Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin

As Berlin prepares to become a re-unified Germany’s capital at the end of this century, as well as the European Union’s leading city, its historical role at the heart of the nation and the continent has never been so crucial or less recognized. No other book before this has fully examined Berlin’s inspiring achievements and catastrophic errors.In this magisterial new work, Oxford historian Alexandra Ritchie recounts how Berlin forged itself into the Schicksal Stadt Deutschlands — the City of German Destiny — and the consequences. With an assured sense of narrative, Ritchie follows Berlin from its pre-Roman roots and Medieval foundation to the nation-building dreams of Frederick the Great and Bismarck. She also traces its surprisingly heterogeneous social forces, which belie the Prussian and Nazi myths of a single German yolk. Most important, she concentrates on the city’s pivotal position in the twentieth century’s upheavals: the Weimar Republics decadent capital, which rivaled New York and Paris for culture; Hitler and Goebbels’s attempt to build a fascist metropolis and its destruction; and the city divided by the Cold War.

Unique in its scope and scholarship, Faust’s Metropolis is history at its most enthralling. It presents an encyclopedic history of this ever-changing city, a vivid social portrait of its citizens, and a thorough evaluation of its political and cultural legacy. Wresting Berlins actual past from its myths, Ritchie arrives as brilliant, authoritative new historian formidably in command of her fascinating subject.