The Undercurrents

(Paperback)

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The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin is a dazzling work of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism told from a precise vantage point: a stately nineteenth-century house on Berlin's Landwehr canal, a site at the centre of great historical changes, but also smaller domestic ones. The view from this apartment window offers a ringside seat onto the city's theatre of action. The building has stood on the banks of the Landwehr Canal in central Berlin since 1869, its feet in the West but looking East, right into the heart of a metropolis in the making, on a terrain inscribed indelibly with trauma.

When her marriage breaks down, Kirsty Bell - a British-American writer in her mid-forties, adrift - becomes fixated on the history of her building and of her adoptive city. She moved into this house in 2014 with her then-husband and two sons, but before her was Herr Zimmermann, the wood-dealer who built the house, and the Salas, a family of printers who took it over in 1908, and lived here through both world wars. Their adopted daughter Melitta Sala, a Kriegskind or 'child of the war', inherited the building and takes hold of her imagination.

Now, at the start of the twenty-first century, it is Kirsty Bell's turn to look out of this apartment window. She looks to the lives of the house's various inhabitants, to accounts penned by Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg and Gabriele Tergit, and to the female protagonists in the works of Theodor Fontane, Irmgard Keun and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A new cultural topography of Berlin emerges, one which taps into energetic undercurrents to recover untold or forgotten stories beneath the city's familiar narratives.

Reviews

It is easy to be carried along by these submerged currents, by the momentum of the prose, the motion through a resisting city. As in other classics of urban discovery, the personal becomes universal, and the past that demands to live in the present is revealed like a shining new reef. As we return, time and again, to the solitary figure at the window.
Iain Sinclair, author ofLondon Orbital

With The Undercurrents, Kirsty Bell does for Berlin what Lucy Sante has done for New York and Rebecca Solnit for San Francisco; she tells the stories recorded in the citys stone and water, and in the hearts of its inhabitants. Her profound and idiosyncratic chronicle of Berlin is an act of hydromancy, divining a history of love and loss from the water that flows beneath and between the citys bricks.
Dan Fox, author ofLimbo

I read this watery, engrossing book in the bath, following along as Kirsty Bells reflective curiosity leads her onward along the Landwehr canal, in and out of the archives, novels, memoirs, and stories of her building and her neighbourhood. Evocative and fascinating, The Undercurrents is a liquid psychogeography of Berlin that had me mulling over the psychic charge of place not only where Bell lives, but where I live too.
Lauren Elkin, author ofFlneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London

Kirsty Bell has achieved a real work of art: She tells of Berlin's sunken past as a freshly emerged present and she explains the energy of this city from the history of the people, the streets, and the hopes that have shaped it.
Florian Illies, author of1913: The Year before the Storm

'From the first moment I heard Kirsty Bell read from her writing, I have yearned for the book she was then working on. And now here it is, perfect and perfectly balanced, a clear-eyed and beautifully written account about place, about consciousness. I treasure The Undercurrents, and so will you.'
Hilton Als, author of White Girls

With sleuthing interest and novelistic flair, Kirsty Bells The Undercurrents has ruptured familiar terrain. The books subject, Berlin, is portrayed as a thing in motion, captured through a compound lens of culture, hard history and memoir.... an associative thesis on the dangers of repression, from gargantuan acts of genocide to the comparatively subtle shames of familial collapse.
frieze

Author Bio

Kirsty Bell is a British-American writer and art critic living in Berlin. She has published widely in magazines and journals including Tate Etc. and Art in America, and was contributing editor of frieze from 2011-2021. She was awarded a Warhol Foundation Grant for her book The Artist's House, and her essays have appeared in over seventy exhibition catalogues for major international museums and institutions such as the Whitney Museum for American Art, The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and Tate, UK. Her approach to writing is rooted less in her degree in Art History and English Literature from Cambridge University (1990-93) than in her hands-on experience with contemporary art production, while working in galleries and curating exhibitions.