Angol
What Berlin remembers is what Berlin has chosen not to cover. What it has not decided is also visible - in the gaps, in the unsuitable replacements, in the buildings that are still waiting.
Elena Costa arrives in Berlin on commission: a long-form piece on the GDR architecture debate - what to do with the three hundred and fifty thousand people who still live in the Plattenbau housing blocks of the former East, and with the buildings themselves, which are simultaneously instruments of the surveillance state and the homes where families raised children and made coffee every morning for forty years.
She finds Kai Brenner, an architect who grew up in a Plattenbau in Marzahn and has spent eleven years arguing - in buildings rather than in words - that demolition and preservation are both the wrong answer.
What Berlin Remembers is a novel about the politics of memory and the ordinary lives inside political systems.
Book Eight in the Elena Costa Series.
Bonus: Listen to the original title song "The Wall We Left Standing" - composed and produced by Bruce Whitecorner.
Listen on Apple Music
