num_pages: 294
description: An intoxicating provocative novel of appetite identity and self-construction Darryl Pinckney's Black Deutschland tells the story of an outsider trapped between a painful past and a tenebrous future in Europe's brightest and darkest city.Jedyoung gay black out of rehab and out of prospects in his hometown of Chicagoflees to the city of his fantasies a museum of modernism and Berlin. The paradise that tyranny created the subsidized city isolated behind the Berlin Wall is where he's chosen to become the figure that he so admires the black American expatriate. Newly sober and nostalgic for the Weimar days of Isherwood and Auden Jed arrives to chase boys and to escape from what it means to be a black male in America.But history both personal and political can't be avoided with time or distance. Whether it's the judgment of the cousin he grew up with and her husband's bourgeois German family the lure of white wine in a down-and-out bar a gang of racists looking for a brawl or the ravaged visage of Rock Hudson flashing behind the face of every white boy he desperately longs for the past never stays past even in faraway Berlin. In the age of Reagan and AIDS in a city on the verge of tearing down its walls he clambers toward some semblance of adulthood amid the outcasts and expats intellectuals and artists queers and misfits. And on occasion the city keeps its Isherwood promises and the boy he kisses incredibly kisses him back.
language: English
title: Black Deutschland
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux