Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material -- Prologue: “A Smaller but More Intense Orchestration” -- American Space -- American Berlin across Three Centuries -- A Tale of Berlin -- How American Is It -- Toy Houses and Playing-Card Lawns -- “German” Roots -- Rags, Riches and Rooming Houses -- The Great Divorce -- Water Crossings -- “This is our Armageddon” -- Ruined Landscapes, Ruined Women -- Women with Attachments: Mermaids, Drink and Drowning -- City of Night -- “Certain Tendencies”: Queer Berlin -- Underground Berlin -- “Something was Different, but Nothing Had Changed” -- Contaminating City -- Just off the Kurfürstendamm: Spy Fiction -- The Garden and the Forest: Natural Space in Berlin -- The Weather in Berlin -- Isolating Berlin -- Naturalizing the Wall -- Escape from Berlin -- Family Reunions: Searching for Someone in Berlin -- Women and Children First: Taming History -- Contemporary Voices: Re-storing Mythologies -- Conclusion -- Bibliography of Fiction -- Bibliography of Secondary Sources -- General Index -- Index of American Authors.

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Of all European cities, Americans today are perhaps most curious about Berlin, whose position in the American imagination is an essential component of nineteenth-century, postwar and contemporary transatlantic imagology. Over various periods, Berlin has been a tenuous space for American claims to cultural heritage and to real geographic space in Europe, symbolizing the ultimate evil and the power of redemption. This volume offers a comprehensive examination of the city’s image in American literature from 1840 to the present. Tracing both a history of Berlin and of American culture through the ways the city has been narrated across three centuries by some 100 authors through 145 novels, short stories, plays and poems, Tales of Berlin presents a composite landscape not only of the German capital, but of shifting subtexts in American society which have contextualized its meaning for Americans in the past, and continue to do so today.

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