Norman Ohler: preference

Transcript context

…Can we also focus attention there, because you have a connection to this place, Berlin, and this part of the world. Can you just briefly speak to that so we can contextualize even deeper the personal aspect of this? Because you understand the music of the people, the land, its history. There’s something you can only really understand if you’ve been there and you’ve taken it in. And we’ll return to this topic in multiple contexts, but in this particular way, as one human being who writes about this place, what’s your own story? I grew up in West Germany, and this was during the Cold War. And Berlin, the walled-in city, was always like a big fascination because there was a wall, there was actually a wall in the city preventing people from moving into another part. And I was from the west, fortunate enough to be from the free west, so I could travel to Berlin, and I could leave. I could look at it, and I always loved Berlin. I thought it was a very vibey place. And then when the wall came down, I was still in school, but I immediately got into the car of my parents and drove there. I wanted to see how it came down. And then Berlin really, in the ’90s, became a place that was very attractive to me, and I moved there then in the ’90s. I was first living in New York. I wrote my first novel in New York, and I loved New York before Giuliani became mayor. It was… He ruined the city. Before that, it was not gentrified. Or let’s say he introduced gentrification, and gentrification is a big topic. I still lived in the ungentrified New York City for like 300 bucks a month rent, and everyone I knew was an artist. You loved the diversity of it?…

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