Berlin is nowadays a place where people may find themselves. As in running away from everything, re-inventing oneself. It seems it happened the same at least for a previous generation.
Claire is a young nurse working for the Red Cross that insisted to leave her bourgeois family in Paris to join the post-war efforts. But she is not any Claire, she is the daugher of François Mauriac, the great writer who dared to remain on the side of the Resistance, unlike many of his peers. But Claire wants to write her own story and Berlin is the place to start. There she will fall in love with a Russian prince, a former war prisoner working for the allies. They got married and their first child is the author of a fictional auto-biography, Mon enfant de Berlin - in my approximate translation, My Berlin Child.
The late actress and author Anne Wiazemsky re-wrote that story, using letters her mother sent back home and diary entry, and filling the gaps in between with accounts from people that knew her parents or fragments of memory. The method is ingenious, as it combines both biography and fiction.
The story evolves chronologically, kindly focusing on the love story, with moderate remarks and observations about the general historical and society context in war-torned Berlin of the mid-1940s.
Although it does not excel from the literary point of view, it was a story of searching oneself in a world in turmoil. Someone not familiar with Claire´s background may just consider the story a work of fiction, which in the end is not very relevant. Fictional or not, Mon Enfant de Berlin shares a narrative that makes you think and reflect. The choice of literary genre is less important.
Rating: 3 stars
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