Coming Next: A 'Berlin Stories' Season of Re-runs

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." -- Hunter S. Thompson

You cannot be a true German Literary Historian without pretending to have read Marx (who thought he was growing up to be a poet). Here’s how to crack the man’s work on the NYC public transit system, for example. (cc:Topper Sherwood)

In years (OK, decades) as a working writer, I’ve been granted a lot of freedom to determine and define my own labor (projects, mission & goals, etc.) together with great clients and co-workers.

I’m profoundly grateful for this. Aside from having encountered, here and there, wonderful people (notably, editors), I must now also credit the very civilized and generous public-welfare system (federal and state) of Europe/Berlin, where I’ve lived, as a German-American, since 2008. (Whether they realize it or not, everyone, rich and poor, is a beneficiary of this profoundly well-evolved, if expensive, social-welfare system….)

Close readers of Berlin Stories know that I’ve been using this platform to sketch out (and publicize) larger works — most obviously, “The Will to Style,” my still-unsold (& brilliant) unpublished volume on the revolutionary-minded, utopian “Vienna Group” of thinkers and artists of the Weimar Bauhaus Public School (1919-25). [For those who don’t know: My work is based on their private-and-personal correspondence with each other, which I was able to track & find in Switzerland almost a decade ago.]

Today, I’ve hit a point where I’m not sure of what-next I’m doing — nor even what I want to do. For this reason, I’m declaring my own sabbatical — a long-anticipated winter vacation. (“Gone Fishin’.”)

For my little group of readers, it means that I’m reposting ‘recycled’ “Berlin Stories” — among the 100-plus stories I’ve worked-up during the past 1.5 years, much of it based on material from my German-history research since 2012. I’m starting this next week, with a story I did a couple of seasons ago about “Christmas in Weimar, 1919.”

I plan to post these “re-runs” through the new year — including the new (lower-priced!) paywall(s). I ask that paying subscribers (please) stick with me, and trust that some of these columns will become just-as-relevant to you in the future as when I wrote ‘em in the past. Maybe even more so….

Thus, my Substack “Berlin Stories” column/journal will be on ‘automatic pilot’ until the end of February 2025, at least, while I explore some new, alternative career paths, both in Berlin and elsewhere.

At this moment, I’m thinking this will lead me
into a bold, new life of:
1) prostitution;
2) street-theater / musical performance, and/or;
3) diving into the depths of German humor.

(Hä. Hä. Hä.)

Thanks for reading. ;-)

Love y’all,
Topper Sherwood

PS: My apologies to those artists & writers — alive, dead, and somewhere in-between — whom I’ve studied/interviewed
but have not yet written about.
YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE!
(See the illustration, above, for example.)
Honestly, it isn’t for the lack of desire, on my part…. -ts