Nowhere has no man’s land blossomed as in Berlin. The fall of the Wall left a green swath through the city and uncharted territories everywhere, a breach into which rushed profit-seekers, entrepreneurs. We are speaking here of the entrepreneurs whose investment is ideas and enthusiasm – whose profit is the same, with interest. They, more than any venture capitalists, have profited from Berlin, and Berlin from them. Berlin’s real economy is the black market of inspiration.
While Berlin’s alternative music and art is already legendary in international circles, its phenomenal literary scene remains terra incognita for most English speakers. A remarkable boom in readings, slams and open mikes in recent years has made highbrow literature as cool as concert-going. And it has created a thriving alternative infrastructure that shapes sophisticated new talents and audiences alike. A prime example is the “literature lab” and magazine lauter niemand. The “lab,” an open mike for fiction and poetry, has been held every Sunday since 1996, its famously spirited discussions a testing ground for young writers who have emerged as some of the most exciting voices in German literature today. no man’s land, the English version of lauter niemand’s 10th anniversary edition, presents 29 of these voices, many never before translated.
lauter niemand does not stand for any one literary school or tendency; both the lab and the magazine reflect Berlin’s dizzying literary diversity. While it is impossible to generalize about the writers included in this issue, certain motifs recur. A good half of the contributors are themselves noted translators, while several work in two or more languages. The image of the “no man’s land,” of the boundaries and interstices between languages, cultures and minds, is reflected in manifold and subtle ways in the poetry and fiction presented here, culminating on the final page, in a symbolic act of “barter” between languages – a transaction from which everyone profits!
In this spirit, no man’s land, too, is a “literature lab” as well as a magazine, a forum for writers, readers and translators and an open frontier between German and English literatures in Berlin and beyond: www.no-mans-land.org

Isabel Fargo Cole
Berlin, December 1, 2006