The years since German unification have witnessed a remarkable boom in literature about Berlin. If Frank Schirrmacher, a cultural editor for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, had complained in 1989 that since the 1920s German literature had remained essentially provincial, a decade later it was clear that German authors had relocated Berlin as a capital of the German literary imagination and were struggling to condense and communicate the experience of living in a major metropolis undergoing rapid and frequently painful social transformation.

The much-publicised search for the great novel of German unification has in essence also been a search for the great Berlin novel, since it is in Berlin that the tensions of economic and political change in Germany are at their most obvious. It is here, in the formerly divided city, that east meets west most intimately, and that the German history of the twentieth century most prominently intrudes on the present. As a character in Uwe Timm's Berlin novel Rot (Red, 2001) ruminates, ‘Here you have the catastrophies of German history gathered together iconographically: the wars, the founding of the Reich … revolution, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi period.’ It was to Berlin that the government ultimately moved in 1999, eight years after a contentious debate and parliamentary vote in 1991. The new-old capital even gave the larger, post-unification Federal Republic its unofficial name: the ‘Berlin Republic’, a contrast to the sleepier pre-1989 ‘Bonn Republic’.