Building Novels

Will Berlin be Beautiful Tomorrow?

Madeline Beach Carey

11. December 2024

Photo via Public Knowledge Books

The latest installment in Madeline Beach Carey's “Building Novels” series, which looks at works of fiction where buildings and architecture play integral roles, is Seeing Fire | Seeing Meadows by Anna Kostreva, an architectural designer and urban researcher at Plural Studio in Berlin. Featuring dozens of hand drawings by the author, the book describes a future in which all but a small group of Berliners have given their lives over to algorithms.

Anna Kostreva’s novel Seeing Fire | Seeing Meadows appears at first to be an art book. By that this reader assumed that the illustrations and certain aesthetic theories would reign most important. However, and much to my delight, the novel is very much about friendship, and cities, and how friends, other people that is, might help us to understand and negotiate the future cityscapes that await us, no matter how digitalized those spaces may be.

The story, set in a Berlin of the near future, is told in first person by Natalie. That future doesn’t sound good or very different from the present:

Berlin used to be well known for its activism, demonstrations, civil campaigns. Kreuzberg was a hotbed for political confrontation. And a few years ago, tourism and gentrification had picked up so strongly that the speed of the rent increases and evictions became intolerable for those living there. The digital representation of all of the bars, independent shops and restaurants, the hip culture and music venues, increased access to this neighborhood for the entire planet of jet-setting travellers and ego-tripping digital nomads. Feeling consumed by the vulnerability of digital visibility, locals became aggressive towards tourists, towards wealthier people on the street that the they identified as the perpetrators of social displacement.

The author’s gentle humor in times of moral despair, keeping a certain spirit of Berlin in the before times alive, comes across in “The Moral Space of the Glass.” (Drawing: Anna Kostreva)

Interspersed throughout the text we find over forty-five drawings. The architectural drawings are beautiful and somber, delicate, but complex and forceful although seemingly fragile. The prose attempts to copy, in spirit, the line drawings, and here is where the project struggles at times. While the drawings feel life-like, the prose left this reader wanting a bit more beauty on the sentence level, some lyricism in the textual lines. Because the text is so careful, so precise, so descriptive, but also so serious and somber, the book — short as it is at just 150 pages — can feel flat, especially at the beginning.

When Winter and Natalie begin to escape the city, they take the train to the mountains and discover this Japanese-inspired “Forest Retreat.” (Drawing: Anna Kostreva)

The names of the places described and illustrated — Cemetery of Digital Identities, The Moral Space of the Glass, The Identity Ring, Cemetery of Digital Alienation — evoke the spirit of visionary architect and educator John Hejduk. At the outset, I imagined a sort of fläneur narrative, similar in scope and style to other contemporary writers and cultural critics born in the US but based in Europe, like Ryan Ruby and Lauren Elkin, but the book surprised me. Natalie tells us of this dystopian Berlin where algorithms rule and human participation is always controlled, but with her friend, Winter, instead of walking they start talking. And the dialogue, the conversation between two friends — such an almost Victorian concept — proves essential to the narrative and also to the book’s hopefulness among the ruins of the nearest future. The friends and their acquaintances are always circling round and round the big questions:

I watch, but I also wonder how this all pans out. If social inequality is a software problem, can it really be moved around, without a moral logic? Winter admits that solving the problem will likely create another, one likely unforeseen. But at least it will be a new problem.

Isn’t there a morality in our actions that drives us to be one way or another? Or is morality the same illusion as the self? Am I simply obsessed with the idea of being morally good, because I am self-conscious about my self? Did I move from wanting to be good at social media archie-selfies to wanting to be on the good side of social justice, because in the end I want to be convinced that I can be happy with myself? Is that bad? Is it a delusion?

“Map of Hackesche Hoefe”: The novel is serious but also has a beating heart, with some suspense and thriller-like plot devices thrown in. (Drawing: Anna Kostreva)

The writer who came to mind most often as I read Kostreva’s novel was not one based in Europe but rather Sheila Heti, a native of Toronto and the great storyteller of people asking questions and relying on friends for philosophical support in these foggiest stages of late capitalism. There is an earnestness in the prose that recalls Heti and also a deep seriousness about beauty and the places where we feel safe enough to begin to speak our minds, to say what we want, and how we imagine a place could be.