Berlin W, Or, Mesalliance Posthumous Fragments - Simon Wortham

Sometimes, with hair pinned, her bare neck like stripped bone or an alpine pass, pure wordless movement, stature in flight. Walking as the expression of a distance that encloses everything within itself. Memory losing breath in the slipstream of her. As if she was already there, wherever she was going. Inhuman grace, to borrow some words from Kleist, passing through infinity. That's how she walked. These are the last of the papers to be released by the estate of Peter Muller. Shortly before his death, Peter's brother Luca replied to a speculative request from the editor with a hundred or so handwritten pages. The papers included what appeared to be a preliminary sketch for an academic publication, marked 'Notes on the Typology of a Neurosis'. There was another set of pages describing Muller's time in West Berlin during the 1970s. It is a memoir, of sorts. At its centre is a woman with another name than her own. But there is also material about Berlin itself. The story of Berlin, and the story of Muller's experience of the city, is told through a variety of literary, historical, and architectural vignettes entangled with his reflections upon a love affair-an affair that carries a political charge as much as an existential one.