Maybe Esther. Katja Petrowskaja

       PROLOGUE

       THANK GOOGLE

      I would rather have set off from elsewhere than here, the wasteland around the train station that still attests to the devastation of this city, a city that was bombed and reduced to ruins in the course of victorious battles, as retribution, it seemed to me, seeing as how the war that had been the cause of immeasurable devastation, far and wide, had been steered from this very city, an endless blitzkrieg with iron wheels and iron wings. That is now so far in the past that this city has become one of the most peaceful cities in the world and pursues this peace almost aggressively, as if in remembrance of the war.

      The train station was recently built in the middle of this city, and despite the much-touted peace the station was inhospitable, as though it embodied all the losses that no train could outrun, one of the most inhospitable places in our Europe, united every which way, yet still sharply bounded, a place that always feels drafty and where your gaze opens out onto a wasteland, unable to alight in an urban jungle, to rest on something before moving out of here, out of this void in the midst of the city, a void that no government can fill, no lavish buildings, no good intentions.

      Again, it was drafty as I stood on the platform and my eyes once more swept across the huge letters

       BOMBARDIER

       Willkommen in Berlin

      underneath the arc of the curved roof, noting the contours lackadaisically yet thrown as ever by the mercilessness of this welcome. It was drafty when an elderly gentleman came up to me and asked about this Bombardier.

      Your thoughts go straight to bombs, he said, to artillery, to that terrible, unfathomable war, and why Berlin of all places should be welcoming us in that way, this lovely, peaceful, bombed-out city, which is aware of all that, it just can’t be that Berlin bombards—so to speak—new arrivals like him with this word in huge letters, and what is meant by welcome anyway, who exactly is supposed to be bombarded, and with what. He was desperately seeking an explanation, he told me, because he was about to set off. I replied, somewhat astounded that my inner voice was addressing me in the form of an old man with dark eyes and an American accent, breathless and ever more agitated, almost wildly plying me with questions that I myself had played