Berlin: Life and Death in the City at the Center of the World
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Sinclair McKay's portrait of Berlin from 1919 forward explores the city's broad human history, from the end of the Great War to the Blockade, rise of the Wall, and beyond.
Sinclair McKay's Berlin begins by taking readers back to 1919 when the city emerged from the shadows of the Great War to become an extraordinary by-word for modernity—in art, cinema, architecture, industry, science, and politics. He 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. From the countless women who endured nightmare ordeals at the hands of the Soviet soldiers to the teenage boys fitted with steel helmets too big for their heads and guns too big for their hands, McKay thrusts readers into the human cataclysm that tore down the modernity of the streets and reduced what was once the most sophisticated city on earth to ruins.
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. In Berlin today, there is a growing and urgent recognition that the testimonies of the ordinary citizens from 1919 forward should be given more prominence. That the housewives, office clerks, factory workers, and exuberant teenagers who witnessed these years of terrifying—and for some, initially exhilarating—transformation should be heard. 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist McKay (The Secret Life of Bletchley Park) delivers an anecdotally rich if somewhat lopsided history of Berlin from the end of WWI to the fall of the Berlin Wall. He devotes an inordinate amount of space to the fall of the Third Reich, detailing the horrific mass rapes of German women by Red Army troops and the "epidemic of suicide" among Berliners fearful of the Soviet takeover. By comparison, McKay races through the intellectually and culturally vibrant years of the Weimar Republic and the nearly three decades between the construction of the Berlin Wall and its tearing down. Though he provides an insightful account of the 1947–1948 Soviet blockade of West Berlin and the Anglo-American airlift, and unearths intriguing yet lesser-known aspects of the city's history, including the cutting-edge atomic research by Jewish scientists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the 1920s and 1930s, he also overlooks some major themes, including the Wirtschaftswunder ("economic miracle") of rapid reconstruction and growth in the first two decades after WWII. Despite the omissions and pacing issues, however, McKay's sparkling prose and expert mining of archival material results in a memorable study of a city that has "alternately seduced and haunted the international imagination."