What Do We Do With the Violence of Our Generation?

Mikaela Dery talks with Julia Kornberg about her new novel “Berlin Atomized.”

By Mikaela DeryJanuary 17, 2025

• Fiction

• SF

BERLIN ATOMIZED, Julia Kornberg’s extraordinary first novel, begins with an address to the reader: “If you want to see a Jewish girl baptize herself all day, every day, you need only go back to the summer of 2009.” The Jewish girl in question is Nina Goldstein, one of the three Goldstein siblings who live in the wealthy gated community of Nordelta in Argentina. The baptisms are a near-obsessive bathing ritual, revealing a particular sense of teenage discomfort. “But 2009 was,” Nina writes, “the summer everyone began to disappear.”

In a “note from the editor,” it is revealed that the book has been compiled in 2063 by Nina’s best friend, Angélica, who has “resurfaced the words” of Nina and her brothers, Jeremías and Mateo. We follow the siblings from the early aughts to 2034—to dinner parties in Berlin, grimy clubs in Paris, art parties in Buenos Aires, war zones in Israel, and apartment buildings in Tokyo, tracking disappearances of all kinds.

The reader, who is invited to see Nina baptize herself all day, is, in a sense, a character in the book. They exist in Kornberg’s imagined future, looking to “the ghosts of [their] generation”—which is how Angélica refers to the Goldsteins in her introduction—to make sense of our dizzying and brutal present. It’s miraculous that Kornberg has been able to write a book that feels separate from that ghost world; instead, she unflinchingly captures the horror, absurdity, and beauty of how it feels to be alive right now.

I talked with Kornberg on Zoom about pessimism, friendship, siblings, travel narratives, Judaism, violent uprisings, and, naturally, Sylvia Plath.

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MIKAELA DERY: I wanted to start by talking about religion in the book. I grew up Jewish in Australia and I wonder if there’s a similar thing that happens in Argentina where people don’t think there are Jewish people there. What would the Goldsteins’ experience be in Argentina?

JULIA KORNBERG: Well, the Goldsteins’ experience was really different from mine. I come from a kind of cultural bourgeoisie. It was very urban; there were a lot of Jewish components to the culture but not a lot of religion. I imagine the Goldsteins as being part of this other subculture that I sort of know—but from afar—which I’m going to call the “normie Jewish culture,” which is very institutionalized, more in line with certain synagogues and certain temples and certain institutions. But the reality is that Buenos Aires is quite a Jewish city. I think it’s the city with the most Jews on the continent. I imagine the Goldsteins as part of this smaller minority, but at the same time, their experiences are not so different from what it’s like to be Jewish in New York or any place where they’re a minority that’s been culturally relevant throughout the country’s history.

I think that all the characters have different relationships to their Judaism. The one who, I think, is the most tortured is Nina, in that she craves this kind of conversion—there’s this Catholic element. In Jeremías, I see it a bit, but I see it as comparable to what Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan went through, where intelligent Jewish boys have this messianic element to them that eventually makes them convinced they should convert to Christianity. I think Dylan had that for a little while, and Cohen definitely thought he was Jesus for a bit. I think Mateo, if anything, is the only character that’s more irrevocably Jewish.

Can you tell me a bit more about Nina’s relationship to her Judaism? The book obviously starts with the wonderful line about Nina “baptizing herself all day, every day.”

That scene, to me, is funny because Nina is trying to do something that, in her eyes, aligns her with the hegemonic religion of the country, Catholicism, which is very prevalent in Argentina. Even though Buenos Aires can be a very Jewish city, Argentina is a very Catholic country. But, to me, that scene is also the mikvah, the tradition of purification that Jews have had for centuries and centuries. You can see this tension between her knowing that she’s Jewish—feeling interested in Jewish topics and questions, thinking in a way that is very Jewish, having very Jewish humor and cynicism—and at the same time desperately wanting to belong.

This book made me think about the fraught relationship Jewish people have with the future. There is this sense that the past is filled with calamity and the near future will likely be filled with calamity. The forward-thinking aspect of the book is really interesting, particularly as it relates to Judaism, because Jewish people don’t really believe in an afterlife; there’s just this hope that the real world will get better.

There’s a messianic aspect to Judaism that I really appreciate; the idea that you have to work to make the future better is very appealing and real to me. There’s also this whole school of Jewish eschatology that arose around the mid-20th century with Walter Benjamin and Jacob Taubes that I am kind of sympathetic to—because while I like the idea that the future is going to be a better place, and we have to work towards it, I don’t see it, I just simply don’t. It’s hard for me to conceive of a good future, so maybe you should just prepare for the worst and do your best.

There are some people who have interpreted the second half of Berlin as a prediction of what’s going to happen, but that’s not so much what I was trying to do. I imagine how it would feel to still be a young person when the world around me was getting worse and worse, and what relationship all these characters would have to that. I see the future parts of Berlin as kind of an exaggerated version of the present. It’s not a prediction; rather, I was interested in seeing, if we exaggerated a little bit more, if things got a little bit worse, how these characters would react. And I don’t have an answer beyond what happens to them.

You mentioned that a lot of this book began with your experience in Israel. How did you end up there, and how did it influence the book?

I was 19. I had never been to Israel, and I went there with a friend. It was really meaningful to be so in touch with Jewish culture. But I also found it, obviously, to be incredibly upsetting, some of the things I heard, this soldier I met, the way certain people spoke about the wars. But it was also spiritually meaningful. So, it was just a very charged emotional experience. Once the trip to Israel ended, I was able to sit down and open the floodgates to many of these characters and the things I was thinking about at the time.

The Gaza chapter feels like the thesis statement for the book. It explores what happens when an ideal curdles, and the way violence is used to try to make things better, with varying degrees of success. Could you tell me more about that part of the book?

That’s very astute. It’s a case where one of these young people, who feels powerless and bored and stuck in this emotional trough, decides to do something. And what he decides to do is join the IDF, which I don’t think is the smartest thing to do. I’ve been trying to work through these questions in fiction: What are some of the courses that young people can take? How can their political imagination be used in real life, and what would the consequences be? Because the consequences can be terrible, violent, and sad. Civilians can die—we see that all the time!

But yes, the Gaza chapter for me is one of the secret cores of the book. It’s the first piece I wrote, and I wrote it thinking about the 2014 Gaza War. My first literary award was from the embassy of Palestine in Argentina. It was a week before I left for Israel—I went in and read a poem, and then I was in Tel Aviv by the end of the week. I followed that war really closely—I was interested in the involvement of youth groups and the people who were finding meaning in a war like that.

The Gaza chapter was born out of a story I heard on New Year’s in Jerusalem. A young American soldier came up to me and my friend and told us that he was living in Atlanta, and he was very bored and playing video games all day, and he decided to join the IDF. I was like, wow, there’s this violence that is palpable in our generation but that is finding no apt channel. He sort of inspired the character of Mateo.

That story gives me chills, it’s so dark!

It’s so dark! And he was drunk and chatting us up and I thought, How can you tell me this? I don’t know, maybe violence is somewhat evolutionarily coded since men have fought wars for years and years. That is kind of one of my questions. I don’t have a resolution—and I would like to read about the ethics of guerrilla movements and armed warfare and violence—but mostly I’m interested in that: What do we do with the violence of our generation? Where does it all go?

There’s a point in the novel where Nina quotes the Sylvia Plath poem “Daddy,” which I thought was so brilliant. Why that poem?

I tried to create a series of aesthetic references for each chapter. For Nina’s first chapter, there was some Plath, some pre-Raphaelite paintings, and I rewatched a lot of Sofia Coppola movies. By the end, I was interested in portraying this relationship between a German man who is sort of stern and violent and a younger Jewish woman, and I thought the poem “Daddy” was just kind of perfect. While it does portray a very complicated situation—where the female voice seems very much oppressed and unhappy—there’s some eroticism in it that I wanted to bring to Nina. The extent to which she enjoys what’s happening is unclear, and that ambivalence that Plath was really good at I think I tried to import.

As you mentioned earlier, there is this male impulse toward violence, this desire for violent revolution versus something else, but violence is not reserved for just men in this book.

Angélica is seeking out the more peaceful revolutions of Edward Snowden, those cyber projects of revolutionary action that don’t necessarily have a physical impact on human life. I think Nina is not a violent character to other people, but I see her as being quite violent toward herself. She’s surrounded by men, and she has this mother who is absent yet oppressive, who has this sort of glamorous eating disorder. She suffers because of it, because she’s trying to be comfortable in her own skin. But she’s incapable of it, and she ends up with this horrible German who beats her. She, on the one hand, is accustomed to that type of violence but, on the other hand, knows that something is very deeply wrong. So, there is a lot of violence, but it’s more contained, which sometimes can be even worse. It can lead to self-harm—in her case, she takes pills and drinks—and in some cases, it can lead to allowing others to harm you.

I wanted to ask you about Nina’s relationships with other women. Her relationship with Angélica is this idealized friendship, but how much can we trust that depiction of their relationship?

You can’t really trust it. There’s an erotic charge to their relationship, which I think is maybe something all female friendships have. I don’t know. I feel like all my female friendships have had kind of an erotic charge, in that when you have a female friend, you’re sort of infatuated, and you want to be with her but also be like her.

Can you trust it? No, but I want to believe—because I hold female friendship to such a high standard—that it is true. It is a genuinely good relationship even though it goes through ups and downs and moments of distance and closeness. It’s one of my favorite relationships in the book, along with Nina and Jeremías’s.

I think in both those relationships, Nina so badly wants to see the best in these people and believes in them almost to a fault.

Yeah, she wants to believe in them, and they disappoint her, and she is unable to see it. Maybe it’s because she had a very sad childhood—with a strict mother and an absent father—and she ends up just wanting to be loved.

I think it also speaks to Nina’s relationship to religion. She doesn’t have this messianic complex that some of the other characters have; she just believes deeply in her friends and in her brothers.

She wants to believe because she needs people around who will protect her. In a world where your parents aren’t really there, that’s important.

I wanted to talk to you a bit about place. These characters move away from Nordelta, their gated community in Argentina, and they end up in Europe, for the most part. Why Europe?

I think it’s because I was there. Now I’m in New York and I write a lot about New York. I like travel narratives. I like the dynamism that travel can give to literature: instead of doing one place, you can jump around.

Angélica ends up in Tokyo, and I was curious about that as well.

It was my own interest in Japan and Japanese literature. There’s a big Nikkei community in Argentina, people who descended from Japanese immigrants—they’re quite present in the culture. There was this great bar that I never got to see because it closed in the early 1990s, called Café Tokyo, and that’s where every rock star and poet used to hang out.

For Angélica, Japan has a kind of promised-land quality, in the same way that Nina moves to Berlin thinking her family was from Germany, and Jere moves to Paris, and Mateo finds himself in Israel.

I wanted to talk about Angélica, and the structure of the book. You’ve mentioned that you see her as sort of a narrator. Tell me about her influence on the other chapters that we read, as you see it.

Presumably, she is the editor—she’s someone who inherits, or hacks, or steals this archive of people’s memories, love letters, diaries, etc. And what I imagine is that she completely reorganizes—almost rewrites—her friend’s words. So, I see her as the constructive principle of the novel, as the person who takes this assorted mess of an archive and decides to give it a form, make it into a book, which is what we read. So, you can’t really trust what you read because it’s not the archive itself; it’s a reconstruction that happens much later based on Angélica’s memories, and presumably her political position and her aesthetic state, and so whatever we read is filtered through her eyes.

How did you decide to have that as the organizing structure?

One of the great writers in Argentina is Domingo Faustino Sarmiento—he was also the president, and also kind of a bad guy—but he did that. He had this one book, Facundo (1845), which he edited several times, and each edition is different. It’s sort of tailored to a moment of his political and literary career, and I like that idea that in 2063 you could give meaning, retrospectively, to your youth through what you have lived, and that’s shaped by that gesture of looking backward. Then, in the future, you can illuminate aspects of the past that are not necessarily there when you were living through them.

That was something that was really interesting to me—what do certain moments in history illuminate about your past? And, in Angélica’s case, whatever is happening in 2063 makes it really important that she go back to this specific moment in time.

I see her as quite a malignant force. Did you see her that way?

Definitely! I think, if anything, the book is deeply pessimistic about history and very optimistic about friendship. During a time of historical crisis, Angélica, Jeremías, and Nina all end up finding each other, in very sporadic moments when they relieve their loneliness and their historical isolation. They are together and, I want to believe, happy.

You’ve talked about your characters as people who are lightly touched by history, but by the end of the book, they become more active participants in it. Why did you decide to make them more involved in the things happening around them?

It’s almost natural to me that they would want to become more involved because they’re seeking out a real relationship to history. I think they seek out the chaos, they want something different for their lives, and they get it—it’s just not so nice and not so pleasant.

How specific is that to the characters you built and how much is that connected to a broader way young people feel?

I think it’s almost endemic to the way I conceive of fiction, because I don’t want my fiction to read like the Unabomber manifesto, but I’m very interested in thinking about the world. It feels like something different has to happen. I grew up in a very leftist tradition, hearing about people who were part of guerrillas, and who led insurgencies, or were in Cuba during the revolution.

By contrast, our lives feel so powerless and sort of stagnant. I feel like that’s something I try to manifest through fiction. I don’t think anything will happen—I think we’re all going to be progressively unhappier and more precarious, and poor, and we’re not going to do anything about it. The worlds I try to portray are not the worlds that I see, but the worlds that I want to see. I would like to feel like we live in a world where something is happening, but here I just feel powerless and bored.

Part of the work of the New Resistance insurgent group is to disseminate graphic images of present-day crises and historical events. As Nina becomes more involved in some of those crises and interested in photographing them, she finds herself in this bind where she thinks it’s important not to show a sanitized version of history, but at the same time, seeing these horrible, graphic images doesn’t seem to do anything other than traumatize us.

It’s horrifying for the soul!

Right! And it seems like there is no way to actually contend with how to understand, or even to perceive, our horrifying reality.

Definitely, and that’s another question that I think remains open. Is it good that we’re seeing this? Is it bad? That poem that I wrote for the Palestinian embassy was about basically me on Twitter at age 18 or 19 following, really closely, what one journalist was tweeting and posting, and having this sense of the world that was both incredibly distant but also in the flesh. That was one of the questions of the book: should we be okay with a distance from history, or should we submerge ourselves?

Do you think you’ve come down on either side of that?

No, I have no idea. Usually, I have all these dilemmas I try to work out in fiction, and for some of them, I get answers, but for most of them, I don’t.

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Julia Kornberg was born in Buenos Aires in 1996 and lives in New York City. Her work has been published in The New York Review of Books, the Jewish Review of Books, The Drift, Bookforum, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Baffler, and other publications. She is a PhD candidate at Princeton University.

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Featured image of Julia Kornberg by Caroline Tompkins.