Revoking Berlin
Berlin is his monument to the trauma of modernity. It is the physical instantiation of dread. Barber’s looming consciousness walks through the solid flesh of the city. It is a minded pervasiveness that generalises into an inchoate, monstrous familiarity that leaves us shuddering with an unnamed, unnameable dread. Our deepest century, our deepest time, the twentieth century, our birth time, is here piercing Barber’s strange, hallucinatory prose as he wanders, like a ghost, through a cosmopolitanism that is the root of intolerable evil.
Richard Marshall reviews Stephen Barber‘s The Walls of Berlin.