Berlin: Life and Death in the City at the Center of the World

Journalist McKay (The Secret Life of Bletchley Park) delivers an anecdotally rich if somewhat lopsided history of Berlin from the end of WWI to the fall of the Berlin Wall. He devotes an inordinate amount of space to the fall of the Third Reich, detailing the horrific mass rapes of German women by Red Army troops and the “epidemic of suicide” among Berliners fearful of the Soviet takeover. By comparison, McKay races through the intellectually and culturally vibrant years of the Weimar Republic and the nearly three decades between the construction of the Berlin Wall and its tearing down. Though he provides an insightful account of the 1947–1948 Soviet blockade of West Berlin and the Anglo-American airlift, and unearths intriguing yet lesser-known aspects of the city’s history, including the cutting-edge atomic research by Jewish scientists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the 1920s and 1930s, he also overlooks some major themes, including the Wirtschaftswunder (“economic miracle”) of rapid reconstruction and growth in the first two decades after WWII. Despite the omissions and pacing issues, however, McKay’s sparkling prose and expert mining of archival material results in a memorable study of a city that has “alternately seduced and haunted the international imagination.” (Aug.)