Berlin

Auteur

Sinclair McKay

Texte du rabat

Sinclair McKay's portrait of Berlin from 1919 forward explores the city's broad human history, from the end of the Great War to the Blockade, rise of the Wall, and beyond.

Sinclair McKay's Berlin begins by taking readers back to 1919 when the city emerged from the shadows of the Great War to become an extraordinary by-word for modernity-in art, cinema, architecture, industry, science, and politics. He traces the city's history through the rise of Hitler and the Battle for Berlin which ended in the final conquest of the city in 1945. It was a key moment in modern world history, but beyond the global repercussions lay thousands of individual stories of agony. From the countless women who endured nightmare ordeals at the hands of the Soviet soldiers to the teenage boys fitted with steel helmets too big for their heads and guns too big for their hands, McKay thrusts readers into the human cataclysm that tore down the modernity of the streets and reduced what was once the most sophisticated city on earth to ruins.

Amid the destruction, a collective instinct was also at work-a determination to restore not just the rhythms of urban life, but also its fierce creativity. In Berlin today, there is a growing and urgent recognition that the testimonies of the ordinary citizens from 1919 forward should be given more prominence. That the housewives, office clerks, factory workers, and exuberant teenagers who witnessed these years of terrifying-and for some, initially exhilarating-transformation should be heard. Today, the exciting, youthful Berlin we see is patterned with echoes that lean back into that terrible vortex. In this new history of Berlin, Sinclair McKay erases the lines between the generations of Berliners, making their voices heard again to create a compelling, living portrait of life in this city that lay at the center of the world.

Contenu

Contents

List of Illustrations
Maps
Preface: 'Every city has history - but Berlin has too much!'

PART ONE: DISSOLUTION

1. The Dwellers in the Dark
2. The Sacrificial Children
3. The Revolutionary Agony
4. Spilled Blood and Exultation
5. The Road That Led into Darkness
6. The Projection of Dreams
7. The Uranium Club
8. The Prophecy of Flesh
9. The Ruins of Palaces

PART TWO: NECROPOLIS

10. Suspended in Twilight
11. The Screaming Sky
12. The Tears of All Mothers
13. Streets of Blood
14. Oblivion
15. 'The shadows on our souls'

PART THREE: POSSESSION

16. Complicity
17. 'Where was home?'
18. The Islanders
19. 'The crowds started howling'
20. The Widening Chasm
21. There is a World Elsewhere