Berlin from another perspective. This is not a standard history of the German metropolis, but seeks to answer the question: How do you explain what Berlin has become today? Late 19th Century imperial grandeur, the cultural explosion of the Weimar era of the 1920s, the destruction of the Second World War, a brutally divided Berlin as the flash-point of the Cold War, abandoned as the capital city of Germany, restoration (just!) as the German capital after 1990, debates about how its centre should be rebuilt-American style or European?; today not the pre-1945 economic dynamo that Berlin was, but artistic and hipster capital of Europe ,with a vibrant arts and alternative scene It’s all there in this book, the twists and turns that the 20th Century produced in Berlin. This city is rather like a palimpsest or parchment of the tumultuous events of the last century.
