On the Edge: Juan Villoro's and Liliana Villanueva's Travelogues in Berlin Divided

Abstract

The transaction between the history of Berlin and Latin American literature has proved stimulating and profitable, among other things, because of the latter's capacity to process heterogeneity (linguistic, cultural, historical) and because of the representations of modernity and its endings that Berlin's urban fabric condenses. Berlin is projected onto a wide area of contemporary Latin American literature as a sign, referent and stimulating city, based on the imaginaries produced by the Cold War and the ruins of successive wars and their awareness of history. 

Thus, the stories set in Berlin at the end of the twentieth century written by Latin American authors would encourage the exploration of other ways of understanding the border that marked that city as the epicentre of the Cold War. A particular way of elaborating and transmitting the experience not only of a division, but, at the same time, the series of passages, confusions and mixtures that moved between East and West, the old and the new order, but also in the immigrant constellation that marked the metropolis during the years before and after reunification. This articles’ hypothesis suggests that some Berlin narratives, especially those dealing with the particular time frame of the end of the twentieth century, allow us to understand and make sense of the process of reconstructing a fragmented identity, as divided as it was connected, as splintered as it was multicultural; as if the experience of the East and the Cold War, with those intervals and contact zones, were a mark reappropriated by these writings within their own tradition. The article analyses from this framework, linked in a general way to border theories, two travel narratives: Otoño alemán (2019), by the argentinian writer Liliana Villanueva and ‘Berlín, capital del fin del mundo’ (1999) and ‘Berlín, un mapa para perderse’ (2005) by the mexican Juan Villoro.