Berlin Rising: Biography of a City

Traces Berlin's history from Holy Roman Empire times to its post-Cold War reunification, describing the extraordinary personalities--from Hohenzollern rulers to artists and performers--who directed its fate and the waves of immigrants who repeatedly transformed it.

Berlin's infamous militaristic streak evolved from its role as capital of Prussia (a small, threatened country with a large army) and later the German Empire. But not everyone marched in lockstep with the demands of their overseers: over the centuries, Berliners developed an acid wit and sarcasm to puncture militaristic pomposity. Thus, the city has a kind of dual "personality," which was most evident in the culturally stimulating Weimar period. Even under the Nazis, Berliners had a reputation for being the least obedient Germans. The authors, who have written several popular histories relating to WW II and Germany, also emphasize the social and economic achievements of foreign settlers and their descendants, most notably French Huguenots, who were welcomed by Prussian rulers to the relatively underpopulated region. They also highlight the substantial contributions of Berlin's Jewish residents, most of whom perished in Nazi death camps. This is a breezy, readable history, at times a bit giddy. (In a section on John F. Kennedy's famous 1963 visit, the authors call him "a modern white knight straight from Camelot.") Photos.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A lively, rewarding history from the well-qualified authors of The Fall of Berlin (1993). Acknowledging the ``strange fascination'' Berlin has exercised on the world for more than a century, Read and Fisher go back to its beginning and clarify what makes the city so strange. Tracing Berlin's growth from ``a malodorous garrison town'' in the Middle Ages to a political, industrial, and cultural capital in the late stages of its rigid Hohenzollern rule (1442-1918), they stress the age-old tension between the one-way direction of social change, imposed from above, and a mobile, ``mongrel'' populace. Berliners-- a useful reminder, given today's renewed German xenophobia--are ``a people largely composed of successive waves of immigrants'': Dutch and part-Slavic Silesian settlers, and such welcome refugees as Huguenots, court Jews expelled from Vienna, Jacobite Scots; later, White Russians. Brash, skeptical, ``bloody-minded'' Berliners, the authors claim, have long made their authoritarian leaders-- Friedrich Wilhelm, Bismarck, Hitler--secretly hate the city. Indeed, Berlin life is pervasively harsh: A late-19th-century female worker's life expectancy was a mere 26 years, and Princess Royal Vicky, daughter of England's Queen Victoria, came to loathe a palace that denied her baths, toilet, and running water; Goebbels himself was struck by ``the pitilessness of this town.'' In early chapters, Read and Fisher offer arresting sketches of a backwater town gripped by petty, sometimes quite demented princes, barely touched by Renaissance or Reformation. When Prussia becomes a major power and Berlin its center, however, the authors' ``biography'' gives way to more general political history easily found elsewhere, though later chapters restore local perspective on industrial growth, labor reforms, popular rebellion, and organized crime. Dowdy line drawings decorating the chapter headings underscore the final chapter's flat message of perenniality (``Berlin Is Still Berlin''), but chronologically ordered plates offer more pointed commentary to this fascinating subject. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Read and Fisher, who have written on various aspects of German history (The Fall of Berlin, LJ 3/15/93; Kristallnacht, LJ 11/ 15/89), present a thorough and popular history of the city of Berlin. They chart the city's development, decline, and rebirth from the Middle Ages through German reunification. A lot of territory is covered in 24 short, cogent chapters: militarism, imperialism, revolution, hyperinflation, cultural excesses, totalitarian terror, total war, and regeneration. Anecdotes from everyday life and a generous array of photographs punctuate the smooth-flowing historical narrative. By far the most accessible history of Berlin available, this book belongs on the same shelf as ealier studies like Walter Nelson's The Berliner (LJ 7/69) and James Sutterlin's Berlin (Praeger, 1989).
Thomas Karel, Franklin & Marshall Coll. Lib., Lancaster, Pa.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Read and Fisher trace the German capital from its twelfth- and thirteenth-century origins as a remote frontier and trading post on the wild plains of northern Europe to the present, in which the future is uncertain and "Wessies" (i.e., West Germans), who resent being asked to pay for Communist mistakes with massive hand-outs, and "Ossies" (former East Germans), who resent being patronized by those they see as biased against the East, battle for their shares of that future. Many readers will be struck by the hardiness and indomitable humor of the book's heroes and heroines--those proud contemporary Berliners who have survived wars, occupation by foreign victors, plunder and rape, rationing, airlifts, near-starvation, and the Berlin Wall. These Germans endured, whether during the heady 1920s, when the city was known as "Babylon-on-the-Spree," or during World War II and its aftermath, when atrocity was the daily norm. For collections strong in twentieth-century world history. Whitney Scott