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Berlin, November 2014
Hardcover / e-Book
Portrait of a City Through the Centuries
St. Martin's Press
November 2014
On Sale: October 21, 2014
432 pages
ISBN: 125005186X
EAN: 9781250051868
Kindle: B00IQNYV6C
Hardcover / e-Book
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Historical
Why are we drawn to certain cities? Perhaps because of a
story read in childhood. Or a chance teenage meeting. Or
maybe simply because the place touches us, embodying in
its tribes, towers and history an aspect of our
understanding of what it means to be human. Paris is about
romantic love. Lourdes equates with devotion. New York
means energy. London is forever trendy. Berlin is all about volatility. Berlin is a city of fragments and ghosts, a laboratory of
ideas, the fount of both the brightest and darkest designs
of history's most bloody century. The once arrogant
capital of Europe was devastated by Allied bombs, divided
by the Wall, then reunited and reborn as one of the
creative centers of the world. Today it resonates with the
echo of lives lived, dreams realized, and evils executed
with shocking intensity. No other city has repeatedly been
so powerful and fallen so low; few other cities have been
so shaped and defined by individual imaginations. Berlin tells the volatile history of Europe's capital over
five centuries through a series of intimate portraits of
two dozen key residents: the medieval balladeer whose
suffering explains the Nazis rise to power; the demonic
and charismatic dictators who schemed to dominate Europe;
the genius Jewish chemist who invented poison gas for
First World War battlefields and then the death camps; the
iconic mythmakers like Christopher Isherwood, Leni
Riefenstahl, and David Bowie, whose heated visions are now
as real as the city's bricks and mortar. Alongside them
are portrayed some of the countless ordinary Berliners who
one has never heard of, whose lives can only be imagined:
the Scottish mercenary who fought in the Thirty Years War,
the ambitious prostitute who refashioned herself as a
baroness, the fearful Communist Party functionary who
helped to build the Wall, and the American spy from the
Midwest whose patriotism may have turned the course of the
Cold War. Berlin is a history book like no other, with an
originality that reflects the nature of the city itself.
In its architecture, through its literature, in its movies
and songs, Berliners have conjured their hard capital into
a place of fantastic human fantasy. No other city has so
often surrendered itself to its own seductive myths. No
other city has been so shaped and defined by individual
imaginations. Berlin captures, portrays, and propagates
the remarkable story of those myths and their makers.
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