From Berlin (Topographics)

The Dutch writer, artist and film maker Armando has lived in Berlin since 1979. Armando grew up near Amersfoort concentration camp in The Netherlands - its peripheries were his playground - and he was deeply affected by his position as a witness of the Holocaust. He has become obsessed with the unofficial histories of the war found in Berlin's streets and in the overheard fragments its inhabitants' conversations. Armando's writings powerfully evoke these traces of the past and his search for them. The living presence of a disappearing past, the city and its inhabitants tell stories different from the official history and its monuments. These versions of the past are plural and contradictory, uncensored and spontaneous, constructing a history which supersedes the limitations of narrative. Ultimately Armando's writing is about enabling the reader to experience that which is too horrific to put into words. In the first translation of Armando's literary work into English, From Berlin gathers Armando's observations of Berlin and the voices of those who lived through the Second World War in a book which is moving and disturbing, and at the same time full of bleak humor.