Berlin vs. anti-Berlin in German literature after reunification

The article examines the allegorical depiction of Berlin in modern German literature, as well as systematizes a wide range of topical issues of urban Berlin discourse (national identity, cultural, collective and communicative memory, cultural interference). Thanks to the construction of the Berlin Wall and its subsequent destruction, the city receives a unique status that allows it to occupy a special place in the literary landscape among the faceless modern megacities for a long time. An interdisciplinary approach using a discursive and analytical apparatus, as well as the theory of the “cultural turn” in the representation of spaces by Doris Bachmann-Medik and the concept of “catastrophic irony” by writer Reinhard Jirgl, allows us to take a new look at the already well-known literary and cultural methods of studying metropolises (the concept of urban writing by Walter Benjamin, “heterotopias” by Michel Foucault, “social space” by Pierre Bourdieu and Henri Lefebvre, the theory of the city as a “palimsest” by Aleida Assman). The research identifies the main themes in the works of East German writers: the study of the trauma of saying goodbye to the socialist (anti)utopia of the GDR (M. Maron, K. Wolf, E. Loest), the problem of the integration of Eastern citizens into new contexts (J. Sparschuh, I. Schulze, B. Burmeister, K. Hensel), de(construction) of one’s own identity (J. Hensel, J. Hein, K. Rusch). The formation of a new unified German-German society is understood by the authors through collective biographical narrative practices. In the artistic discourse of writers born in West Germany, there is a tendency to move from national historiography (G. Grass, K. Delius, U. Timm) to the discourse of local urban space (S. Regener, P. Schneider, T. Meinecke) and the neo-expressionist grotesque depiction of “Berlin-Surreapolis” (T. Hettche, T. Becker, M. Schacht). Representatives of the “East modernism” (R. Jirgl, V. Hilbig, K. Drawert) point to the uniqueness of Berlin as a special topographic and historical space. Internal changes determine external (architectural, linguistic, communicative, and medial) transformations. A separate group of Berlin novels are the works of German-language writers with a migrant background (E.S. Ozdamar, J. Kara, F. Zaimoglu). The problem of polyidentity in the context of overcoming multilevel linguistic, cultural and social codes is shown in their works through the narrative representation of both the local intracultural and global multicultural Berlin experience. New urban spaces are being created in the literature of the “Turn of 1989/90”, both supporting the “Berlin myth” and destroying it through the construction of an apocalyptic image of “Anti-Berlin”. Keywords Unification, Berlin Wall, Berlin novel, modern German literature, identity, metaphor, semiotics of space.