For generations, the big city has promised romance, danger, opportunity. But what happens when you wake up one hungover morning and realize the promise is gone...along with your cheap apartment? That your whole existence in Berlin - 10 years of easy living based on cheap rent and the ability to just barely make it in the creative industry - was just a historical accident, the cheap rent and Bohemian setting products of a perverse economy, a miracle that couldn't possibly last? What does it do to your sense of place to realize that Berlin is following cluelessly in New York's footsteps, from artsy wonderland to real estate boondoggle? Does that mean Berlin, like New York, is over? Or does it come back to Deep down, does it mean that you can't afford to go on fooling yourself? Part amateur sociology, part autobiographical journey, Zombies of Berlin explores Ralph Martin's experience of gentrification in Berlin and New York and the dawning horror that these cities have windows of raw Blink and you might miss them. The author takes an anxiety-fueled trip to Leipzig to check out the 'better Berlin', with distinctly mixed results, thrown back upon himself as he tries to figure out whether we shouldn't all just move to the country. Zombies is not a political pamphlet but a hauntingly melancholic and comical a vivid portrait of status anxiety in the age of real estate. Ralph Martin is an ex-New Yorker, writer, and journalist. His work has appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in the New York Times, and elsewhere.
Author
Ralph Martin has been a leader in renewal movements in the Catholic Church for many years. After graduating from the University of Notre Dame, he did graduate work in philosophy at Princeton University and holds an MA in Theology from Sacred Heart School of Theology in the Archdiocese of Detroit, a Licentiate in Sacred Theology (S.T.L.) from the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., and a Doctorate in Sacred Theology (S.T.D.) from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas (the “Angelicum”) in Rome. He worked for a number of years for the National Office of the Cursillo Movement and subsequently became a leader in the national and international development of the charismatic renewal movement in the Catholic Church. He was the founding editor of New Covenant Magazine, as well as the founding director of the International Catholic Charismatic Renewal Office, currently located in Rome. Currently, Ralph is president of Renewal Ministries, an organization devoted to Catholic renewal and evangelization (www.renewalministries.net). Ralph is also the host of “The Choices We Face” a widely viewed weekly Catholic television and radio program distributed throughout the world. Renewal Ministries is accountable in its work to a Board of Directors in the United States, which Archbishop Robert Carlson of St. Louis, serves as Episcopal Advisor, and to a Board in Canada that Cardinal Thomas Collins of Toronto, serves as Episcopal Advisor. Renewal Ministries is also actively involved in assisting the Church in more than 30 different countries through leadership training, evangelistic conferences and retreats, and the publication and distribution of Catholic resources. Ralph is also an associate professor and Director of Graduate Theology Programs in the New Evangelization at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in the Archdiocese of Detroit (www.shms.edu) and a Visiting Professor of Theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. He was named by Pope Benedict XVI as a Consultor to the Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization and was also appointed as a “peritus” to the Synod on the New Evangelization in October of 2012. He and his wife Anne have six children and 14 grandchildren and reside in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
