FT MAGAZINE 
Throughout the 1990s, German literary critics had fretted about the lack of a definitive “reunification novel”. Then, in 2001, pop musician Sven Regener (pictured above) published Herr Lehmann, about a good-natured Berlin slacker.
The book’s protagonist, Frank Lehmann, lives among students and failed artists, works at a bar and worries about women. So far, so High Fidelity. Except that history is about to come crashing down on him: this is West Berlin in the summer and autumn of 1989.
Regener’s novel didn’t have quite the weighty tone the critics were waiting for. Lehmann is so busy making sense of his private life that he fails to pay attention to the historical changes around him. His girlfriend cheats on him. His best friend goes a little crazy. On the last pages, he is slumped at a bar on his birthday when word arrives that the wall is coming down. His response? “Oh, shit…”
Herr Lehmann (in English, Berlin Blues) quickly became a bestseller in Germany and then a successful film. It was as if Lehmann, with that bewildered “oh, shit”, had spoken for a generation of young West Germans. Reunification had been their parents’ dream. The children had different concerns.
And yet, before those young people knew it, reunification changed their lives. Berlin went from being a no-man’s-land to being the capital. The old bohemian hideaways started to disappear. Even Lehmann’s Kreuzberg neighbourhood, for years a magnet for left-wingers, Turkish immigrants and artists, started to gentrify. Berlin had been a dying city in the 1970s and 1980s, but suddenly the lost decades looked kind of fun.
Soon former East (or Ost) Germans started talking about “Ostalgie” – a longing for the old communist society. Regener captured the corresponding West German nostalgia, and thereby his generation’s imagination. “Herr Lehmann, that’s us,” said Leander Haußmann, the director of the film. But people who’d never even lived there also longed for Lehmann’s Berlin. After all, it’s easier living in High Fidelity than War and Peace.
