also real. It's funny. We had, few days ago, we had the, the writer novelist David Baerwald on the show. He has a new book out called The Fire Agent, which is about his grandfather who turned out to be a, an American spy in Japan, a German Jew growing up, I think, in Berlin. But he notes that he grew up, Baerwald, as a surfer, and he grew up like you did in Los Angeles.

00:39:17 Wendy Lesser: I didn't grow up in Los Angeles. I abhor Southern California. I grew up in Northern California.

00:39:22 Andrew Keen: Oh, you weren't— where were you born?

00:39:24 Wendy Lesser: I was born in Los Angeles, but my family took me out of there when I was three years old, and I—

00:39:28 Andrew Keen: never knew. Baerwald didn't, and he notes that, he, he grew up as a surfer in Los Angeles. And sometimes he'd go to the beach, and he'd see Bertolt Brecht there. So—

00:39:40 Wendy Lesser: that's a funny thought. Brecht on the beach. But, you know—

00:39:43 Andrew Keen: Or Brecht, surfing. I'm not sure how good a surfer he was. But there is this weird kind of synergy or symmetry between Southern California, as you know, Los Angeles, Hollywood, and Berlin. It's odd, isn't it?

00:40:02 Wendy Lesser: Immigrants move to the places where their previously known immigrants have clustered. So some of the LA attraction was the movie business for those people, and some of it was there was already an immigrant German community. But you're right. I mean, even Christopher Isherwood ended up in LA. It— all the whole crowd ended up there.

00:40:22 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Although, like most of them, they're probably miserable there. You've written many books. You're a highly literary person. One of the things you wrote is Why I Read. There's obviously also a deeply literary quality to Berlin. It's like a movie, and it's like a book. My— I mean, one of my favorite, Berlin books is The Wall Jumper by Peter Schneider. You're obviously attracted, Wendy, to this city because of its literary quality, aren't you?

00:40:58 Wendy Lesser: I am. But some of the literature I'm attracted to wouldn't count by most people's standards as, highbrow literature. I love a lot of the thrillers that are set there. I mean, the— by later people looking back, like Mick Herron and Ian McEwan, but also by Len Deighton. The Berlin Game trilogy starting with Berlin Game is one of my favorite books about the city. And—

00:41:21 Andrew Keen: Didn't he just die, Len Deighton?

00:41:23 Wendy Lesser: He did. He just died in the last six months or so, and it caused me to reread not only the whole Berlin trilogy, but the two trilogies that came after that. He was really a wonderful writer who happened to write thrillers set largely in Berlin. And, John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, obviously, is one of the very—

00:41:42 Andrew Keen: I mean, the first—

00:41:44 Wendy Lesser: Yeah. Of—

00:41:45 Andrew Keen: the first moment in, Checkpoint Charlie, and then the movie also is astonishing. In fact, the movie in some ways is almost as good as the book. The book's amazing.

00:41:54 Wendy Lesser: Yeah. Yeah. So, yes, I— there's a lot of great literature set in Berlin, and I'm really fond of it. And it's by outsiders as well as people from Berlin.

00:42:05 Andrew Keen: Another person who's written about Berlin alongside you is John Kampfner. I'm not sure if you've read his book In Search of Berlin. He's an old friend of mine. He has a new book called Braver New World, the countries daring to do things others won't. He's an optimist, and he sees innovation, maybe not so much broadly in Germany, but certainly in Berlin. In terms of this cautionary mirror for our times, does Berlin I mean, I take your point on it offering this mirror on the rise of Nazism and intolerance and violence, But it also is there something about Berlin in the late twenties that offers a solution to what we're currently going through in terms of innovation?

00:42:54 Wendy Lesser: Not just the late twenties. In other words, part of the point of my second half of the book, which is really a second two thirds practically, the Berlin now section, the after section, is that it is it's a solution to, our problems if they've already gone too far. In other words, it's not necessarily a way to avoid the problems, but it's a way to confront them after they've already happened. That you're not— so I grew up in a childhood where Berlin was considered the evil empire, not Berlin, all of Germany. And, and a lot of American Jews of my generation and younger people twenty, thirty years younger have experienced this. Without having lost any family members to the Holocaust, we were all imbued with the sense that Germany was a horrible place. And it wasn't till I got there that I saw how well and strongly they have dealt with this past and this reputation and have tried to address it. So I think the innovation that I would be interested in seeing in America— the Berlin in particular, I can't speak for the rest of Germany because I don't know it, but the Berlin has manifested is a willingness to acknowledge its bad deeds. America is very bad at this. We are not good at acknowledging we've done something wrong. We like to kind of brush it all aside and act like we're always the heroes. And, really, you can be a much better city and a much better country if you acknowledge that you're not always in the right.

00:44:28 Andrew Keen: Is that really fair, though, on America, Wendy? I mean, I was just in Montgomery, Alabama, went to Bryan Stevenson's astonishing museum of lynching. We know the African American Museum in Washington, DC. More and more memorials to some of the sins of America. Are you being completely fair?

00:44:51 Wendy Lesser: You're right. I'm not being fair. And I've heard a lot about that Stevenson Memorial, and I haven't been. But, that that's the kind of thing I mean. That is the kind of thing that needs to be done. But there isn't a whole lot of it in New York, for instance. It may be that America is too big for me to be aware of how much of it there is. But in the city in America that is most parallel to Berlin, that is New York, we don't get a lot of monuments and inscriptions and plaques saying, this is where we did this bad deed. We say, we get Washington slept here or, you know, this is where the Civil War came to an end or whatever, that kind of thing instead.

00:45:35 Andrew Keen: But is it really equivalent? I mean, some people were watching this and thinking maybe they're from New York. And then when you go to Berlin, of course, you're surrounded by memorials, certainly to the Holocaust and remarkable architecture, museums, and public spaces. Is there an equivalent in New York? Should you go to New York and walk around and see memorials to, I don't know, the American slaves or Native Americans? What would be the equivalent?

00:46:02 Wendy Lesser: We— I don't think we are as bad yet as Germany became in the nineteen thirties. So we haven't needed those kinds of monuments yet. So I'm not judging by the absence of monuments. I'm judging by the attitudes of everybody from students— who have been in classes of mine to voters who I see voting for candidates, to newspaper interviews and articles and so forth. I'm judging by a world out there that is not my close personal acquaintance. My sense is that Americans are bad at remembering their history, and they're bad at taking responsibility for their history on the whole. But we do not have a history yet like Holocaust Germany or even Berlin Wall Germany. So that's why it's a cautionary mirror. It's a mirror that might become useful if the worst comes about.

00:47:04 Andrew Keen: What about some of the politics of contemporary Berlin? I know they're much more aggressive in this, not just Berlin, Barcelona, or other European cities that are doing this as well, making sure, for example, that Airbnb doesn't drive up rents, commitment to public transportation, policy towards cars, and real estate. Is there something that we can learn, we Americans can learn about the contemporary local politics of Berlin?

00:47:34 Wendy Lesser: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, everything you describe is one of the things that I really love about Berlin. The issue of rents, they recently in 2021, they passed, a rent law allowing the city to take over hundreds of thousands of overpriced rental properties. It didn't go into effect because the government changed hands and commissioned an examination of this law and everything before putting it into effect, but the voters wanted it. And they do have very strong rent control laws, actually, throughout Germany, but in particular in Berlin. They're— they have wonderful transportation. I go into ecstasies about this in the book. They complain because the transportation has worsened in the last twenty years. There's too much construction on the streets. There's not enough money going into the infrastructure. There are all sorts of reasons why the S Bahn and the U Bahn and the buses are not as brilliantly efficient as they were twenty years ago. But to me, they look pretty great. You can get anywhere in the city well and cheaply, and I just love the way it operates. There's— there is even built into the German constitution, there's a greater sense of the rights of the individual, and there's a certain welfare passage that refers to the need for a dignified existence so that people should have a basic minimum income that allows them to pay their rent and buy food and things like that. I mean, we don't really have— our Bill of Rights is pretty good, but it doesn't have too much about economic or financial well-being, if you see what I mean.

00:49:15 Andrew Keen: What I love most about Berlin actually are the parks, almost like forests within a city. What's your favorite bit of Berlin for people who, don't know much about Berlin and, of course, buy your upcoming book, Berlin Before and After: A Cautionary Mirror for Our Times. Well— but if someone had an hour in Berlin, where should they go?

00:49:36 Wendy Lesser: That's a hard one. I mean, I love parts of the city that are all over the city, and the parks are very beautiful. But the part that I love the best is the area where I stay when I'm there. It's on a street called Maybachufer right on the canal, the Landwehr Canal that the right wing threw Rosa Luxemburg's body into, although not at this spot, farther along. [ed.: speaker attribution is a judgment call; verify by ear] But this— the spot where I stay, they have a what they call a Turkish market every Tuesday and Friday, and everything in the world is sold there. It's not really a Turkish market because it's been there since before 1929. I have a 1929 commentator talking about that exact market, what's going on then. A weekly market where food and clothing and supplies all were brought for sale. So that's pretty terrific. I love just walking around Berlin. And the end of my book is a trip on the M29. It's my favorite bus route in Berlin, and it goes from my neighborhood, that Maybachufer area, all the way across what was the former West onto the Kurfürstendamm and out into the rich precincts of, Grunewald. And you can see a lot of the city from the M29, and it's just the city bus. You know? You just pay the regular city bus fare and go sit up on the second floor of the bus, the top floor like those old London red ones, and you can see the city.

00:51:03 Andrew Keen: Maybe, Wendy, you're gonna be made into a Berlin angel, sounds like.

00:51:09 Wendy Lesser: A great fate.

00:51:10 Andrew Keen: Wow. Wonderful conversation. The book, for fans of Wendy Lesser, I think you're gonna be thrilled. Berlin Before and After: A Cautionary Mirror for Our Times, not just about Trump's America, but about Berlin, German history, German culture, German cinema, German writing. Congratulations, Wendy, and, enjoy Berlin. Enjoy Berkeley, and enjoy New York City.

00:51:34 Wendy Lesser: Thank you, Andrew, and thanks for having me on this.