Berlin.

Two flows in one current. Kosmische — Cluster, Neu!, Harmonia — finds American ears via Eno; no wave — DNA, Lydia Lunch — returns to Berlin transformed by the time of Earthquake Weather. The Atlantic is, briefly, a recording studio.

Bergman’s late films and the New German Cinema run on adjacent rails. Fassbinder is openly reading Bergman; Wenders, more discreetly. The current is short — perhaps fifteen years — but it teaches a generation of German filmmakers what the long take is for.

A small but real flow of post-wall German prose — W. G. Sebald most visibly — finds its closest readers in Sweden and Norway. The Scandinavian crime novel takes the inheritance most directly. The current is one decade long.