THERE IS NO PAST IN BERLIN: Ioana Cristina Casapu in conversation with Alexander Wells

For the second instalment of ‘THERE IS NO PAST IN BERLIN’, the author, curator and artist Ioana Cristina Casapu – initiator and host of the series – welcomes the Australian writer, critic and translator Alexander Wells for a literary interview and a public discussion on history, memory, migration and the narratives through which societies understand themselves.

The focus of the evening is on literature: as an archive, a counter-memory, a testimony, a source of imagination and a space where different historical experiences can converge.

Wells’ critical writings repeatedly explore how literature carries political history into the present. His texts on the Stasi, German reunification, Wolfgang Hilbig and Jenny Erpenbeck probe the cultural legacy of the GDR and shed light on how East and West continue to shape German and European memory. Elsewhere, he has written about Dresden, Joseph Roth’s Berlin, social housing in the Weimar Republic and the political construction of national history. In all these essays, literary texts become a means of interpreting ideological change, class relations, urban space and the stories that endure beyond political turning points.

Casapus’s work approaches these questions through the themes of migration, autobiography and lived experience. Her *Berlin Diary – The Story of My Inner Wall* (2025) brings together 24 essays written over the course of a decade in Berlin. The book moves between Romania and Germany, Eastern and Western Europe, alienation and belonging, and transforms the image of the Berlin Wall into a literary exploration of the boundaries carried within individual biographies. Her earlier novel *Deviațiide Stereo*, published in English as *Heart Beats: A Memoir of the Millennial Generation on Social Media*, examines a generation shaped by mobility, digital culture, intimacy and social change.

Their conversation takes as its starting point a shared literary context: writing in a city characterised by ruptures, transnational movements and a continuous social, political and cultural reorganisation.

What can literature preserve that official historiography overlooks? Who finds their way into the literary canon, and whose experiences remain on the margins? How do writers transform migration, exile, internal migration, loss and arrival into literary form? How do East and West continue to shape the stories that Europe tells about itself? And what happens when individual memory comes into conflict with established historical narratives?

‘THERE IS NO PAST IN BERLIN’ explores these questions through the lens of literature and poetry.

The title refers to the unequal visibility of the city’s diverse pasts: whose stories are remembered, told and canonised, and whose remain on the margins? Berlin’s history is marked by the ruptures of 1933, 1945, 1961 and 1989, as well as by reunification, gentrification, new waves of migration and successive cultural and social transformations. These changes continually reshape notions of home, refuge and belonging.

Here, literature forges links between individual and collective experience. It brings together those born in Berlin, those who came here from other parts of Germany or from beyond the country’s borders, those who left and have returned, and those who are still in the process of making a home for themselves in the city. Different languages, generations and aesthetic traditions come together without relinquishing their differences.