{"product_id":"an-american-flzaneur-in-berlin-david-tuffley-9781718176416","title":"An American Flâneur in Berlin","description":"\u003cp\u003eThere is a moment, somewhere between Gabi Hartmann's arrival on the snow-dusted platform of \u003ci\u003eMohrenStra e\u003c\/i\u003e station and her silent recognition of a stranger in an Eberswalde town square, when this book stops being a travel memoir and becomes something harder to name - and far more difficult to put down.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eAn American Flâneur in Berlin\u003c\/i\u003e follows Gabi, a California woman of German descent, on a late-winter pilgrimage to the city of her ancestors. One hundred and twenty years before her overnight flight from Los Angeles, her great-great-grandfather Karl-Friedrich Hartmann had boarded a Hamburg steamship headed the other way - a young Prussian farmer's son with no inheritance, only courage and a destination. He settled in the Salinas Valley and never returned. Now Gabi is retracing that arc in reverse, carrying a question she cannot quite articulate: \u003ci\u003eWhat does it mean to belong somewhere you have never been?\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhat she finds is not a tidy answer but a city that unsettles and illuminates in equal measure. She stands at the ghost-site of the Führerbunker, where the marble recycled from Hitler's demolished Chancellery now lines a subway station. She attends Sunday service at the Berlin Dom, that glorious monument to Prussian opulence inside a supposedly austere Lutheran church - and sits quietly with the contradiction. She rides the S-Bahn to Wannsee on a frozen January morning when the tour boats lie buried in untouched snow and hooded crows pick their way along a deserted pier. She wanders the hushed vastness of the \u003ci\u003eStaatsbibliothek zu Berlin\u003c\/i\u003e - the very library Wim Wenders filmed in \u003ci\u003eWings of Desire\u003c\/i\u003e - half-expecting angels.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd through all of it she is a flâneur in the truest Baudelairean sense: unhurried, unattached, following the city's subtle aesthetic contours wherever they lead, trusting that the spirit of a place will speak to those patient enough to listen.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe book's beating heart is a question about identity and time. In Eberswalde, the small former-Prussian town where the Hartmanns farmed for a thousand years, Gabi searches for traces of a world obliterated first by the Luftwaffe and then by Soviet reconstruction. She finds a town that looks like the original but is not - and then, in a sunlit town square, she locks eyes with a young woman who walks exactly like her, tosses her head exactly like her, and walks on. No polite introductions, no cups of tea. Just a moment of electric recognition across five generations and an ocean of time.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDavid Tuffley writes with the eye of a novelist and the mind of a philosopher. \u003ci\u003eAn American Flâneur in Berlin\u003c\/i\u003e is not a guidebook, though it will make you want to book a flight. It is not a history, though it carries the weight of one of the twentieth century's most consequential cities. It is not a meditation on solitude, though its luminous appendix of quotes from Pascal, Thoreau, Kafka, and Nietzsche reveals the inner logic of wandering alone.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt is, in the end, a book about the astonishing discovery that arrives only when you stop looking: that home is not always where you were born. Sometimes it is where you come from, and sometimes those are entirely different places.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRead it slowly. Read it the way Gabi walks.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e David Tuffley\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 1718176414\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9781718176416\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Independently Published\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 08\/20\/2018\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 54\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 0.18lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.13d","brand":"David Tuffley","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":48873652551935,"sku":"9781718176416","price":8.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/an-american-flzaneur-in-berlin-david-tuffley-9781718176416","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}