From its early pages it feels as though Sinclair McKay was born to write this book ... this one reads from the beginning as the work of someone who has been romanced and badly needs to communicate the nature of his love to his readers ... The succeeding chapters dealing with postwar Berlin are the most interesting, not least because they explain to Berlinophiles why we see what we see today — the residues of the relatively recent past, from the stretch of Cold War wall along the Spree to the remade Unter den Linden and the East German TV tower, at 1,200ft almost twice the height of the BT Tower in London ... I loved this book. McKay’s writing is vivid and sometimes even beautiful. Although he is helped by his access to contemporary records or first-hand recollections, his own observations and summaries seem always apposite and wise. The sense of the city and its people is conveyed. To anyone who knows Berlin a little and is fascinated by it, but would like to understand it better, this is a wonderful aid ... And its ending is appropriate and uplifting.
Characteristically perceptive and fast-paced, McKay’s new book artfully plunges its readers into contrasting layers of history ... Seen through the eyes of McKay’s colourful cast of city dwellers, twentieth-century Berlin is brought vividly to life ... The idea that the first half of the national story begins with the state’s foundation in 1871 and leads to worse and worse excesses until its ultimate catastrophe in 1945 necessitated a new beginning is a powerful one. McKay’s Berlin reinforces it somewhat by placing the emphasis squarely on the years before and after the supposed 'zero hour'. But to this day we can find much longer continuities.
Students of film history will revel in McKay’s account of Berlin’s innovative filmmakers ... Drawing on memoirs and other records of Berliners’ experiences, McKay makes vivid the physical, emotional, and spiritual devastations meted out indiscriminately to all by daily threats of aerial bombings. The termination of WWII divided the city and subjected every Berliner to Cold War challenges. This is a must-read chronicle of a city central to twentieth-century history.
Readers with an interest in the life of cities, 20th-century European history, World War II, and the Cold War will appreciate McKay’s well-researched book.
... anecdotally rich if somewhat lopsided ... 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 ...Despite the omissions and pacing issues, however, McKay’s sparkling prose and expert mining of archival material results in a memorable study.
McKay focuses intensely on this period; more than half the book chronicles the collapse of the Nazi regime and the arrival of the Russians. Unfortunately, this brutal period has already been analyzed countless times, as shown by the book’s extensive bibliography, and the author has little new to add ... The destruction of the wall in 1989—a crucial moment in the city’s story—receives only a page. The author fails to explain Berlin’s 30-year evolution from isolation and stagnation to economic and cultural powerhouse, and he offers no examination of the impact of unification. Showing how the mosaic of the past informs the present should be a crucial target for a historical writer. Berlin is a city of layers and contradictions, but McKay misses it ... A largely dissatisfying history of one of the world’s great cities.
