Gaither Stewart explores the lives of expatriates and native Berliners alike in Once In Berlin, the first in the Wind River Press series ‘Travels’. Longing for home but uncertain where it lies, Stewart’s characters struggle to find their identities within a city searching anew for its own.

Once In Berlin is a fictional portrayal of the sudden explosion of a new era of a new Europe against the background of past devestation … the shadows of which haunt the present. The book explores the minds of people attempting to keep pace with an already changed world. In this sense, for the protagonists as well as for readers, the city of Berlin becomes both a reality and a metaphor.

The protagonists ask questions like “Why am I here?” in the persistent way of modern man. The setting is Berlin. Yet the setting in these stories is sometimes less a physical topos than a state of mind or a manner of being of the individual’s struggles. In the stories we watch the protagonists’ dilemmas as reflections of the new era in this new city … this still off-center city, a city still rather mysterious to many Europeans, to many non - Berliner Germans, too.

Each story is a foray into the minds of its protagonists. In each, dilemmas of identity and belongingness and freedom surface. They all want a new life. A more fulfilling life. But they are not always prepared to pay the price. Their answers to their dilemmas are often contradicted by their behavior in Berlin. This is a fiction of conflict between what one thinks and what one does, the driving force of my fiction.

I find I can better treat this variety of questions and answers and incursions into man’s mind against a specific background in a series of stories rather than a novel. I see it as the artist’s canvas: multi-colored, multi-dimensional, multi-faceted.

Critics often note the strong sense of place running through my fiction. That place sense makes my Berlin fiction particular. Neither a guide nor a history, Once In Berlin is a canvas of people and the atmosphere and the feeling that place creates.

My unique vision of Berlin is that of a combination of journalist, writer, and foreigner with an intimate long-term connection with Germany where I studied and lived for many years. My immediate motivation is to be found in two long stays in Berlin this past year.

Taken together the stories form a sweeping novel set in and about the city. The protagonists are in the foreground to reflect the city standing behind them. Yet, though somewhat misty, the city comes through as a protagonist, too. As Jörg says in “Miracle on Potsdamer Platz,” “That’s our city. We’re sitting right on top of them now. On top of all our Berlin dead … Don’t forget we owe them. They’re our past. They’re progress. Actually we are our dead ... And our lives are founded on our places.”

Several aspects of Berlin in particular fascinate me: the romantic Berlin of the twenties and Thirties, its destruction and miraculous rebirth, its uniqueness in regard to the rest of the nation, and its probable eventual emergence as the real capital of the European Union at the crossroads between East and West.

The five long stories here are totally different one from the other; yet, they both reflect and derive from my personal fascination with the city. The first story—“Shadows Beyond the Wall”—reduces the ideological drama of post - war Berlin to the personal relationship between two Cold Warriors, an Italian and a Russian, who overcome mistrust and betrayal to find they were never really enemies.

“End Station Nostalgia” portrays the city as seen through the eyes of two American art historians on sabbatical in a fictitious American cultural society in Berlin engaged in an intellectual and in the end a brutal physical struggle: one is an American Jew who feels at home and a right-wing German-American, who detests liberal progressive Berlin.

“Miracle On Potsdamer Platz” shows the Entfremdung of a rich Berliner who depends on miraculous lamotrigina for sanity and survival, the gradual disintegration of his marriage, and his path back to his family. The title story, “Once In Berlin,” whose real protagonist dies at the beginning, passes through the lives of pre-war, post-war and contemporary generations, showing the dreams and disappointments, the successes and foibles of Berliners of nearly a century.