A CITY THAT BEARS A CENTURY OF SCARS

Sinclair McKay Viking £20 ★★★★★

Although all cities should permanently be in a state of flux, Berlin is one that never feels quite finished. In the main, it is a very sparse and open place, and there are seemingly great expanses of nothingness. However, it is those bits of nothing that tell you the real story of Berlin, a city that Sinclair McKay describes as being ‘a naked city’, one that ‘openly displays its wounds and scars’.

And what wounds, what scars. Throughout the 20th Century, Berlin experienced upheaval and conflict that left their marks not only on the built environment, but also on the city’s culture and personality. McKay claims – quite reasonably – that Berlin is a kind of encapsulation of that century. You cannot understand that period without understanding Berlin, he says, and to comprehend the city you have to know what its citizens went through.

He succeeds brilliantly in telling the story of Berlin and its people. This is a book that is harrowing yet entertaining. We are guided from the Berlin of defeat, licking its wounds in the wake of the Kaiser’s lost war, into the emerging Weimar Republic that would see the city transformed into a place of gaiety – both in the oldfashioned and the newer senses of the word. This is the city of Cabaret (starring Liza Minnelli, right), of decadence and modernism – a period so deftly captured in the TV drama, Babylon Berlin.

But beneath the revolutionary architecture and neon lights, McKay also reveals the instability and the poverty of Weimar Berlin, a city where people scavenged for food in dustbins and stole and ate pets. Like the rest of Germany, it was crippled by an economy in freefall. Such suffering was as nothing compared to what Berliners would go through towards the end of Hitler’s war. The people not only had to survive the savagery of the Red Army – the tales of rape and murder are, of course, horrific – but also the fanatical madness of their own Nazi leaders, who would insist that 12-year-old boys should fight with weapons they could barely use, and would string up those who refused to fight when all was lost.

McKay also writes about the surprising number of Jews who were still in Berlin, many of whom were being hidden by brave Berliners in cellars and attics. He includes the story of Lothar Orbach and his mother, who were hidden under a bed in their neighbour’s apartment. When Nazis came to the door searching for them, the neighbour donned a swastika armband and immediately enquired as to whether the search party had caught ‘those damn Jews’. The bluff paid off, and the Nazis went on their way. After the war, Berlin, like Europe, was divided. At this point the book becomes a tale of two cities, in which the democratic, bustling West Berlin is contrasted with the staid East Berlin, a place of ever-present menace from the Stasi, a city in black and white rather than colour. Berliners were once more to prove their heroism during the Berlin Airlift in 1948, when the Soviets tried to blockade West Berlin, but also with the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, in the wake of which hundreds would bravely attempt to make what would often be fatal crossings. McKay has done Berlin a great service. It is difficult to give a city a voice but he has done it by letting the Berliners speak.