Berlin is not a single, continuous stage in 2666, but a city repeatedly approached through movement, memory, and uncertain belonging. For Hans Reiter it is a destination where work and companionship become possible, yet his arrival there never secures a settled life; for Heinz Vogel, it remains the city from which he has been sent away and to which he considers returning. The novel also places Berlin within the wider geography of literary and political activity, making the city a meeting point for private recollection and public history.

A remembered city and a rescue

Heinz Vogel’s account of Berlin is shaped by his own displacement from it. On his doctor’s orders, he is holidaying in the Town of Chattering Girls, away from the city where acquaintances have grown tired of his outspoken theories and his insistent manner. Vogel imagines that a person pure of heart could travel from Moscow to Madrid without being accosted, an impractical belief that makes his absence from Berlin part of his strange, optimistic view of the world.

That optimism takes a concrete form when Vogel sees a boy struggling in the water. At first, his shortsightedness makes him mistake Hans Reiter—brown-skinned, blond-haired, and bobbing among the rocks—for seaweed. He nevertheless dives in and saves him. The rescue becomes a memory Vogel cannot leave alone: later, awake in bed, he revisits the moment of hesitation implied by his initial mistake and wonders what could make a boy resemble seaweed. When the two meet again, they exchange names and shake hands. Berlin is thus attached to Reiter before he reaches it: it belongs to the rescuer’s point of origin and to the questions that the rescue carries back there.

Work, return, and Halder

Reiter’s first movement toward Berlin follows the closure of the country house where he has worked. After the baron dismisses the servants in 1936, Reiter joins the laborers building the Reich’s highways and sends nearly all his wages home. When his work takes him near Berlin, he quits and heads off rather than remain with the road crew. He soon finds Hugo Halder in the city and seeks his help. Halder secures him a position as a clerk in a stationery shop, giving Reiter a foothold in Berlin through a connection formed during his earlier service.

The city’s employment does not free Reiter from hardship. He rents a bed in a workers’ house and shares a room with Füchler, a factory night watchman afflicted by shifting ailments. The two rarely see one another because their working hours differ, but they get along well. Füchler tells Reiter about the death of his young son, which drove him to leave home and wander Germany before a former friend found him work as a watchman. At the end of his life, Füchler offers Reiter that job and writes a letter of introduction to the supervisor, vouching for him as someone he has known since birth. Reiter accepts the factory position; after Füchler dies, he keeps the dead man’s coat, shoes, scarf, shirts, and socks, as well as the cowboy novels found beneath the bed. Berlin’s precarious lodging and employment are rendered through such transfers: a bed, a letter, a job, and the possessions of a man who has nowhere else to leave them.

Nights in the city

Factory work gives Reiter more free time, though it also fixes his days and nights into an unusual rhythm. He patrols the yard and cold corridors at night, sleeps for several hours after breakfast, and spends afternoons riding the tram into central Berlin to see Halder. The backstreet flat near the Himmelstrasse is crowded with old furniture and dusty paintings. There Reiter joins Halder and Noburo Nisamata, whom they call Nisa, an agricultural-affairs assistant at the Japanese legation.

Their evenings pass through a chain of city venues. They meet at the Stone Virgin Cafe, eat, and wait for Nisa; then they leave quickly for the Eclipse, a cheap cabaret where poor performers and an out-of-the-way table make conversation possible. From there they go to the Cafe des Artistes, where painters and art-world acquaintances gather. Nisa enjoys sharing a table with the celebrities Halder knows, while Halder’s inventions and unrealized business schemes accompany the group’s talk. Later they head to the Danube, a more fashionable cabaret whose doorman sometimes resists admitting Reiter because his clothes fail to meet the dress code. On weekdays Reiter must leave his companions by ten to catch the tram to his night shift. The route through cafes and cabarets brings him into Halder and Nisa’s social world, but his factory hours and poor clothes keep its class boundary visible.

Searching and the city’s wider histories

Berlin also marks the limits of Reiter’s ability to recover an earlier friendship. During the war, he visits the city on leave and tries in vain to find Halder. Halder’s old flat is occupied by a family of civil servants; its party-member head says he does not know where the previous tenant went. The eldest daughter follows Reiter down the stairs and leads him to a public park, where she kisses him and makes knowledge of Halder conditional on his returning the kiss. Reiter recognizes her as mad, but continues asking where Halder lives. She laughs at his inability to guess and finally gives her name: Ingeborg. The city offers a route to information, but only through an encounter that is unsettling and intimate rather than straightforward.

A separate strand places Berlin in the intellectual geography of Boris Abramovich Ansky’s youth. In 1929, Ansky participates in the creation of magazines in several Soviet cities, works on an effort to find a publisher for Khlebnikov’s posthumous writings, and writes German-language work alongside his other literary activity. His account names Berlin as one of the cities he had been sent away from: his doctor had arranged his holiday in the Town of Chattering Girls partly to get him out of the capital. Across these strands, Berlin is neither a stable home nor a mere backdrop. It is a place to which characters are drawn for work, companionship, or literary life, and from which they may be displaced, unable to find one another, or compelled to look back through memory.