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A WATERSTONES BEST HISTORY BOOK OF 2023
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 ONDAATJE PRIZE
'A masterful portrait of one of the world's greatest cities... A must-read' PETER FRANKOPAN
'Such a delightful read' KATJA HOYER, The Times
'Berlin may well be Europe's most enigmatic city and John Kampfner is the ideal guide.' JONATHAN FREEDLAND, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Escape Artist
'Gripping' Financial Times
No other city has had so many lives, survived so many disasters and has reinvented itself so many times. No other city is like Berlin.
Ever since John Kampfner was a young journalist in Communist East Berlin, he hasn't been able to get the city out of his mind. It is a place tortured by its past, obsessed with memories, a place where traumas are unleashed and the traumatised have gathered.
Over the past four years Kampfner has walked the length and breadth of Berlin, delving into the archives, and talking to historians and writers, architects and archaeologists. He clambers onto a fallen statue of Lenin; he rummages in boxes of early Medieval bones; he learns about the cabaret star so outrageous she was thrown out of the city.
Berlin has been a military barracks, industrial powerhouse, centre of learning, hotbed of decadence - and the laboratory for the worst experiment in horror known to man. Now a city of refuge, it is home to 180 nationalities, and more than a quarter of the population has a migrant background. Berlin never stands still. It is never satisfied. But it is now the irresistible capital to which the world is gravitating.
In Search of Berlin is an 800-year story, a dialogue between past and present; it is a new way of looking at this turbulent and beguiling city on its never-ending journey of reinvention.
Contents
1: Eight hundred years and one world house 2: Nobody's palace 3: A very modern conflict 4: Les nouveaux Prussiens 5: The torments of hell 6: Sparta and Athens 7: Reformers and radicals 8: Finally, very rich 9: Sleeping in shifts 10: At the edge of my days 11: The city that cannot stop remembering 12: Subsidy city 13: Erich's lamp shop 14: They came and never left 15: Back where they belong 16: Fear of normality