The Weather in Berlin: A Novel

For decades, film director Dixon Greenwood has lived the Hollywood life — the studio intrigues, the abrupt rise and fall of careers, grand aspirations come and gone. Dix’s own fame rests on his one great work, SUMMER, 1921, an antiwar classic that has become a cult film. Now he believes he has lost his imagination and genius for reading the times. His audience has vanished. So, on a kind of personal rescue mission, he embarks on a three-month journey to Germany, the birthplace, as he sees it, of the twentieth century.
In postwar, post-Wall Berlin, Dix finds the winter skies gray and the cultural climate turbulent. While fellow artists debate politics and art, he discovers that a nostalgic Prussian costume drama is the most popular program on German television. With decidedly mixed feelings, he agrees to direct an episode — a fateful decision that unexpectedly reunites him with an actress who disappeared from the set of SUMMER, 1921 thirty years before. Their final collaboration takes Dix into the heart of the German century and back to his own imagination.
THE WEATHER IN BERLIN showcases Ward Just’s unmatched eye for restless Americans abroad. Imbued with the glitter and darkness of both old Hollywood and the new Europe, it is a terrifically atmospheric novel by “one of the most astute writers of American fiction” (New York Times Book Review).