The church on Siegfeldstrasse was open to anyone who embarrassed the Republic, and Andreas Wolf was so much of an embarrassment that he actually resided there, in the basement of the rectory, but unlike the others—the true Christian believers, the friends of the Earth, the misfits who defended human rights or didn’t want to fight in World War III—he was no less an embarrassment to himself.
Jonathan Franzen has a new short story—an excerpt from his forthcoming novel, Purity—about living in a dystopian Berlin over at the New Yorker.
