Begins by taking readers back to 1919 when the city emerged from the shadows of the Great War to become an extraordinary byword for modernity — in art, cinema, architecture, industry, science, and politics. Traces the city’s history through the rise of Hitler and the Battle for Berlin which ended in the final conquest of the city in 1945.
It was a key moment in modern world history, but beyond the global repercussions lay thousands of individual stories of agony.
Amid the destruction, a collective instinct was also at work — a determination to restore not just the rhythms of urban life, but also its fierce creativity.
Today, the exciting, youthful Berlin we see is patterned with echoes that lean back into that terrible vortex. In this new history of Berlin, Sinclair McKay erases the lines between the generations of Berliners, making their voices heard again to create a compelling, living portrait of life in this city that lay at the center of the world.
"Anecdotally rich . . . McKay’s sparkling prose and expert mining of archival material results in a memorable study of a city," said Publishers Weekly.
