**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.
