In Search Of Berlin - The Story of Europe's Most Important City

A WATERSTONES BEST HISTORY BOOK OF 2023<BR><BR>'A masterful portrait of one of the world's greatest cities... A must-read' PETER FRANKOPAN<BR><BR>'Such a delightful read' KATJA HOYER, The Times<BR><BR>'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<BR><BR>'Gripping' Financial Times<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR> 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.