Thursday, May 22, 2008

Karl-Marx-Allee

I'm surely biased by my own experience living out at the end of the former Stalin-Allee on Jessnerstrasse in the former East Berlin in 1991-92, but I enjoyed this poem by John Koethe about his sense of the former East Berlin, "Karl-Marx-Allee."
Posted by at
Labels: , , ,

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love this fragment from Koethe's poem:

People memorize themselves, and try to live that way / Forever, seeking refuge from the great, surrounding storms / In lives inscrutable and self-contained as jars.

... especially the last line!

-- dhsh

4:18 PM
Andrew Shields said...

"People memorize themselves, and try to live that way" reminds me of my comments on Jonathan Lethem's "The Fortress of Solitude," posted a few months ago, and what he calls "social mimicry":

"I dedicated myself to acting as though I'd fit in this atmosphere all along."

9:39 AM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)