From Berlin     by Armando, Translated by Susan Massotty Original title: Krijgsgewoel; Machthebbers: verslagen uit Berlijn en Toscane Original language: Dutch Original year: 1983 Published by Reaktion Books Pub. Date: 1997 Format: Paperback, 144 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.59 x 9.13 x 6.11 ISBN: 0948462876 List Price: $18.95, £12.05 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £12.05 Buy online from Amazon.com for $18.95 Published by Reaktion Books, London Pub. Date: 1996 Format: 138 pages Not available for ordering

Armando is one of those artists who are fascinated by the thin line where fiction and reality meet. Years ago he brought out a book written jointly with Hans Sleutelaar and called ‘The SS Men’ (De SS-ers, 1967). It was a work of fiction in which former SS men were shown talking about their experiences during the war and after. Typically, in my local university library the book is catalogued under history.


From Berlin gathers together a number of texts originally published in various collections between 1982 and 1994. It forms an excellent introduction to the work of one of Holland’s most underestimated writers.


Armando is obsessed with the Second World War. He has tried harder than most to understand it, and not just the war itself, but what led up to it, how people struggled through or perished in it, how the survivors fared afterwards and now look back on it. Armando has lived in Berlin for some twenty years as a writer, painter and film-maker. He is an intense observer. His insatiable curiosity about Nazism and the War is very much tied to places, streets, buildings, the silent witnesses of the past. That is why he speaks of a ‘guilty landscape’, meaning the trees and houses that watched impassively as history ran its course.


Yet it is not the scenery itself that interests Armando. From Berlin does not have much of a story line but consists entirely of short, crisp vignettes that read like snippets of conversation, extracts from interviews, descriptions of people musing about their past and about those who died. Armando’s handling of these fragments is superb. The tone is colloquial and direct, the humour wry and bleak, the style sparse. Although much is left unsaid, we never stray from the immediacy of a individual speaking voice and the concreteness of a precise location. Armando shuns embellishment and prefers to let the facts speak for themselves, even though many of his voices may well be fictional. The brutality, the self-delusion, the excitement and all the other emotions and experiences they talk about are real enough.


While the places, and often the animals, in From Berlin have names, the people remain nameless. Each voice tells its own story, its own unique life and viewpoint, its own smallness. The uniqueness and nuance of each individual tale is what fuels Armando’s desire to understand. They all overlap and touch, and yet all are different, like so many pieces of a puzzle that never really fits together into a clear, manageable picture. There is not one single reason why young men joined the SS, why others opposed the Nazis, why some kept their mouths shut or stood idly by. It is this complexity, and the refusal to bow to the simplicities of generalization and stereotype, that makes Armando such a keen listener and observer. It also keeps each of his vignettes fresh, and leaves the reader anxious to read more.

MAN: So, you’re from Holland, are you? There’re a couple of Dutch people I’d like to talk to sometime, but I don’t know who they are. It’s like this. I was a simple working-class lad from the middle of Berlin. It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears, but I managed to put together a collection of gramophone records, really nice ones from Electrola. Opera records. And when I finally came back from the Front (I was twenty at the time), I found out that foreign workers from Holland had plundered our house, or rather the ruins of what had been our house. All my records were gone.They’d been in the basement, and had survived the bombings in one piece. Yes, I know you can’t do anything about the fact that those Dutch people stole my records, but it still rankles. (p. 108-9, tr. Susan Massotty)