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Then We Take Berlin: Stories from the Other Side of Europe
Stan Persky's tale of his adventure through Eastern Europe and into "boyopolis" — the underbelly of Berlin, a fast-changing world of gay bars, houses of pleasure and cabarets that mirrors the fractured turmoil of Europe today— was greeted with tremendous critical acclaim. With the wit and sexual candour of Edmund White, and the acute historical sense of Ryszard Kapuscinski, Persky gives us an intensely frank, revelatory and disturbing picture of the new Europe.
417 pages, Paperback
First published April 18, 1995
About the author
Stan Persky
26 books4 followersStan Persky was a Canadian writer, media commentator and philosophy instructor.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 23, 2014
Berlin's a sex world...Morning, noon, night. It's always like that.
Persky's world here is Christopher Isherwood's 1930s Berlin—updated to 1990—and he also includes many of the rest of the major capitals of Eastern Europe. The majority of the book is firsthand observations on the political and cultural situation (turmoil) just after the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the fall of communism. Much of this seems so uncomfortably distant now, as a time which history wants to forget...
Balancing all that is the centerpiece 100-page essay "Berlin/Boyopolis"—around which the other essays are mere satellites. Nothing beats Isherwood's original Goodbye to Berlin, and Persky is wise to similarly combine his sexual tourism with journalistic research. His prose is literary and philosophical, but seems deliberately imitative, and is not as effortless as Isherwood's. Emigrant German writer W. G. Sebald's ironically nostalgic voice and style are also clear here. This is particularly evident with the vintage 1930-ish images of beautiful boys mysteriously inserted inline with the text: one of Sebald's well-known devices (the photos, not the boys.) Yet I don't fault Persky for doing his best to bring us up-to-date on the scene as quoted at the top of this review, said by one of his newly found "temporary" friends. It's good to know that despite the intervention of World War, and the Cold War, something remains of Isherwood's 1930s Berlin.
November 6, 2023
I first fell in love with Stan Persky's writing when I read an excerpt from this book in the 1994 anthology 'In Another Part of the Forest' edited by Alberto Manguel and although I have read the book three times now I can not find a better description than 'books-odd-and-hard-to-classify'; in fact it is probably the hardest to classify of all the 164 books I have currently labelled as such (as of May 2024). Although at one point Persky talks about the epistemology of desire and how his explorations relate to this it is never seriously pursued - I am pretty sure if he had I would never have finished the book - for me epistemology was one of those 'tools' of Marxist discourse which I never understood but at one stage used to try and chat up boys who wore their political commitment in badges on their army surplus jackets.
This book was rapidly reissued under the title 'Boyopolis: Sex and Politics in Gay Eastern Europe' and I am sure many readers were as confused or disappointed under that title.
The odd thing is this is an intelligent and fascinating insight into what was happening in Eastern Europe in the immediate aftermath of German unification and the pieces he wrote about about the various countries are fascinating (what he had to say about Todor Zhivkov, his daughter Lyudmilla and the gypsy seer Vanga in Bulgaria is particularly interesting in the light of 'Border' by Kapka Kassabova about life in communist Bulgaria) and because he doesn't attempt to say anything about the future of Eastern Europe his book remains more interesting and less dated the works by authors such as Timothy Garton Ash.
Indeed all his interviews with former dissidents and current politicians fade into the background when you read his account of visiting two former translators in Tirana in Albania which is intercut with his poetic account of his interaction with a beautiful young Albanian boy named Ilir. It is his ability to intertwine the personal and the political in these stories that makes this book so powerful. Persky also writes some of the simplest but most beautiful pages about growing up in an immigrant Jewish family that I ever read. His paragraphs on his father left me longing for more. His ability to connect with various young men and through them with the places he lives in and visits is what places him as an heir to Isherwood and Spender.
On the back of my copy is a quote from the anthologist and writer Alberto Manguel who says of 'Then We Take Berlin':
"One of the most brilliant books I've read in years: a traveller's autobiography, a political Baedeker, an amorous journal, a wise and witty memoir somewhere between Barthes' 'Fragments of an Amorous Discourse' and the adventures of Fanny Hill."
It is as good a summary as any other. Come to it with an open mind and you will be delighted by what you will discover.
This book was rapidly reissued under the title 'Boyopolis: Sex and Politics in Gay Eastern Europe' and I am sure many readers were as confused or disappointed under that title.
The odd thing is this is an intelligent and fascinating insight into what was happening in Eastern Europe in the immediate aftermath of German unification and the pieces he wrote about about the various countries are fascinating (what he had to say about Todor Zhivkov, his daughter Lyudmilla and the gypsy seer Vanga in Bulgaria is particularly interesting in the light of 'Border' by Kapka Kassabova about life in communist Bulgaria) and because he doesn't attempt to say anything about the future of Eastern Europe his book remains more interesting and less dated the works by authors such as Timothy Garton Ash.
Indeed all his interviews with former dissidents and current politicians fade into the background when you read his account of visiting two former translators in Tirana in Albania which is intercut with his poetic account of his interaction with a beautiful young Albanian boy named Ilir. It is his ability to intertwine the personal and the political in these stories that makes this book so powerful. Persky also writes some of the simplest but most beautiful pages about growing up in an immigrant Jewish family that I ever read. His paragraphs on his father left me longing for more. His ability to connect with various young men and through them with the places he lives in and visits is what places him as an heir to Isherwood and Spender.
On the back of my copy is a quote from the anthologist and writer Alberto Manguel who says of 'Then We Take Berlin':
"One of the most brilliant books I've read in years: a traveller's autobiography, a political Baedeker, an amorous journal, a wise and witty memoir somewhere between Barthes' 'Fragments of an Amorous Discourse' and the adventures of Fanny Hill."
It is as good a summary as any other. Come to it with an open mind and you will be delighted by what you will discover.
July 10, 2020
Huh. 'Boyopolis' has its moments — it was fascinating reading the interviews Persky conducted with politicians, journalists, and cultural figures in some of the more peripheral post-communist countries of Eastern Europe. But what these characters had to say to Persky was far more interesting than what Persky had to say about them. Though he provides a good sense of what it was like to find oneself on the frontlines of democracy-building in Hungary, Croatia, Bulgaria, and Lithuania in the early 90s, they sadly receive the smallest amount of attention in the collection at large. Unsurprisingly, his emphasis remains on the reunification of Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Poland after Solidarity, and he really didn't have anything original to say (or show) about these otherwise well-covered topics. The best bits happen when Persky wanders off the beaten path.
And I have to agree with the criticisms he received and acknowledged in the 1995 epilogue. There is no explicit attempt on his part to demonstrate how his explorations of gay culture across the region relate to the fall of communism. He learns very little about what it was like to live as a homosexual in any of the satellite surveillance states, and provides no sense of how that changed following 1989 (or even over the course of 'the thaw'). In addition to this, he never explains how politics impacted sex or how sex impacted politics, which is a shame. He claims he accomplished this by laying out what he calls the 'epistemology of desire' that motivated his travels and social engagements in Eastern Europe, but I finished with no understanding about how his conceptualization of sex tourism could possibly demonstrate the relationship between (post-)communism and gay culture in these places.
He also has some odd digressions. At one point, Persky judges rap for being a corrupting influence on teenagers. At another, he criticizes a twenty-year-old for wearing baggy shorts. At another, he criticizes the prominence of television and video games in entertainment culture. These condescending judgements were grating, to say the least. It's not a great look.
That said, then, the text has not aged very well. So much so that I would only recommend reading it as a historical text. As an object of study and criticism, it provides just enough firsthand material on the development of politics, capitalism, and civil society in the countries featured to have a cultural and intellectual value.
And I have to agree with the criticisms he received and acknowledged in the 1995 epilogue. There is no explicit attempt on his part to demonstrate how his explorations of gay culture across the region relate to the fall of communism. He learns very little about what it was like to live as a homosexual in any of the satellite surveillance states, and provides no sense of how that changed following 1989 (or even over the course of 'the thaw'). In addition to this, he never explains how politics impacted sex or how sex impacted politics, which is a shame. He claims he accomplished this by laying out what he calls the 'epistemology of desire' that motivated his travels and social engagements in Eastern Europe, but I finished with no understanding about how his conceptualization of sex tourism could possibly demonstrate the relationship between (post-)communism and gay culture in these places.
He also has some odd digressions. At one point, Persky judges rap for being a corrupting influence on teenagers. At another, he criticizes a twenty-year-old for wearing baggy shorts. At another, he criticizes the prominence of television and video games in entertainment culture. These condescending judgements were grating, to say the least. It's not a great look.
That said, then, the text has not aged very well. So much so that I would only recommend reading it as a historical text. As an object of study and criticism, it provides just enough firsthand material on the development of politics, capitalism, and civil society in the countries featured to have a cultural and intellectual value.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews