Sinclair McKay - Berlin: Life and Loss in the City That Shaped the Century

Sinclair McKay

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BERLIN

Life and Loss in the City
That Shaped the Century

Contents

About the Author

Sinclair McKay is the bestselling author of Dresden , The Secret Life of Bletchley Park and The Secret Listeners . He is a literary critic for the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator and lives in London.

Berlin

Powerful. Visceral. Truly revelatory. Beautifully written and utterly compelling. I didnt think Sinclair McKay could top his previous book, Dresden , which was masterful. He has proven me wrong with Berlin Damien Lewis, author of SAS Bravo Three Zero

Great subject, well-researched, brilliantly written. Anyone who wants to understand Berlins incomparable place at the very centre of twentieth-century history should begin with Sinclair McKays remarkable, mesmerizing book Keith Lowe, author of Savage Continent

McKays powerful imagery and magnetic prose combine to produce an electrifying new account of Berlin from the end of WW1 to the tearing down of the Wall in 1989. Einstein, Furtwngler, Grosz and von Braun are among many famous figures examined afresh, but it is the haunting stories of ordinary Berliners trapped in Hitlers Armageddon that make the deepest impression. Only the citys enduring creative pulse and astonishing resilience offer relief from the horrors of Nazi obscenity, Allied bombing and communist totalitarianism. You cannot understand the twentieth century without understanding Berlin, claims the author. He makes a compelling case Julia Boyd, author of Travellers in the Third Reich

List of Illustrations

. The winter of 191819.. Rosa Luxemburg.. The restored Neue Synagogue.. The 1920s Karstadt department store.. Weimar Berlin of the late 1920s.. Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner.. The electrical laboratories of Manfred von Ardenne.. Albert Einstein.. A scene from Fritz Langs Die Nibelungen (1924).. A scene from Fritz Langs Metropolis (1926).. Albert Speers scale models for a future Berlin.. Paul Wegener in The Golem (1920).. Hannah Arendt.. Crown Prince Wilhelm and the Grand Duchess Cecilie.. Vladimir Nabokov and his wife Vera.. A Berlin working-class tenement block.. The AEG Turbine works.. Berlins metro system.. Street violence in the 1920s and 1930s.. A Nazi May Day parade.. The results of Kristallnacht .. Hildegard Knef.. Marika Rkk.. The Karstadt department store in 1945.. The Volkssturm.. The Tiergarten in 1945.. A street barricade to hold back Soviet tanks.. An enemy tank in a Berlin street.. Sachsenhausen.. A Berlin flak tower.. Berliners taking shelter below ground.. The Fhrerbunker.. The ruined city centre in May 1945.. The restored U-Bahn.. Rubble women.. Children at play in the ruins.. Living in half-demolished accommodation.. A female Red Army member on point duty.. The Hotel Adlon in 1945.. Walter Ulbricht at a post-war planning meeting.. Marlene Dietrich in Billy Wilders A Foreign Affair (1947).. The Berlin Blockade of 19489.. A map of divided Berlin.. Bertolt Brechts theatre company staging Coriolanus , mid-1950s.. The Berlin UK/US spy tunnel.. The spy tunnels technology.. Bravo magazine.. The 1953 Berlin uprising.. East Berlin protestors confront a Soviet tank.. Ulbrichts East Berlin apartment blocks.. A West Berlin apartment block.. The communist childrens show Unser Sandmnnchen .. The construction of the Berlin Wall begins.. The Berlin Wall.. Divided Berlin was healed.

Picture Credits

The majority of the photographs come from private collections. Others are from: , National Archives. Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright but the publisher welcomes any information that clarifies the copyright ownership of any unattributed material displayed and will endeavour to include corrections in reprints.

Maps

Preface: Every city has history, but Berlin has too much!

Berlin is a naked city. It openly displays its wounds and scars. It wants you to see. The stone and the bricks along countless streets are pitted and pocked and scorched; bullet memories. These disfigurements are echoes of a vast, bloody trauma of which, for many years, Berliners were reluctant to speak openly. In the shadow of filthy genocide, it was taboo to suggest that they too were victims in Hitlers war. The city itself is long healed, but those injuries are still stark: the old Friedrichsruhe brewery wall with a sunburst blast-pattern caused by heavy shelling; the bas-relief at the base of the nineteenth-century Victory Column, of Christ on the cross, pierced by shrapnel through the heart; the entrance portal to the bomb-crushed Anhalter railway station Romanesque brick arches now standing alone and leading only to empty air. In the Humboldthain, a rich park just north of the city centre, trees spring forth around a grim, vast, concrete fortress that, towards the end of the war, served as shelter, hospital and catacomb. Most famous is the shattered church tower, capped with metal, that stands over the busy Kurfrstendamm shopping street: the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. The tower is almost all that remains of the turn-of-the-century original; one night in 1943, it was hit in a bombing raid and engulfed in flames (and, after the war, a new hexagonal modernist church was constructed next to it). If you knew nothing of the history of this city, the initial sight of this strange tower would be disconcerting: what could be meant by this weird ruin preserved in the midst of an indifferent shopping concourse? Other European capitals acknowledge the dark past with elegantly aestheticized monuments; they seek to smooth the jagged edges of history. Not here.

Throughout the twentieth century, Berlin stood at the centre of a convulsing world. It alternately seduced and haunted the international imagination. The essence of the city seemed to be its sharp duality: the radiant boulevards, the cacophonous tenement blocks, the dark smoky citadels of hard industry, the bright surrounding waters and forests, the exultant pan-sexual cabarets, the stiff dignity of high opera, the colourful excesses of Dadaist artists, the grim uniformity of mass swastika processions. And with the advent of the Nazis came a steadily building drumbeat of death. Of the citys Jewish population, most of those who had remained in Berlin under the Nazis 80,000 people or so were deported and murdered between 1941 and 1943. In addition, an estimated 25,000 Berliners were killed by Allied action in the final weeks of the war in 1945. But there was a continual proximity to fear, before and after, too: for anyone born in Berlin around the year 1900 and who was then lucky enough to live on into the 1970s or 1980s life in the city was an unending series of revolutions; a maelstrom of turmoil and insecurity. This spanned the reeling trauma of the First World War and the disease and violence that immediately followed; the sharp, vertiginous inrush of modern industry and the defiantly revolutionary architecture that mirrored it, roaring through once familiar streets and workplaces; the nausea of steep economic plunges, bringing destitution and hunger; then, the Nazi supremacy, the psychosis of genocide and the fires of war; and, finally, the heart of the city rent in two by competing ideologies. At the centre of these traumas were those weeks at the end of the war in spring 1945 when the devastation visited upon Berlin and its people was comparable to the infernal retributions of classical antiquity.

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