Bell’s main thesis is that a small flood in her apartment is a metaphor for the undercurrents of Berlin’s past rippling to the surface, that is always trying to pull one down. How’s this done? By telling us about her divorced, bourgeois life in an apartment too big for her family, especially when the kids leave her alone. To busy herself, she LARPs as a historian for the building’s previous residents intercut with the greatest hits of Berlin history. Claiming Berlin is hiding much of its history beneath the surface (she’d have a field day in Munich), she invokes, as all bourgeois meanderings do, Luxemburg and Arendt and others, taking their revolutionary positions out of context to spice up her Wikipedia-level analysis. This wouldn’t be so terrible if she also didn’t invoke quack science (Feng Shui, astrology, staged constellations) to justify her ghostly feelings of the apartment and Berlin as a whole. When she isn’t calling on a FS expert, or quoting one of the many famous people who lived in and wrote about Berlin, or mistranslating basic German, she writes with a heightened level of drama that is cringe at best:
“I am grasped by a grim sensation when I think about this period in Berlin. A forceful downward pull. Like a negative maelstrom that senses disaster beneath the increasingly frantic pace taking hold of this metropolis.”
Here she’s describing the moment in 1932-3 when the Nazis came to power. She recounts all historical moments in a similar manner (before padding the pages with more interesting author’s theses), as if discovering these moments for the first time, comprehending the full gravity of the situation as some kind of martyr, and delivering it so graciously to us. A more ungenerous reading would even take offense with her chapters on the postwar history and German shame, coming from an Anglo-American, perhaps the most ideologically poisoned of all those who think about postwar history (e.g., Greatest Generation, End of History, etc.).
As her stated goal in the end declares, she wants to egotistically place herself in the long history of famous Berliners (which is why she kept evoking so many), all because she won a nice Kreuzberg apartment from a divorce. One can only hope that this book will, like her spooky apartment feelings, reside under the surface in the long term, never to reveal itself.