Berlin Tales is a remarkable anthology of twentieth-century Berlin writing, gathering together stories from some of the city’s most important literary voices across the Weimar years, fascism, war, division, exile, and reunification.

Edited by Helen Constantine and translated by Lyn Marven, the collection moves through Berlin as a site of fracture and reinvention, where private life is constantly shaped by political upheaval, migration, surveillance, poverty, performance, and memory.

The anthology includes work by writers such as Alfred Döblin, Kurt Tucholsky, Günter Kunert, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Julia Franck and many others, tracing radically different visions of Berlin across generations and ideologies. Some stories capture the sharp wit and urban velocity of Weimar Berlin, while others sit inside the psychic residue of the Wall, fascism, displacement, and post-war reconstruction. Berlin is everything. It's cabaret, bureaucratic machine, divided territory, migrant refuge, artistic laboratory, and haunted landscape.

Particularly striking is the way the collection allows contradictory Berlins to exist simultaneously. One story might unfold in smoky cafés and political absurdity, another in cramped apartments under state pressure, another in the estrangement of exile and return. The inclusion of migrant and diasporic perspectives, particularly in later twentieth-century pieces, gives the anthology a broader sense of Berlin as a city continually rewritten by movement, language, and historical rupture.

Published by Oxford University Press in 2009. Paperback edition in very good condition, with light shelf wear and clean internal pages.