The Shortest History of Berlin

Berlin's story is one of constant reinvention

'Yesterday echoes along today's streets, and the ideas conjured up by Berlin's dreamers, dictators, liars and artists seem as solid as its bricks and mortar.'

Shaped by waves of death and war, and all but obliterated in both the Hundred Years and Second World Wars, Berlin is not an ancient city. Founded in the thirteenth century, this small trading post became the capital of Prussia. Berlin's youth has always spurred it towards the future. Yet at the same time it longed for a noble past to perpetuate its own myth.

The Shortest History of Berlin traces the city's unique story through the individuals who made it, from Frederick the Great to Marlene Dietrich, Karl Friedrich Schinkel to David Bowie, Walter Rathenau Bettmann to Leni Riefenstahl.

While Berlin may no longer be physically divided in two, it still grapples with extremes, leading the global fight for environmental protection and welcoming refugees by the tens of thousands yet facing rising populist nationalism.

The Shortest History of Berlin is an exploration of the human hand in history, the power of myth-making, and resilience in the face of death, destruction and division.

About the Author

Rory MacLean is the author of more than a dozen books including Stalin's Nose, Under the Dragon and Geography of Heaven: Travels to the Hereafter. He has won awards from the Canada Council and the Arts Council of England as well as a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship, and was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary prize. John le Carré called him 'surely the outstanding, and most indefatigable, traveller-writer of our time'. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the curator of the annual Sherborne Travel Writing Festival, he divides his time between the UK, Berlin and Sicily.