Vladimir Nabokov spent fifteen years in Berlin, from 1922 to 1937, and by most accounts hated nearly every minute of it. He arrived not out of curiosity but because he'd lost everything else — the Russia of his childhood was gone, and the city's large, self-sufficient Russian émigré community simply had room for him. He spoke little German, knew few Germans beyond landladies and immigration clerks, and by the end disliked the place intensely.
And yet no city is woven more tightly into his work. Six of his early novels are set fully in Berlin, with two more partly so. As writer and Nabokov scholar Dieter E. Zimmer explains, the Berlin in those books is not theBerlin of Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz — its proletarian eastern quarter — but the Russian Berlin of Wilmersdorf, Charlottenburg and Schöneberg, the cafés and lecture halls of the exiles, plus the Tiergarten, the Sportpalast where he watched boxing and ice hockey, and the pine forest of the Grunewald, the one spot he genuinely seemed to enjoy (he was there chiefly hunting butterflies).
What makes literary strolling through these pages so rewarding is Nabokov's freakish eye for detail. He noticed the stone fan in Empress Auguste Viktoria's memorial in the Tiergarten, the stucco roof ornaments catching sunset light. Zimmer, who grew up in the city, has traced specific buildings from the fiction: the flat in Laughter in the Dark sits on Kleiststrasse between Nollendorfplatz and Wittenbergplatz, and blind Albinus's last taxi ride ends at a house on Kaiserallee (now Bundesallee) — still standing. Best of all is the nest in The Gift, where protagonist Fyodor lodges on a fictional "Agamemnonstrasse": Zimmer matched it to Nestorstrasse 22 in Halensee, where Nabokov himself lived from 1932 to 1937, identified via a wonderfully unflattering description of nearby Hochmeisterplatz — church, pissoir, pharmacy, tram depot and all. A commemorative plaque marks the spot today.
There's a melancholy side to the hunt. Of the ten buildings Nabokov lived in, six were destroyed in the war; the Sportpalast, Lunapark, Wintergarten and the old Russian émigré quarter are gone entirely. The Grunewald remains, though with fewer butterflies. Zimmer spent years tracking down period photographs of the unglamorous corners Nabokov wrote about — butcher shops, back courtyards — and eventually unearthed around a hundred close matches, a fight against oblivion he describes as part sport, part victory over time.
For travellers, this is a genuinely different Berlin itinerary. Skip the Brandenburg Gate and follow instead the streets of a writer who translated the city's everyday texture — trams, markets, parks, odd statues — into fiction, even while wishing he were somewhere else. Start at Nestorstrasse and Hochmeisterplatz in Halensee, walk the Grunewald, and read The Gift en route.
