Fahrt mit der S-Bahn

In the divided Berlin of the 1960s to 1980s, the S-Bahn held a specific position: it was object of controversial political debates, setting for numerous migration attempts, and of ten addressed as a metonymic representation of the (divided) urban architecture that was specific to Berlin. Thus it served as an important medium of ref lection for a number of authors, especially from the eastern part of the city: this article primarily examines poetry, essay writing, and prose texts by the former GDR authors Uwe Johnson, Günter Kunert, Fritz Rudolf Fries, Elke Erb, Johannes Jansen, and Annett Gröschner. Special attention needs to be payed to the S-Bahn as a poetic instrument for identifying an own position within the multi-layered Berlin topography: between East and West, affiliation and rejection, collective urban identity and self-assertion, performed and hindered border crossings.